00;00;00;00 – 00;00;25;10
Marc Moss
Welcome to the Tell Us Something podcast. I’m Marc Moss, founder and executive director of Tell Us Something. We are currently looking for storytellers for the next Tell Us something storytelling event. The theme is hold My beer. If you’d like to pitch your story for conSyderation, please call (406) 203-4683. You have three minutes to leave your pitch. The pitch deadline is December 7th.

00;00;25;12 – 00;00;29;26
Marc Moss
I look forward to hearing from you this week on the podcast.

00;00;29;29 – 00;00;47;13
Jesse Ballard
I distinctly thought about the doll house in the corner, the horse mural on the wall. And so when I started to wake up from that nighttime nap, I was really surprised to look around and see thorn branches instead of that childhood bedroom wall.

00;00;47;15 – 00;01;08;26
Betsy Funk
The flowers are there and they’re up to our knees in color and riotous glory. It’s a misty day, so we aren’t hot. It’s cool. And the mist has made the flowers scream at us. It’s glorious. And I’m hiking with my daughter, who?

00;01;08;29 – 00;01;31;02
Syd Lang
Goodness. For the open mouth piece. Right? Yeah. So I’m throwing up everywhere, and all of a sudden, the crowd of kids just falls completely silent. And. And a kid goes, hey, that’s my grandma’s costume that you’re throwing up in.

00;01;31;05 – 00;01;58;18
Marc Moss
Three storytellers share their true personal story on the theme Never Again. Their stories were recorded live in person in front of a packed house on September 18th, 2024 at the George and Jane Denison Theater in Missoula, Montana. Tell Us Something acknowledges that we gather on the ancestral lands of the Salish, Kootenai, and peoples. These lands have been inhabited for millennia, shaped by the wisdom and stewardship of the First Nation peoples.

00;01;58;20 – 00;02;24;27
Marc Moss
We acknowledge the historical and ongoing trauma inflicted upon indigenous communities, including the forcible removal from their lands, the destruction of their cultures, and the systemic injustices that continue to persist. As we honor the indigenous people who have called this place home. Let us commit to learning from their traditions and values a tangible way to do that. If you live in Missoula, Montana, is to visit the Missoula Public Library on Friday, November 1st.

00;02;24;27 – 00;02;51;27
Marc Moss
Missoula Public Library hosts a First Friday event highlighting native art and culture, showcasing the library’s permanent collection. That event kicks off four weeks of programing celebrating Native American Heritage Month. A tooltip will be installed on the Harrison Children’s Library. They will unveil an exhibit of the Salish Kootenay Seasonal round that gives children a new interactive learning tool. They will also debut a new collection of indigenous books and materials.

00;02;52;00 – 00;03;17;04
Marc Moss
Stop by the library or visit Missoula Public Library Board to learn more. Tell us something. Stories sometimes have adult themes. Storytellers sometimes use adult language. Jessie Ballard and her family are stranded in the Kenyan desert, where they faced danger, dehydration, and exhaustion. Come along with Jessie on a wild, adventure filled with unforgettable memories in a story she calls the best walker.

00;03;17;11 – 00;03;25;21
Marc Moss
Thanks for listening.

00;03;25;23 – 00;03;57;10
Jesse Ballard
I want you to think back to the last time your car broke down, or you were riding in a car that broke down. Think through the steps involved to being rescued. I imagine it was a stressful situation, but pretty simple to get rescued. A phone call to triple A, wave down a passer by. Call a buddy and maybe within a few hours you were safely back at home or in a safe place at least.

00;03;57;13 – 00;04;22;27
Jesse Ballard
Now, I want to take you back in time to late 1980s in a remote area of northern Kenya. Myself, I’m around eight years old. My younger brothers, around six, were with my parents and we had just finished visiting family in a remote area of northern Kenya. We were living in Nairobi, the capital city, at the time we’d finished our visit.

00;04;22;29 – 00;04;47;27
Jesse Ballard
We packed up our double cab white Nissan and we were well on our way back to Nairobi. We happened to hours after our travel. We ended up in this area part of our travel called the chawl B desert. Chawl B is the gabbro word gabbro. Being one of the groups of people that lives in the area for dry and salty.

00;04;48;00 – 00;05;12;02
Jesse Ballard
So I just want you to imagine dry and salty for miles and miles around you. Well, I’ve set up how remote it is, but here we are driving along and another car happens to come by us, and they stop. And it’s Mr. and Mrs. Anderson. Family, friends. Wow. What are the odds of that? So my parents strike up a conversation.

00;05;12;02 – 00;05;35;14
Jesse Ballard
I think my brother and I are just playing in the back seat, and then they wave and off the Andersons go. My dad goes to restart the car. Nothing happens. We all jump out of the car and start waving at the Andersons, who by this point are miles down the road in a dust cloud of dry and salty.

00;05;35;17 – 00;05;58;02
Jesse Ballard
Well, that didn’t work. My dad tried valiantly to get the car started, but it wasn’t going to happen. So he makes the decision. He’s going to be the hero. Dad, and is going to embark out on his own and find help. My mother, sitting in a pickup truck with an eight year old and a six year old, said, not.

00;05;58;05 – 00;05;58;20
Betsy Funk
We are.

00;05;58;20 – 00;06;25;04
Jesse Ballard
All coming with you. So we gathered the supplies, the few supplies we had, which included a jerry can. For those of you not familiar with that phrase. It’s kind of a big plastic or metal container that’s often in the back of a car on Safari with extra gas, or in our case, with extra water. So my mom grabs the jerry can and we start our walk through the child B desert.

00;06;25;07 – 00;06;44;22
Jesse Ballard
At first, my brother and I think this is great. We’re skipping. We’re throwing rocks. We’re having a grand old time. What an adventure we’re on. Eventually, the charm starts to wear off. It’s made extra irritating by my mother banging on the now empty Jerry can.

00;06;44;24 – 00;06;47;08
Betsy Funk
Boom boom boom boom.

00;06;47;10 – 00;07;11;09
Jesse Ballard
Over and over and over and over. Mom! Stop that! That’s annoying. I pause here to have you think of walking a Montana trail, where you might encounter something like a bear. What is it that you do when you’re on a trail where you might encounter a bear? You make noise, right? You’ve got your bear bells. You’re ready with your bear spray.

00;07;11;12 – 00;07;34;18
Jesse Ballard
My mother knew that we might encounter lions or some other wildlife, and the boom boom boom was out of protection for us. But of course, I was childlike, blissfully ignorant to that, and just annoyed at the incessant bang bang bang. So we’re walking and walking and walking and eventually the sun starts to go down and we are exhausted.

00;07;34;18 – 00;08;00;27
Jesse Ballard
So tired. My dad managed to grab some thorn branches and build an enclosure for us to rest in. I don’t my dad and my mom were doing much resting, but I was so tired and I felt so safe in that enclosure that I conked out. I fell fast asleep even though I was only eight. I have this distinct memory of feeling like I was back in my childhood bedroom.

00;08;00;27 – 00;08;30;00
Jesse Ballard
Even though I was in the middle of the desert in a thorn bush enclosure. I distinctly thought about the doll house in the corner, the horse mural on the wall. And so when I started to wake up from that nighttime nap, I was really surprised to look around and see thorn branches instead of that childhood bedroom wall. So as I was waking up, I start to hear the sound of cowbells in the distance.

00;08;30;00 – 00;08;54;14
Jesse Ballard
Digging, deep digging. So we are all listening, and we know that if there’s cowbells, there’s humans, there’s civilization. So we get up and we follow the sound of the cowbells. And that leads us to this. Now abandoned old tented camp. But it wasn’t totally abandoned. There was a caretaker there watching over the property, and he welcomed us in.

00;08;54;15 – 00;09;24;04
Jesse Ballard
He pulled out some cots for us to lay on, and again, we just fell fast asleep. Sleep through the night and as the as we’re there, he’s also giving us cup after cup of tea or chai so that we could get hydrated. And as we’re waking up, I remember this what’s probably an old wives tale to test if you’re dehydrated or not, where if you lift the skin on the back of your hand, if it sticks together, supposedly you’re dehydrated.

00;09;24;07 – 00;09;48;15
Jesse Ballard
And I thought, oh, I’ve been walking in a desert. I mean, I’m dehydrated. And sure enough, when I lifted that skin, it stuck together. So keep that tea coming, get rehydrated. But as I’m waking up that next day, I hear another strange sound. It’s little kids yelling and I can hear that thunk, thunk thunk of rocks being thrown up into this tree near my bed.

00;09;48;18 – 00;10;13;19
Jesse Ballard
And I look up and there’s a giant snake up in the tree. I was pretty scared, but these kids just kept at it and kept checking the rocks, and eventually that snake slithered away. So big sigh of relief there. So now we had to figure out how in the world we were going to get home. Well, this old camp happened to have an old ham radio.

00;10;13;21 – 00;10;40;00
Jesse Ballard
The problem was it had a dead battery. So these two Samburu Lascaris guards, who were part of the the staff at the camp, decided they were going to book it back to our car and get the battery out of the car that we could hook up to the radio and call for help. They did that trip so quick for my brother, and I felt like hundreds and hundreds of miles, but they were back real fast.

00;10;40;03 – 00;11;14;11
Jesse Ballard
So we hooked up the radio and my dad gets on there and we hear this crackling over the radio and another familiar voice. It’s our neighbor from back in Nairobi, placing the order for her tented camp. A dozen eggs and a bag of flour. What are the odds that it would be Mrs. Cotter on the radio? But eventually my dad got through to friends who were wonderful and volunteered to drive up and help get the car and get my dad and the family back home.

00;11;14;13 – 00;11;46;10
Jesse Ballard
Well, my parents decided that another long drive was not the best thing for it and seen little me and my brother. So they managed to make a connection with a local pilot who had a little Cessna plane, likely something like an hour story earlier, and he flew into this remote area. No landing strip, just a bumpy road, but bumpy fields that he landed in, and myself and my brother and my mom loaded into this tiny little plane, which for me was so exciting.

00;11;46;10 – 00;12;11;11
Jesse Ballard
We were going to fly in this cool little plane and get home. My brother was prone to car sickness, which also translates to air sickness. So he’s in that plane just trying to hold it together, and my mom’s doing her best to distract him from wanting to vomit by pointing out things that were flying by. So we’re flying along, and my mom sees this waterfall in the distance.

00;12;11;12 – 00;12;37;04
Jesse Ballard
Look, man, look at that cool waterfall. Our daredevil pilot decides you want to see the waterfall? Let’s go. Hangs a really sharp right. Pulls the plane right up against the waterfall, which did not help the air sickness at all. Eventually we make it back home. My dad makes it back home and we are safely under the roof in our own house.

00;12;37;07 – 00;13;07;23
Jesse Ballard
And I’m back in my bed with my dollhouse in the corner. The horse mural on the wall. I’m sure my parents were in their room going. Never again. But for me, I had a trophy proudly up on my bookshelf, given to me by my parents. A little trophy that on the bottom, red nest Walker. You get.

00;13;07;26 – 00;13;31;04
Marc Moss
Thanks, Jesse. Jesse is a perinatal care coordinator who moonlights as an actor and a birth doula. She lives in Missoula with her husband, two kids, and two cats. In our next story, Betsy Funk hikes with her adult daughter Kelsey, in Glacier National Park on what would become a grueling hike for her daughter. Kelsey’s determination and love for the outdoors pushed them through tears and exhaustion.

00;13;31;07 – 00;13;42;19
Marc Moss
Betsy calls her story Glacier calls. Thanks for listening.

00;13;42;21 – 00;14;07;12
Betsy Funk
I’m from Glacier country. And for those of you who know Glacier Country, you know that the park calls to us and often that means we’re compelled to go visit her. This is happening this one week, and I was feeling it, needing to go back to Glacier. Back to hike. So I made the decision to go. One day I called a friend.

00;14;07;14 – 00;14;23;00
Betsy Funk
I said, let’s go hiking. She said, yeah, I’m up for it. Let’s go. I said, well, have to start early because we want to get back in time. She had a baby and we wanted to make sure the baby got back in time to get some rest. She says, yeah, no problem. I got this. And so I went and picked her up.

00;14;23;03 – 00;14;49;29
Betsy Funk
We loaded up the baby backpack, the snacks, all the Kutama of going to Glacier. Of course, we got our layers and our bear spray and headed up to Glacier to our favorite hike. Now, my friend is my daughter, and she, she has her son, and she’s excited about going on this hike because she’s been doing this with me since I was carrying her in the backpack up the hike.

00;14;50;02 – 00;15;11;01
Betsy Funk
She did it with me when she was a teenager and says, I will go no farther. And she also did it with me and kicked my ass up the switchbacks. So we know it’s her favorite. She has, she has a real passion for this part of the park, as do I. So we get to the trailhead. It’s about eight in the morning.

00;15;11;01 – 00;15;31;29
Betsy Funk
We decide we’re going to start early. This particular trail takes on a slow day, about six hours to do. It’s not extraordinary hard, but it is touted as one of the most beautiful hikes in the park. So as we’re unloading her son and I’m unloading her and we’re getting things ready to go, I look over at her and I say, Kelsey, how are you doing?

00;15;32;04 – 00;16;05;16
Betsy Funk
I’m good mom. I said, so you sure about this? Yes, mom, I got this. I said, great. Okay. You’re sure of it? Let’s go. So the trail drops off. the going to the sun Road, and it goes for about a mile into the subalpine forest. And as you step on that trail, the sounds of the road drop away and you’re surrounded by the moistness of bear grass and ferns.

00;16;05;19 – 00;16;31;17
Betsy Funk
A soft foot underneath. And it gradually hikes uphill into these beautiful mountains. That compelled us to go and call us. So as we’re hiking, I’m realizing this is taking Kelsey a little longer than I thought it would. Now she’s carrying her son, and, And that’s okay. So I turn around and say, you sure you’re up to this?

00;16;31;17 – 00;17;02;17
Betsy Funk
She says, oh, I got this, mom, so I’m fine about I don’t know, I want to make a guess, but a mile to a mile and a half in on the trail, it’s becoming pretty apparent to me that this is going to be a long day. She’s taking a while, and I guess this is where I tell you that my daughter is in six plus years of living with and gradually dying from, glioblastoma multiforme, which is brain cancer.

00;17;02;20 – 00;17;38;27
Betsy Funk
It’s terminal. She’s been through two brain surgeries, five and a half years of chemotherapy and a full term pregnancy. she’s a fighter, and she wants to do this hike. She loves this hike. But when you look at her, you realize that cancer, it doesn’t take you all at once. Cancer takes you. Bit by bit, one piece at a time.

00;17;39;00 – 00;18;04;17
Betsy Funk
And I’ve been watching for over six years. My daughter die in front of my eyes, one piece at a time. So we’re hiking along the trail and I’m starting to be concerned. It’s taking her a while. She’s gained a lot of weight with all the treatment. She’s slow, she’s tired. And I ask her, else we can stop at the why?

00;18;04;18 – 00;18;34;04
Betsy Funk
It’s okay. We’ve been here. It’s wonderful. She says, no, mom, I got this. So we get to the why where she knows the next thing she’s going to see are these glorious meadows filled with arnica, an Indian paintbrush, mountain aster. And she has a degree in horticulture. So she she says she’s jazzed. She wants to see this. So we get to the line and I say, okay, we’ve got a choice.

00;18;34;06 – 00;18;55;18
Betsy Funk
We could stop here, go back, have lunch. It’s great. We’ve seen wonderful things. We could go on up to get an idea, or we could head over, say, pass. And she says, mom, Syde pass. That’s the only option. I got this. So we head up. The meadows are there. They’re up to our knees in color and riotous glory.

00;18;55;21 – 00;19;29;00
Betsy Funk
It’s a misty day. So we are as hot. It’s cool. And the mist has made the flowers scream at us. It’s glorious. And I’m hiking with my daughter. So from there we open up and we go through some beautiful waterfalls and creeks and we get to the switchbacks. Now these switchbacks are no fake. Go. They’re real switchbacks. They go and they go, and then there’s little summit and then you go some more.

00;19;29;03 – 00;19;53;05
Betsy Funk
at this point, we’ve been on the trail twice as long as it would take anybody else to be on the trail. I said it was a misty day, so there were very few people on the trail, and those people had long since passed us where I thought we’d be done. At about two in the afternoon, it was becoming pretty apparent that we might be down after dark.

00;19;53;07 – 00;20;18;15
Betsy Funk
We go to start the switchbacks, and it’s even more apparent that Kelsey is weakening. She’s struggling about every ten meters. She has to stop. Let’s feed the baby mom. Let’s take a rest. Kelsey. We can go back any time I got this, mom. It’s okay. I got this on these switchbacks. She finally allowed me to take the baby.

00;20;18;17 – 00;20;44;07
Betsy Funk
I carried them on my back. Now you’re wondering, what’s he doing? Well, he was just hanging out. He was cool. He was wrapped up all snuggly warm, and I just kept handing food back there. He was good. So we’re hiking up the switchbacks, waiting for calcium, checking in. How are you doing? I’m okay. I got it, mom. Take the next switchback.

00;20;44;07 – 00;21;11;21
Betsy Funk
How are you to him? Mom, I’ve got this. Okay. We eventually make it to the top. Along our way, we pick up a couple of heart stones. And as is tradition in my family, we put the heart stones on this enormous cairn that stands at the top of the pass. And we put them there to honor those who come before us and to guide those who come after us.

00;21;11;23 – 00;21;34;24
Betsy Funk
And we hold each other and we celebrate and we embrace and we feed the baby more food. and then I ask for calcium. If we go back, it’s shorter. We know where we’ve been and we’re okay. It’s an extra mile, a mile and a half to go down the other Syde. Mom, I didn’t come here to quit.

00;21;34;26 – 00;22;03;17
Betsy Funk
I’ve got this. So I take a deep breath. I say, I’ll take the baby. She’s my baby, I said. Okay, she was a stubborn one. so she carried the baby as we drop down this trail. If you’ve never been there, you walk through hanging gardens of monkey flowers and orchids all scream and riotous color in the high alpine saying, come have sex with me, please.

00;22;03;20 – 00;22;31;25
Betsy Funk
The beautiful. And she is relishing in it. She’s in rapture. She’s loving this at the same time. Her legs are shaking. She’s worn through one pair of leggings because she’s large and her legs have chafed. She’s bleeding. I give her another pair of leggings. She’s begun to walk through them. She falls. She breaks up, holds. I ask if I can take a photo.

00;22;31;27 – 00;23;00;27
Betsy Funk
She says, nope, I got this mom. So we continue down, shaky knowing it’s getting late. There’s nobody on the trail at this point. The clouds are settling, it’s getting scary and it’s bare. 30 if anybody knows what bare 30 is. Well, basically the rule is stay 100 yards away from a bear right? Oh, I have someone with me who’s having trouble walking on the trail.

00;23;01;00 – 00;23;25;03
Betsy Funk
And when we see the full size, the grizzly bear ten feet off the trail and I ask her, can you bushwhack? She says, mom, I don’t think I can. I don’t think I can hold myself up. We can’t walk on the trail. I take a breath and I say, okay, so there is this full sized grizzly ten feet off the trail.

00;23;25;03 – 00;23;53;11
Betsy Funk
The trail goes on a switchback above the bear and below the bear. So we’re going to cut across a little field to try to avoid doing it twice. Right. So I tell Kelso, right here it is. Kelso, I’ve got the bear spray and I’m standing with the bear spray, and I go, you walk behind me and she goes, mom, I said, just walk behind me because I’m looking at that bear.

00;23;53;11 – 00;24;26;20
Betsy Funk
And I say right to his face, she’s not going to die today. Not today. And she makes it. She gets the other Syde. I start to back up, still holding the bear spray. The bear shakes his head and huff 70, walks over to a pine chain just below the bear. We made it. We continue down the trail and it’s clear Kelsey is truly struggling.

00;24;26;22 – 00;24;49;08
Betsy Funk
a ranger has been sent in to help us, although what could he do but help her up? Because at this point, I’m giving the baby her modality of getting down this trail, bleeding and shaky and very unstable is to sit on every step, slide on her ass, and have us help her up. And then she walks away to the next one.

00;24;49;08 – 00;25;17;02
Betsy Funk
Sets and slides. It’s getting later and later, and I’m thinking, we need to call somebody in. And I ask him, should we call for help? She says, mom, I gotta do this. I got this. We make it to the bottom. It’s glorious. I’m relieved. I’m crying. The baby’s asleep. and there’s a at the bottom of this trail.

00;25;17;02 – 00;25;42;06
Betsy Funk
There’s this beautiful path that goes down on the river. And I go and put my feet in. Because I’m an old woman and my feet hurt. And she goes and puts her feet and she’s. Oh, this doesn’t this won’t do, mom. And she goes because she’s bleeding and she sits right in the creek and she goes, you know, mom.

00;25;42;08 – 00;26;02;12
Betsy Funk
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do that again. And I looked right at her and I said, you know what else you got? This. Thank you.

00;26;02;14 – 00;26;24;04
Marc Moss
Thanks, Betsy. Betsy Font lives in the Flathead Valley, where, surrounded by mountains, she raised her family. She believes stories are the result of the mischief wonder and magic of life and of a willingness to be witness to all of it. To see photos of Kelsey and Betsy on their hike visit. Tell us something, doc. Work coming up after the break.

00;26;24;06 – 00;26;40;28
Syd Lang
Thank goodness for the open mouth piece, right? Yeah, so I’m throwing up everywhere, and all of a sudden the crowd of kids just falls completely silent.

00;26;41;01 – 00;26;42;13
Syd Lang
And a kid goes.

00;26;42;16 – 00;26;43;18
Betsy Funk
Hey.

00;26;43;21 – 00;26;47;23
Syd Lang
That’s my grandma’s costume that you’re throwing up in.

00;26;47;26 – 00;27;08;22
Marc Moss
Remember that the next tell us the main event is January 13th. You can learn about how to pitch your story and get tickets at Tell Us something.org. Thank you to our story sponsors who help us to pay our storytellers the Good Food Store. For more than 50 years, The Good Food Store has been Missoula’s homegrown independent source for natural, organic and locally sourced food.

00;27;08;24 – 00;27;43;14
Marc Moss
Learn more at Good Food store.com. And thanks to story sponsor ParkSyde Credit Union, whose mission it is to be the best place for people of western Montana to get a loan. Learn more at ParkSyde fcu.org. Thanks to our accessibility sponsor SBS solar, allowing us to provide American Sign Language interpretation at the live event. SBF solar stands at the forefront of the solar energy revolution, with over 30 years of industry experience specializing in custom solar design and installation for both reSydential and commercial applications.

00;27;43;20 – 00;28;10;17
Marc Moss
SBA solar is committed to promoting energy independence and environmental sustainability. Learn more at SBS linc.com. And thanks to our workshop sponsor, White Tide Designs, helping us to feed our storytellers at the group workshop. White Tie Designs is a woman led art and design studio that produces colorful spaces and stunning artwork that fosters positivity and empowers individuals to be their best selves.

00;28;10;19 – 00;28;34;26
Marc Moss
Learn more at Wide Tide designs.com. Thanks to our media sponsors, Mizzou Events Dot net, where you find all the good things that are happening. All of our Missoula and Missoula Broadcasting Company. Learn more about them and listen online at Missoula Broadcasting company.com. Thanks to our in-kind sponsors. Float Missoula. Learn more at float msl.com and choice of Tyler. Learn about Joyce at Joyce of tile.com.

00;28;34;29 – 00;28;58;14
Marc Moss
All right, let’s get back to the stories. You are listening to the Tell Us Something podcast. I’m Marc Moss closing out this episode of the Tell Us Something podcast. Syd Lange is a summer camp counselor at a small, long running camp in Colorado. Listen as she meets a special individual one summer and watch their friendship blossom amidst laughter, shared stories, and a whole lot of fun.

00;28;58;16 – 00;29;08;17
Marc Moss
Syd calls her story lovesick. Thanks for listening.

00;29;08;19 – 00;29;39;15
Syd Lang
I’m standing in the middle of a large dining room, and I’m in a bit of a pickle. The problem is, there is a cute girl sitting in the corner and I am in fluorescent, Colorado. well, actually, not in fluorescent. Fluorescent, as of the last census, had 149 people who lived there. It’s technically an unincorporated community, and I’m in Florissant, but not really forest.

00;29;39;15 – 00;30;02;20
Syd Lang
And I’m actually 30 minutes up a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. And I’m in this dining hall, and I see this girl and she’s sitting in the corner, and I want to go sit by her. She’s got this wild mullet that I later learned. She’s cut herself with a river knife on the Grand Canyon, and she’s got these vibrant eyes, and I want to sit next to her.

00;30;02;20 – 00;30;32;15
Syd Lang
But I’m a little bit nervous, and I’m nervous because on the drive out from Montana to Colorado, I’ve lost my voice somewhere. Wyoming’s long takes a long time to drive through there. I’m sure somewhere my voice has taken a stop and not come with me. I get to Colorado and I, I have laryngitis. And so here I am, standing in this room trying to meet a staff of seven people, small staff, and I can’t speak.

00;30;32;15 – 00;30;36;07
Syd Lang
And so I’m introducing myself, scratching through words. And I’m saying I am sad.

00;30;36;07 – 00;30;37;12
Betsy Funk
And I, I don’t.

00;30;37;12 – 00;30;57;00
Syd Lang
Normally sound like this, and I don’t know what to tell you. And I’m so happy to be here. And, it’s my fourth time coming to work at this outdoor education center. And we do summer camp, and we also do, teaching students. And so I spend the next week during staff training trying to get to know this girl.

00;30;57;01 – 00;31;14;19
Syd Lang
It’s not going well. I’m not really getting to know anyone because no one can hear me. And so at the end of training, we decide that we’re going to go all together as a staff. We’re going to go into town. The big town. And so we get in two separate cars, and I manage to weasel my way into the car with her.

00;31;14;19 – 00;31;32;03
Syd Lang
And I’m thinking, oh, good, here we go. Now it’s my time to rock. And so we get in the cars, you know, five, seven person staff team, right? Five people and one car, two people and the other. Here we go. So we get in the old 2001 Subaru Outback, and she rolls down all the windows because it’s August in Colorado.

00;31;32;03 – 00;31;52;12
Syd Lang
It’s still pretty hot. She turns on the radio and she’s singing the whole drive, and my little scratchy laryngitis voice is no competition for the windows or the music. And so I’m silent. The whole two hour car ride. We get to town and she has this great idea. We should go to karaoke.

00;31;52;14 – 00;31;54;16
Betsy Funk
Like, oh, awesome.

00;31;54;18 – 00;32;23;15
Syd Lang
This is perfect. So I get to karaoke and Big Green Tractor, my typical karaoke songs. Not sounding as good as it usually does, and I’m up there and I’m scratching through the lyrics and I finally, as the night goes on, I get a chance to sit outSyde with her and we’re talking about how we both have worked at this camp, but we’ve worked there opposing seasons, and so we have never we’ve never met before.

00;32;23;18 – 00;32;26;03
Syd Lang
And she goes, oh, I’ve heard of you, though.

00;32;26;06 – 00;32;26;11
Betsy Funk
Like.

00;32;26;13 – 00;32;48;25
Syd Lang
Oh God, this can’t be good. And she goes, yeah, you’re Patient zero, aren’t you? Yep. So, so let’s go back to 2019. It was my second summer at camp, and I’m coming as the climbing director this summer. And my goal is to get students excited to sign up for my climbing program, because the more they sign up, the more I get to climb.

00;32;48;25 – 00;33;17;02
Syd Lang
And that’s the dream job to a 19 year old. And so here I am. I’m dressed in front of all of the kids. It’s 150. Kids are sitting in an outdoor auditorium, and I’m putting on an opening night performance, and it’s this zany, wild experience and I’m dressed head to toe in a giraffe costume. And luckily, there is a break in the giraffe costume from the top of my head to the bottom of my chin.

00;33;17;02 – 00;33;33;27
Syd Lang
It’s got this like big giraffe muzzle, you might call it these big ears. And I’m in a belay system, which is a climbing term. If you don’t know, I’m wearing a harness and another person is also wearing a harness, and we’re kind of mocking what climbing might be like. And I have no control over if I’m moving forwards or backwards.

00;33;33;27 – 00;33;53;20
Syd Lang
I’m tied into a rope and my player is deciding how much slack I get. And so here I am, and I’m like dancing in front of everyone. I’m so excited. I’m the giraffe and I’m going to climb with you all summer. Come sign up, and all of the sudden I turned to the left and I just start spewing vomit just out of nowhere.

00;33;53;20 – 00;34;10;18
Syd Lang
Thank goodness for the open mouthpiece, right? Yeah. So I’m throwing up everywhere, and all of a sudden the crowd of kids just falls completely silent.

00;34;10;20 – 00;34;12;03
Syd Lang
And a kid goes.

00;34;12;05 – 00;34;13;06
Betsy Funk
Hey.

00;34;13;09 – 00;34;36;14
Syd Lang
That’s my grandma’s costume that you’re throwing up in. And so I’m standing in front of everybody spewing vomit and also spewing the norovirus, which took over the entire camp all summer. looking back, it was pretty awesome. You know, kids in the dining hall, they’re standing up and three kids are vomiting at once. And all these interactions, it was a real stand by me moment.

00;34;36;15 – 00;34;56;21
Syd Lang
We had a barf tally on the Syde. Yeah. Totally awesome. So I coined the name patient zero, and I’m sitting here and I’m like, really going into this story, like telling her maybe more than I should. And I look over after talking about this and I’m expecting her face to be like, oh. And she looks at me with just this, like excited astonishment.

00;34;56;22 – 00;35;14;03
Syd Lang
She goes, well, hey, that’s cool. Have you heard of my character early? Like, oh, okay, we’re going to do this. Here we go. And so she starts telling me about this character named Earl, which is a bird, and the bird dance to every event. And Earl kind of sounded like this. So she’s going into Earl.

00;35;14;03 – 00;35;39;11
Syd Lang
And then I start talking about granny. And granny was my other claim to fame at this establishment. Granny is an old character. She’s an old woman character. And I’m working outdoor ed season at this time. And so fifth and sixth grade students from the surrounding area in Colorado, they come up and they spend a week with myself and the other field instructors, and we we replace part of their curriculum from the class.

00;35;39;11 – 00;36;01;16
Syd Lang
So we’re teaching it. And also acting it out. It’s really an odd place. And so I am working I’m teaching the, the homesteading curriculum, and I’m granny dressed head to toe in a bonnet. And granny, I just fell in love with granny. So I spent two months being granny and granny sounded like this. Hey, kids. Well, come.

00;36;01;16 – 00;36;01;23
Betsy Funk
On.

00;36;01;23 – 00;36;07;08
Syd Lang
Down. Here we go. We’re going to churn some butter.

00;36;07;10 – 00;36;29;20
Syd Lang
And granny had a really rough season because granny had giardia. And if you don’t know what giardia is, it is a parasite you get from drinking unclean water. And she already really stays until you take care of it. So the idea, Judy, a granny, is running around teaching these kids in her bonnet and her and her homesteading dress.

00;36;29;27 – 00;36;45;19
Syd Lang
She keeps going, Granny’s got dysentery. Where is the chamber pot? So at this point, everybody has heard about patient Zero and also granny with giardia.

00;36;45;21 – 00;37;08;21
Syd Lang
And I’m swapping stories with this girl. Her name is Sophia, and we’re going back and forth, back and forth and just doubling over in laughter outSyde of this karaoke bar. And we decide that what we need to do is bring Earl and granny together. And there’s a perfect opportunity for that. We have, in this outdoor ed season, what’s called the hoedown.

00;37;08;24 – 00;37;29;29
Syd Lang
And I can guarantee you, you have never been to anything like the High Trails Hoedown. It is magical and wild. All the students are packed into a small auditorium. The teachers are. They are wide eyed, confused, or like, this is what you do. What? And all the staff comes in, were dancing around in different costumes and we put on a performance.

00;37;29;29 – 00;37;51;14
Syd Lang
And every night the performance looks different because we don’t play in it and it goes on for like two hours. These kids dancing at the hoedown and granny and Earl come out and they just steal the show. And for the next two months, granny and Earl steal the show every single week, granny and Earl.

00;37;52;24 – 00;38;26;08
Syd Lang
Spend a lot of time together. Granny and Earl also sit in Sofia, fall in love. throughout the entirety of that season, Sophia’s mullet slowly grows out. My voice slowly comes back. Thank goodness. Good old Larry’s kicked it, kicked the curb, and, we moved back to his unit together. And granny and Earl still live in Missoula. We’ve been here for two and a half years, and we have a pretty darn good time.

00;38;26;11 – 00;38;38;07
Syd Lang
and I would say we still know how to throw a pretty dang good hoedown.

00;38;38;09 – 00;39;12;06
Marc Moss
Thanks, Syd. Sydney Lang grew up in Olympia, Washington, and has been living in Grand Old Missoula, Montana on and off for the past seven years. She attended the University of Montana, where she studied communication and climate change. She spends much of her time climbing big rocks and zooming through the trees on her bike. She has been working in the outdoor education world for many years both in Montana and Colorado, said love seat bubble gum, ice cream, practice slack line by the river, play on local trails and cook dinner with friends.

00;39;12;08 – 00;39;35;12
Marc Moss
Thanks for listening to the Tell Us Something podcast. Remember that the next Tell Us Something event is January 13th. The theme is hold my beer. Learn how to pitch your story and get tickets at Tell Us something.org.

00;00;10;01 – 00;00;35;00
Marc Moss
Welcome to the Tell Us Something podcast. Tell Us Something is a nonprofit that helps people share their true personal stories around a theme. Live in person and without notes. I’m Mark Moss, your host and executive director of Tell Us Something. Have you ever felt that tug towards a place, a memory, or maybe even a person? That feeling of going home, that feeling of going home isn’t just about a physical location.

It’s about belonging and connection. It’s about finding that piece of yourself that’s been missing. On this episode of the Tell Us Something podcast. We explore all the different ways we come home to ourselves and the world around us. We’ll hear stories of journeys, of second chances, of rediscovering what truly matters. So buckle up and get comfy. Join us as we embark on these heartfelt adventures.

This episode of the podcast was recorded in front of a live audience at the Glacier Ice Rink and Pavilion on June 11th, 2024, as part of the Missoula Pride celebration. Eight storytellers shared their true personal stories on the theme Going Home.

00;01;19;02 – 00;01;30;05
Michelle Reilly
It was like looking through the most beautiful kaleidoscope I had ever looked through all these vibrant colors and shapes and patterns of fractals and wonder.

00;01;30;05 – 00;01;48;03
Adel Ben Bacha
As she answers the phone, she softly says hello. And then silence. That silence felt like forever. But she breaks that silence with a delicate sob.

00;01;48;03 – 00;01;59;15
Zeke Cork
I didn’t know what it meant, but I couldn’t shake it. I thought maybe it was about my family, so I try to write about it, but there was always something missing. It stayed with me for years.

00;01;59;15 – 00;02;06;01
Ashley Brittner Wells
The coolest thing you could do in town was go to the games. And I desperately wanted to be cool, so I went.

00;02;06;01 – 00;02;37;00
Marc Moss
That’s coming up. We are currently looking for storytellers for the next tell us something storytelling event. The theme is Never Again. If you’d like to pitch your story for consideration, please call (406) 203-4683. You have three minutes to leave your pitch. The pitch deadline is August 9th. I look forward to hearing from you. We’re also looking for volunteers to help with the event.

If you love Tell Us Something and you love helping out, visit. Tell us something. Morgan. Volunteer to learn more and to sign up.

We were gathered at the Missoula County Fairgrounds in the heart of Montana amidst the vibrant energy of early June. As we remembered that we took a moment to acknowledge the traditional stewards of this land. We stand on the ancestral homelands of the Salish and Kalispell, people who for countless generations have nurtured and cared for this place. The place of the small bull trout.

Their deep connection to this land is woven into the very fabric of this valley. We honor their resilience, their knowledge of the natural world, and their enduring presence here. Acknowledgment alone is not enough. Let’s also commit to taking action ways that you can do this if you live in Missoula, or to learn more about the native tribes who still inhabit this land.

You can visit the Salish Kootenay College or the Missoula Children’s Museum to deepen your understanding of the Salish and Kalispell cultures. You can visit the Missoula Art Museum, where the exhibit We Stand with you. Contemporary artists. Honor the families of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous relative crisis runs through September 7th, 2024. You can support cultural events hosted by local tribes and explore opportunities to volunteer with their initiatives.

We can always be looking for opportunities to incorporate indigenous knowledge and practices into our everyday lives, whether it’s sustainable land management or traditional food systems. We can commit to moving beyond mere words and work towards building a more respectful and inclusive future. Honoring the legacy of the Salish and the Kalispell people on whose land we stand.

Remember this. Tell us something. Stories sometimes have adult themes. Storytellers sometimes use adult language.

We ate. Tell us something. Recognize the privilege inherent in our platform and while we love sharing a variety of voices, it’s important to amplify marginalized voices. That’s why during the event on June 11th, I stepped back and passed the mic to our friends from Missoula Pride. Devin Carpenter, who shared his story at last year’s event, and Kiara Rivera from the center, performed the honors of seeing the evening’s event.

On the podcast, you’ll hear them giving the bios for the storytellers.

Michelle Riley finds herself homeless in 10th grade in a challenge that begins a lifetime of challenges after earning a PhD. Despite her alcohol use disorder, she struggles to overcome addiction and finds unexpected hope. In an online ad, sensitive listeners, please note that Michelle’s story contains mentions of suicidal thoughts, which may be distressing for some listeners. Please take care of yourselves.

Michelle calls her story heroic measures. Thanks for listening.

00;05;41;05 – 00;06;29;18
Michelle Reilly

I found myself homeless for the first time when I was in 10th grade. My sisters and I came home from school and our father’s truck was parked there. But our father was never home this time of day. So we walked inside. Hello. Hello. No answer. We walked up the stairs and the door to my parent’s bedroom was cracked, so we pushed it open and my father was there, kneeling at the foot of his bed with all of his guns, a row of guns laid out neatly on his bed.

My mom was gone. She left. See, I grew up in a small town in rural Appalachia, and my parents were young parents. My mother had three daughters by the time she was 21. So I guess by 35, she didn’t want to be a mother anymore. And home became not so homey anymore. I started sleeping at friends houses or sleeping in my car.

Sometimes I didn’t sleep at all because by 11th grade I was working 3 or 4 jobs. I’d rotate between two afterschool jobs, and then I’d go to work third shift at a diner. And diners in Appalachia weren’t the most wholesome place for a 16 year old girl to be. So I dealt with far too many sexual propositions from older men.

There. I’d get off at 6 or 7. I’d go to school, shower in the locker room, and then I’d sleep either in homeroom or in my car. And I don’t remember thinking about these things. It was like I was just on autopilot doing them. After high school, I started undergrad with the same unwavering autopilot and schedule. I was working 5 or 6 jobs and taking 18 to 21 credits a semester.

And I was introduced to the underground rave scene in Pittsburgh and started experimenting with party drugs. I was also drinking a lot during this time and sleeping even less. I’d started drinking at a young age after my mom left, and I was given a fake ID, but I lived in a small town, so I’d frequently run into friends of my father’s at dive bars, but they knew his mental state after my mom left, so either they never told him or if they did, he was too depressed to say anything to me.

After undergrad, I moved to Reno and started living out of my car again. And then at 27, I applied to grad school and earned a master’s of science from Johns Hopkins University. And then I was offered a research position. So I moved to Flagstaff and earned my PhD and four years.

Underneath the accomplishments and overcome struggles. I was completely empty and numb, still completely out of touch with any emotions and just doing doing all the things that I know needed to get done. Doing all the things I needed to do without feeling anything. And during this time, I was still drinking a lot like a fifth whiskey a night was not uncommon.

I was still over performing at work, exceeding expectations and producing high quality products. But my behavior was erratic and my emotions were frequently uncontrolled outbursts of sobbing or rage. And I felt that uncontrollable spiraling. It’s like I was in a dark box and there wasn’t a top or bottom, and there wasn’t a way out of this box because the box was everything.

It’s like those car compactors at scrap yards. The force and pressure needed to smash a car into this tiny package of metal. That force and pressure is what it felt like all around me, all of the time in this torque box. And I couldn’t climb out of this box because the darkness was everything.

It was so isolating and I felt so alone. I became completely dysregulated and at times suicidal and really lost hope.

One day I was scrolling through Instagram and I felt an emotion, a glimmer of hope, a tiny seed deep down that I barely felt safe acknowledging. I filled out an online form for a clinical trial titled Psilocybin Treatment for Major Depressive Disorder with Co-occurring Alcohol Use Disorder.

Fast forward several long months of getting physicals, providing psychological examinations, getting bloodwork and providing a detailed drinking history. And I was told I was accepted into this trial. I started meeting twice a week with my guides, a licensed social worker and a psychologist. And there wasn’t a single meeting that I didn’t cry at, just endless tears streaming down my face.

But hopelessness was still. I felt.

On September 18th, I walked into the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Behavioral Research for my last Credos interview, and I was asked a series of questions on a scale of 0 to 10, how important is it for you to change your drinking right now? Ten? On a scale of 0 to 10, how confident are you that you can change your drinking right now?

At this point in my life, I felt like I had drank more days. I’d been alive than not drank, so my confidence was pretty low. I think I gave the question a 3 or 4. More evaluations and discussions and meditating. And then I was handed a wooden chalice and I put on a blood pressure monitor. I shades and headphones and I waited.

And if you’re familiar with psychedelics, the dose I was given was a high dose. It’s what they call a heroic dose.

The music began to entice and overwhelm me, and I was being pulled by curiosity into a world completely unfamiliar to me. Although I had a fair share of experience with party drugs, I had no experience with psychedelics.

I began to see so many fantastical things and found myself invited deeper and deeper into my internal psyche. So many interesting patterns and curiosities and a feeling of weightlessness.

It was like looking through the most beautiful kaleidoscope I had ever looked through, all these vibrant colors and shapes and patterns of fractals and wonder.

The texture of the music became the vibrant colors, and I could feel all these colors and patterns in a very intense way. The kaleidoscope became five dimensional and the universe became five dimensional. And I was a part of that.

I could feel so much depth and breadth and heights, but also time both forward and backwards and resonance. And every cell in my body was suddenly alive and vibrating with the resonance of these mutating colors and the kaleidoscope. My body became warm and endless without boundary, and I felt so much openness, like an untethered ring. Like the layers just being pulled off of me.

All that crushing heaviness. That only thing that I had felt for so long was being pulled out of me and lifted off of me and replaced with this beautiful radiance. And this warm, golden light was being poured into me and filling me and spilling out around me into this beautiful reflective pool. At some point, I don’t know the timeline, but I felt as though I was being embraced by the universe, and I felt a presence.

And I felt this presence tell me or show me that I was not alone, that I was being held, always held, and that I was loved. And I saw darkness from my past in a new light. But I felt safe there, and I felt as though I was not alone. But I was being guided through this darkness and fear was replaced with curiosity.

I explored unending time and a continuum of life, and I felt more at home than I had ever felt in my entire life. The details of the experience are inexplicable, as often is said about life changing psychedelic experiences. It was ineffable. I had one other treatment three months after my first, and I have not had the urge to numb reality through drinking since my first session.

I still carry with me that peace and comfort I felt during my first session, and I’m learning a new sense of self filled with generosity and acceptance. And I’m so grateful that I found my way home to my self-worth.

00;16;36;03 – 00;16;52;04
Devin Carpenter
Michelle Reilly is a wilderness specialist and wildlife ecologist who has lived in Missoula for 8 years. She is a wildcrafter, avid backpacker, and devoted mother. If she isn’t deep in the mountains or paddling the rivers, you can find her in her yard tending her gourmet mushroom gardens. She also runs a Missoula Ladies’ Dinner Club and enjoys entertaining in her backyard. Sensitive listeners, please note that Michelle’s story contains mentions of suicidal thoughts and the her father contemplating suicide, which may be distressing for some listeners. Please take care of yourselves. Alright, please welcome Michelle Reilly.

00;16;52;10 – 00;17;06;17
Marc Moss
Up next Adele Ben Boccia shares a vivid tale of family nostalgia and a life changing phone call that redefines the meaning of home. Adele calls her story plus 206. Thanks for listening.

00;17;06;17 – 00;17;35;07
Adel Ben Bacha
Hello, everyone. Before I tell you my story, I would like for all of you to close your eyes, at least for one part, because I want this to be a shared experience. So my story takes us back. Eight years ago in France, in the little city of my family and I are all gathered for a Thursday dinner, as my mom loves to make them.

Everyone understands what she has prepared for dinner. It’s everyone’s favorite meal, a delicious couscous that looks like perfection. So she’s in the kitchen. We are all in the living room. We are a big family of eight people, and I’m the youngest in the living room. You can hear the loud voices, some jokes being thrown at people, and very loud and heavy arguments.

So she’s in the kitchen. The dish is getting ready, and as she brings the plate in the living room, everyone just stops. They’re astonished by this red vivid color. This color comes from the spices she puts in it. The tomato sauce, the harissa. Very spicy that day. By the way. And everyone dies in. Everyone stops. And the room is filled with the sound of clinking spoons.

And so I try a very timid. Bon appétit that can be heard. Have you ever felt that ignored. If not, that hurts a lot. So everyone dives in and eats peacefully. The noise is getting louder as it was before, but suddenly the phone rings. My mum rushes through the phone to the phone and I see her eyes widening, and as they get bigger, we all see this number.

This number was longer than usual on the phone and we could all see the country code. And I remember vividly the numbers two, one, six. Answering that phone took her instantaneously back to her childhood until she was 17. As she answers the phone, she softly says hello. And then silence. That silence felt like forever. But she breaks that silence where they delicate sob.

Me and my siblings look at each other and we understand what happened. And something very bad happened. After a sleepless night, my mom boards us on the first plane. She finds to Tunisia the place where she was born. As the plane lands, her head is still up in the clouds. She walks through the airport and all she sees is just lifeless figures walking around the airport.

She goes out of the airport. And then she hops into the first taxi, and she is starting to get prepared to her two hour drive to take her to her hometown, a small village now become a city called Dubai. As she is on her way, she looks through the window and she notices that a lot of things have changed.

The palm trees are higher, the buildings too, and the traffic is heavier, making the journey even longer. She finally gets there, knocks at the door and suddenly the memories in her head start rushing as well as if it was a race. Each memory wanted to be the one, the one to be remembered. The first thing she would tell her sister.

But eventually none of them won. The door opens and my mom sees her sister. Red eyes still filled with water, without a word. She is welcomed with a heartfelt hug and welcoming eyes filled with filled with sympathy. Without saying anything, she follows her sister in a very dark room, and you can tell that the room was very dark, because the only light you could see was the swaying of the curtains through the rare breeze.

And then she enters and she sees the lifeless body on a mattress. As she sees it. She can’t help it but rush to the body. She holds her and hugs her tightly and kisses her repeatedly. On me. On me. Meaning mom in Arabic. I’m here now. You’re safe. After saying that, the only thing we could see is a tear that has been shed on my grandmother’s cheek.

One of her siblings goes to the body and closes the eyes, and you may now open yours. The reason why I chose this story is because, like my mom and the youngest of the family of eight, and I’ve always felt that it was hard to find my voice and to step up for my ideas. Because when you’re young and you have a lot of big brothers that would tell you what to think because you’re too young, you don’t know anything.

You’re naive. But now, thinking back, I think that this story shaped me in a way because I didn’t want to feel the regret and guilt that my mother felt of not being there enough for her own mom. So when I was about 18, I already knew that I wanted to be a teacher, and I’ve always made a promise to myself.

I said that whenever I get my first job as a teacher, I will buy a house and make sure that my mom is safe with my dad and that they left the small apartment we have been living all our life. So that’s what I did and I thought that would help them. But as I was growing older, I was getting, harder and harder on my siblings.

As I was repeating the process, I had been I had been living before, and now I’m thinking back, and I was hard on them because my mom wishes they called her more and visit more because she was expressing her own grief as if life could stop at any moment. So I get into a lot of arguments with my siblings, telling them that they should call mom more often because you never know what can happen.

But now I understand why I felt that. And most of all, why I shouldn’t feel like that. Because today we’re here to talk about home. And my vision of home changed. My siblings didn’t call my parents that often because they now have a family husband, wife, children. So this is now their home. But it doesn’t mean that they love my mom any less.

So what I do today to avoid that happening again is calling my mom anytime I can. And being here now. Far away from home. Only for a month. Still, I make sure that I call my mom every day because I have understood something very important. We tend to think of home as a building, something that has been built, something that protects you from the outside.

A geographical space. But I have now understood that a home is actually not a geographical place. It could be a spiritual place. So now when I call her, I always make sure that even if we don’t have much to say every day, that I get to hear every detail of her day. This way, when it’s my time to go home, I don’t feel like she felt the buildings getting higher and the trees higher to thank you.

00;25;44;02 – 00;25;54;09
Kera Rivera
Adel Ben Bacha is a 29 year-old French English teacher in Dijon, France. You must have heard of the mustard! He teaches in highschool, university and for masters’ programs, among other activities . He loves meeting new people, traveling and discovering new cultures, going out with friends and family.

00;25;54;09 – 00;26;01;02
Marc Moss
We’ll be right back after this short break. You are listening to the Tell Us Something podcast.

00;26;01;02 – 00;26;12;14
Zeke Cork
I didn’t know what it meant, but I couldn’t shake it. I thought maybe it was about my family, so I try to write about it, but there was always something missing. It stayed with me for years.

00;26;12;14 – 00;26;18;28
Ashley Brittner Wells
The coolest thing you could do in town was go to the games. And I desperately wanted to be cool, so I went.

00;26;18;28 – 00;26;22;10
Marc Moss
That’s after the break. Stay tuned.

Thank you to our story sponsor, the Good Food Store, helping us to pay our storytellers. Learn more at Good Food store.com. Thanks to Golden Yolk Griddle, who also showed up as a story sponsor. Learn more about them at Golden Yolk griddle.com. Thank you to our accessibility sponsor, Parkside Credit Union, allowing us to hire American Sign Language interpreters at this event.

In order to be a more inclusive experience, learn about them at Parkside fcu.com. Thanks to our artist sponsor Bernice’s Bakery, who paid our poster artist. I learned about them and their delicious baked goods at Bernice’s Bakery mty.com. Thanks to our media sponsors, Missoula Events, Dot net, the Art attic, The Trail Less Traveled, and Missoula Broadcasting Company including the family of ESPN radio.

The trail 133, Jack FM and Missoula. Source for modern hits you 104.5. Thanks to our in-kind sponsors. Float. Missoula. Learn more at float msl.com and choice of tile. Learn about Joyce at Joyce of tile.com. Please remember that our next event is September 18th at the George and Jane Denison Theater. The theme is Never Again. You can pitch your story by calling (406) 203-4683.

Tickets are available right now at Tell Us something.org. Please follow us on all the standard social media channels and subscribe to our newsletter. In order to be informed about all of our events. Welcome back. You are listening to the Tell Us Something podcast. I’m your host, Mark Moss.

In our next story, Zeke Cork returns to Missoula after many failed escapes to face his demons, find love and embrace his true self. Sensitive listeners, please note that Zeke’s story contains a mention of a suicide attempt, which may be distressing for some listeners. Please take care of yourselves. Zeke calls his story. Ezekiel cried. Thanks for listening.

00;28;25;09 – 00;28;39;09
Zeke Cork
Speaking. Got a short king? Yeah, sure. King on the premises? Yeah.

Thank you, Devon. And thank you, everybody, for coming.

After trying to be someone else anywhere else, I came back to Missoula. This town owns me. No matter how many times I try to run from here, it would find me and call me back and was never kicking or screaming that I’d return. It was more like tail tucked between my legs, begging for forgiveness with a promise to be better.

See, I grew up here. My handprints are in concrete. My footprints cast in the local trails. My tire tracks on the gravel roads. I went to Paxson and Roosevelt, then Hellgate High School. All my first year here. My first communion. My first kiss. My first awkward mechanics was sex. My first love, and my first heartbreak. I left my first boyfriend, who I wanted to be more than I desired, for a girl who had dumped me in the pig barn right here at the county fair.

So surrounded by the smells of shit and cotton candy. I stumbled through the sounds of the midway games and the blinking lights, where I ran into friends who tell me it was going to be okay. And then I made a girl underneath the Ferris wheel who I watched devour of candied apple with a passion I could only envy.

And I swear, she rolled her eyes at me, seeing the pathetic loser I was instead of the swaggering, give a shit start, I tried to present. Now my parents, they were educators, active members of the Democratic Party in Saint Anthony’s parish, and they pushed me to become anything that I could imagine, at least until their marriage failed. When I was a teenager.

And trust me, it needed to end. But I lost my way. I didn’t know who to be without them showing me. I think maybe later, when we’re adults ourselves, we figure out that our parents were just people trying to find their own way. But I followed my father to Portland. I blamed my aimlessness on him, and I wanted him to fix it.

I was a disaster. My once perfect father was consumed with finding his own last year, and he was really nothing more than Peter Pan chasing after his shadow. So I came back to Missoula, trying to find the promise that others had seen in me. I enrolled at the university. I was pretty focused for a while until I fell in love with that girl I’d met underneath the Ferris wheel, so I’d follow her to Chicago and then Seattle.

But she’d become this plank for me to cling onto, and an ocean of confusion and grief. That was a lot to expect of someone who was just trying to make it to shore themselves. So I packed up my books and my records, and I drove back to Missoula again. But there’s something that happens for me every time I enter this valley from any direction.

When it opens up and the neighborhoods pop into view, and whatever season it’s in presents itself in all its glory, like the royal robes of fall lilacs in the spring, the ice choked rivers in the winter, and the brown hills of late summer. And I just let out this long breath I’ve been holding. And I know, I know that I’m home.

But I can never sustain that comfort. I could only see my reflections in shards, slivers of broken glass. I couldn’t name the ways I was fractured. I only knew that I was. So I took up drinking as a hobby. And there was lots of what Beyoncé calls those red cup kisses when I’d meet a girl, and then another, and then another, hoping they’d be the one that would fix me.

But they were just crooked. Rusty nails tried to hold it together themselves, and we all kind of wanted the same thing, but the weight of it was too much for anyone to hold. And one night I had a dream about the prophet Ezekiel, the one in the desert who commands the bones to rise up out of the sand.

The one in that old song. That old gospel song. Ezekiel cried. Them bones, them bones, the ankle bone connected to the knee bone. Yeah. That guy. I didn’t know what it meant, but I couldn’t shake it. I thought maybe it was about my family. So I try to write about it, but there was always something missing. It stayed with me for years, and I’d say, what is it?

Why does this haunt me? And then one late night in August, after one month of sobriety, I wandered out to the shed that belonged to the woman I was seeing at the time. And I took her shotgun with me, and I tore that place apart looking for shells. All I found was an empty box. But still I put the barrel of that thing in my mouth and I squeeze the trigger, hoping there was one in the chamber.

Well, I’m here today because there wasn’t. But the next morning I checked myself into rehab. Next month I’ll be 34 years sober.

But back then, I had to just try to make it through each day. So I stayed to myself, went to work, read, listen to music, played video games, and watched a lot of movies. But then I’d made a girl and she was cautious but intrigued. And I wasn’t a good catch. But she was beautiful, smart and strong. So we took it slow, and eventually I’d convince her to run away with me, and we moved to Seattle.

We came back to Missoula, and then we’d move to Texas, California and Alaska. Every time things got rough, we’d move. All we needed was a change of scenery. We even got married, and that meant something. Maybe that would be the thing that would save us. Where we strong enough to move back home, settle down in our family and friends again.

We’ve had so. But it was actually the opposite. It was the safest place to just let it end. See, the skeletons live here, and we’d return to the place where they’d dwell. And I still despise that broken person in the mirror. And I’d been asking someone else to love them without hesitation. Without question. Unconditionally. What a huge ask.

So, for the first time in a very long time, I was on my own and I stood on the top of Mount Sentinel, staring down at my hometown, listening to Josh Reynolds homecoming, humming along in the crisp column air. And I let the pastoral rolling. It was there that I understood what the dream she had left her countless times as a lost girl, someone’s daughter, sister, a wife, only to return to become something akin to the prodigal son.

And it probably would have been a lot easier for me to become myself in a place where no one knew my story. But instead, I asked people who had known me most of their lives to call me by a new name and address me as the man I’d always been, but repeatedly denied. And what I got in return was my family and friends wrapping their arms around me and saying, yes, this makes sense.

My ex-wife gave me my first testosterone shot and she’s my closest friend. Then I’d meet someone new. Yeah, I know, here we go again. But we’d both sworn off relationships. But that crackle and hum like power lines was pretty hard to resist. So she chose to move across the world and give me and my town a try. She liked us.

We got married in a ghost town not too far from here, and we’re trying something different. We’re helping each other unpack the baggage instead of helping and making each other lugging around. So far, so good. And I’m no longer a stranger in a strange land. I finally live in a body that I’m not at war with. And the mirror.

The mirror is now a full reflection of someone I recognize. Someone I know. I look at my perfect haircut from Compass Barbershop, who has been with me through the whole thing.

And I’ll run a razor down my neckline. And I’ll watch my shoulders broaden and my hips narrow. And I see my parents, both of them looking back at me. My mother, who’s 84, is still alive and well, and my father has passed, but both of them staring back at their son, proud of the man he’s becoming. And I have a tattoo on my chest, a line I borrowed from Florence Welch that says, I’ll show you what it means to be spared.

I landed in a safe space. Nestled between these foothills and held by this community. The place where Ezekiel Zeke rose out of a desert of despair and became home. And for me, this is what it means to be home.

00;38;37;04 – 00;38;43;13
Devin Carpenter
He lives in Missoula with his wife and two rescue mutts. He loves tacos and trucker hats.

00;38;43;13 – 00;39;05;10
Marc Moss
Wrapping up this episode of the Tell Us Something podcast. Ashley Britton or Wells is a self-described tomboy in the 1980s who finds courage in the Montana Lady Griz games. It took years to find her own place in the sands and be the inspiration for girls who are like she was then. Ashley calls her story made in Montana. Thanks for listening.

00;39;05;10 – 00;39;52;13
Ashley Brittner Wells
I’m sitting on the burnt orange carpet of my bedroom for new kids on the block, blasting from a tape deck in the background. Staring back at me from my bookshelves. Kristy’s great idea. Every Garth Brooks cassette tape known to humankind. And the eyes of 1 million porcelain dolls. I’m staring at my 1993 1994 Montana Lady Griz basketball team poster.

The shit is iconic. 15 players pose in their high school leather jackets on the University of Montana campus in front of their lockers. T’s blond perms, proofs of curly bangs scrunched at the front one with a feather in her hair. The team is historic. The tag line is made in Montana because that year all the players were from our states, and I would stare at it because it was a signal to me and my friends what Montana girls like us could grow up to be.

One day. I’m all Montana, too. I was born in the mid 80s and raised in East Missoula. And did I mention that I loved the Lady Grizz? I went to all their games. I went to their summer camps in the summer, and I tried to figure out which player I wanted to be. Their home turf, Delbert Arenas, nestled up against the base of Mount Sentinel on the University of Montana campus.

Our games I would run one hand along the brown, snaking metal railing that surrounds the court, balancing a piping hot personal pan pizza, on the other hand, slide my butt along the tanned plastic bleacher seating and get ready to be pumped at the opening chords of Pop Up the Jam. I would scream, and the players ran out to raucous applause from a full house decked out in copper and gold.

The games were the coolest thing you could do in town, and it was like my posters had come to life. The players were like my celebrities Shannon Cates, Skylar Cisco, Malia Kapp. The coolest thing you could do in town was go to the games. And I desperately wanted to be cool. So I went. I have always been trying to figure out who I am in a world that doesn’t totally feel like I belong in it.

I was bigger and louder than the other kids. I tried to do all the things the boys did. I struggled to fit in pretty much anywhere you put me. I was what we referred to in the 90s as a tomboy. I didn’t know which new kid on the block I had a crush on, but I knew that I had a crush on their rat tail haircuts.

So I got one of those with my mom in tow. The hair stylist twisted my thick blond ponytail into a giant hair tie at the base of my neck and cut the whole thing off. Save the rat tail, my mom cried. She still has that ponytail tucked away in a Ziploc bag in her floral hope chest. I sometimes think it’s the last remnant of the daughter that she thought she was getting, but who?

I quickly put a stop to it. My friends and I loved my rat tail, and at the games we would strut around the arena checking people out, looking to be checked out. the crowds back then and to this day are made up of everyday Missoula fans just like us. Families retire trees. Then there was the student section.

I thought the student section were so cool. They were in college, for example. They had they were sunglasses inside. They knew all the chants and cheers. T fans, lady Griz T fans. But there was this one couple that always stood out to me. One had hair short like mine and wore hoodies and baseball caps. The other had a tease perm, poofs of curly bangs and jeans, just like the players on my beloved poster.

But they weren’t just any other couple. They were queer. I would see them, and I would watch them as much as I would watch the games. I had never seen a couple like them in Missoula or anywhere else. I would climb to the highest corner of the arena and my second hand Nike’s, and I would watch them, and I would see them put their arms around each other’s shoulders, whisper in each other’s ears, cheer for the same players.

I cheered for. And I didn’t really know what I was seeing, but it felt really safe. It felt warm. It felt like coming home. It must have taken so much bravery for them to show up to those games 30 years ago to and be totally themselves. I don’t know what it was like to be queer in the early 90s in Missoula, except that I do, because I was I just didn’t know it yet.

Back then, it felt like people kept out of each other’s business in ways they just don’t anymore. And seeing this couple was really meaningful to me, because it made me feel like maybe someday who I was going to be wasn’t one of the players on the court. It was one of the people in the stands. When I was 24, I moved to Portland, Oregon and quickly realized why a couple like that would make me feel like I’d found myself.

You probably figured it out before I did. It wasn’t difficult to be a lesbian in Portland, Oregon. It didn’t feel like taking a chance, holding hands in public with Mal, who would become my wife. Once we went hiking up the Columbia River Gorge, and on the way home, we pulled over to stop and look at the river and as we got out of the car, I planted one on Mal’s face.

And in that moment, I noticed a man in iridescent sunglasses staring at us. Standing outside of his pickup truck. It was just the three of us out there and my breath caught in my throat. But then he gave me a smile and a wave and a thumbs up. And I thought maybe it was going to be okay, and maybe I could be queer anywhere, even in Missoula, Montana.

Shortly thereafter, we moved home. You can imagine how excited I was to take Mel to a Lady Grizz game. My mom was just as excited and bought us matching University of Montana hoodies just for the occasion. We loaded our arms up with personal pan pizzas, big bags of popcorn, fountain Diet Cokes as big as we could find, and took the back arena hallways to our seats.

Nowadays, those hallways are lined with posters from all of my beloved teams from the early 90s, and I showed them all the 9394 poster and told her about the team and the dirty ball contest at summer camp, where whoever had the dirtiest ball would win a prize. At the end of Lady Griz camp. So I would dribble the ball for hours in my driveway and practice layups and try to do whatever I could to prove how committed I was to the players.

I also told her about the couple, who, you know, I’ve always wondered who they were, where they ended up. All of these images came rushing back to me as I watched the current team on Robin solving court. A few months ago we attended the senior night game and the house was packed. There were families and the student section and packs of ten year old girls walking around the arena and matching sweatshirts shox a bright pink lipstick across their faces.

Seeing and being seen, listening to whatever it is I listen to now, it is. And this time I hesitated for my arm around my shoulders.

The Montana that I grew up in, and frankly, moved back to just a few short years ago has been replaced by a moral panic. Folks aren’t exactly keeping themselves out of our communities business anymore, but we must remain being seen. When you are true to yourself, you give others permission to be true to themselves, to.

It was our turn to demonstrate a little bit of bravery. Owing so much to that couple that I will never get to thank.

So I did, everybody. I put my arms around my shoulders.

Because she is my love. And those arena seats are my home where we get to be exactly who we are and who I always have been.

00;49;56;11 – 00;50;04;18
Kera Rivera
She is best known as Mel’s wife. she is a lifelong women’s sports fan.

00;50;06;26 – 00;50;20;03
Marc Moss
Thanks for listening to the Tell Us Something podcast. This episode was recorded live in person as part of the opening events at Missoula Pride on June 11th, 2024 at the Glacier Ice Rink Pavilion.

Please remember that our next event is September 18th at the George and Jane Dennison Theater. The theme is Never Again. You can pitch your story by calling (406) 203-4683. Tickets are available currently at Tell Us something.org. Please follow us on all the standard social media channels and subscribe to our newsletter.

In order to be informed about events and all things storytelling. Stream past episodes, learn more about upcoming events, and get tickets at Tell Us something.org.

00;00;10;01 – 00;00;35;00
Marc Moss
Welcome to the Tell Us Something podcast. Tell Us Something is a nonprofit that helps people share their true personal stories around a theme. Live in person and without notes. I’m Mark Moss, your host and executive director of Tell Us Something. Have you ever felt that tug towards a place, a memory, or maybe even a person? That feeling of going home, that feeling of going home isn’t just about a physical location.

It’s about belonging and connection. It’s about finding that piece of yourself that’s been missing. On this episode of the Tell Us Something podcast. We explore all the different ways we come home to ourselves and the world around us. We’ll hear stories of journeys, of second chances, of rediscovering what truly matters. So buckle up and get comfy. Join us as we embark on these heartfelt adventures.

This episode of the podcast was recorded in front of a live audience at the Glacier Ice Rink and Pavilion on June 11th, 2024, as part of the Missoula Pride celebration. Eight storytellers shared their true personal stories on the theme Going Home.

00;01;19;02 – 00;01;33;03
Kiki Hubbard
A few days later, my mom called me to share a story. She said she had just been on the phone with my grandmother, and that she was terribly upset because apparently her cousin had called to ask how my father had enjoyed the bacon.

00;01;33;03 – 00;01;46;20
Adria Jwort
So you’re going to North Dakota after that. But where are you stopping at Salt Lake City? As soon as you get there, call me. Just, you know, he kept saying, call me, let me know you’re at. And I knew it was because of that club shooting.

00;01;46;20 – 00;02;10;29
Teri Wing
For seven years with Sarah, I was in hiding and actually I had my kids in hiding to, Initially, she was very patient with it all, but eventually she decided that she was living, my life in hiding with me and not her life, because she had actually come out when she was in her 20s.

00;02;10;29 – 00;02;26;13
Chloe Williams
So I loved Women on Hawthorn and in Portland for eight years. Yeah, there was drama, there were tears, there was joy, there was heartbreak. And I really sort of saw the first glimpse of my real self during that time.

00;02;26;13 – 00;02;57;12
Marc Moss
That’s coming up. We are currently looking for storytellers for the next tell us something storytelling event. The theme is Never Again. If you’d like to pitch your story for consideration, please call (406) 203-4683. You have three minutes to leave your pitch. The pitch deadline is August 9th. I look forward to hearing from you. We’re also looking for volunteers to help with the event.

If you love Tell Us Something and you love helping out, visit. Tell us something. Morgan. Volunteer to learn more and to sign up.

We were gathered at the Missoula County Fairgrounds in the heart of Montana amidst the vibrant energy of early June. As we remembered that we took a moment to acknowledge the traditional stewards of this land. We stand on the ancestral homelands of the Salish and Kalispell, people who for countless generations have nurtured and cared for this place. The place of the small bull trout.

Their deep connection to this land is woven into the very fabric of this valley. We honor their resilience, their knowledge of the natural world, and their enduring presence here. Acknowledgment alone is not enough. Let’s also commit to taking action ways that you can do this if you live in Missoula, or to learn more about the native tribes who still inhabit this land.

You can visit the Salish Kootenay College or the Missoula Children’s Museum to deepen your understanding of the Salish and Kalispell cultures. You can visit the Missoula Art Museum, where the exhibit We Stand with you. Contemporary artists. Honor the families of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous relative crisis runs through September 7th, 2024. You can support cultural events hosted by local tribes and explore opportunities to volunteer with their initiatives.

We can always be looking for opportunities to incorporate indigenous knowledge and practices into our everyday lives, whether it’s sustainable land management or traditional food systems. We can commit to moving beyond mere words and work towards building a more respectful and inclusive future. Honoring the legacy of the Salish and the Kalispell people on whose land we stand.

Remember this. Tell us something. Stories sometimes have adult themes. Storytellers sometimes use adult language.

We ate. Tell us something. Recognize the privilege inherent in our platform and while we love sharing a variety of voices, it’s important to amplify marginalized voices. That’s why during the event on June 11th, I stepped back and passed the mic to our friends from Missoula Pride. Devin Carpenter, who shared his story at last year’s event, and Kiara Rivera from the center, performed the honors of seeing the evening’s event.

On the podcast, you’ll hear them giving the bios for the storytellers.

In her first story, Kiki Hubbard, her mother and her grandmother are on a plane returning back to the United States from former Yugoslavia. After a trip tracing their ancestry, the grandmother, a strong immigrant who fled war and violence, is frustrated because customs won’t let her bring bacon into the United States. Kiki calls her story what bacon? Thanks for listening.

00;05;57;15 – 00;06;16;18
Kiki Hubbard

I’m on an airplane home from Europe with my mother and grandmother. To my left is my grandma Francesca, who went by Frances, but whom my family affectionately called Momo. I know she’s next to me because I can sense her signature fidgeting.

Mama was a constant warrior. It was as if anxiety propelled her through life, which kept her busy, I suppose, because she was always knitting, gardening, cooking, doing. And she moved at a rapid pace regardless of what she was up to. For example, if you saw her doing her laps at the mall, you would quickly conclude that she was either racing someone or racing away from someone.

This is a woman who never became a U.S. citizen, despite being in the United States for over 50 years as an immigrant.

Because she was terrified of failing the exam. She was ashamed of making mistakes and having people learn about them. And I suppose at a deeper level, she was afraid of being told that she couldn’t stay in this country. Now standing no more than five feet tall, Momo was also one of the strongest people I have ever known. She chopped firewood with an ax well into her 80s. She would flip burning logs in the fireplace with her bare hands. After emigrating here, she chopped off half of her pointer finger while working in a bakery in Milwaukee. She simply wrapped her hand in a towel and kept working. It wasn’t until her supervisor caught wind of the situation that she was taken to the emergency room.

Now, sitting next to me, to my right on the airplane is my mom. My mom was born and raised in Austria when she emigrated here with her parents. She was forced to grow up faster than most nine-year-olds because she picked up the English language quicker than they did. She read the mail, scheduled appointments, and had to navigate the complex systems that came with living in a new country.

And while Austria is where my mom was born, my grandmother used to call former Yugoslavia her home, where she and my grandfather farmed and lived in community with a number of other ethnic Germans whose ancestors had emigrated to Yugoslavia and other countries along the Danube River more than 250 years before. In fact, the impetus for our trip to Austria, from which we were returning to on that airplane, was a research grant that I was awarded as a college undergraduate. I was provided some funding to travel to Austria to interview relatives I had never met before about my cultural heritage, and in particular, how my grandma landed in Austria in 1944 as a war refugee.

My grandmother survived a genocide event that rarely makes it into history books. She fought following the fall of Hitler at the end of World War Two. The communist leader in Yugoslavia, Tito, initiated a massive gradation of anyone with German ancestry. So even though my grandparents had never set foot in Germany, they had German roots, and all ethnic Germans were stripped of their citizenship and property rights and told they had to leave the country. Those who didn’t heed the warning were either faced with torture, death, or slave labor camps. My grandparents were among the lucky, if you can call them that, because they were given three days to leave their land. They packed up their prized possessions in a covered wagon, said goodbye to their farm, their livestock, their vineyard, their friends, and joined a procession of other ethnic Germans headed toward Austria. They were told the trip would take two weeks. In fact, it took a full month, and they survived off the kindness of strangers and off of a single smoked pig that they prepared before leaving Newcastle.

When they arrived in Austria, they had high hopes that they would be able to return to Yugoslavia. But when they started to hear from the survivors there, they learned that there was no home to return to. Their land had been given away to members of the army. This dispossession of land would haunt my grandfather in particular for decades. I remember him as a despondent man whose mind was very far away. But although the army could take away their land, they could not take away their traditions. Some of my fondest memories with my grandfather are sitting next to a bonfire next to a lake in northern Wisconsin, cooking bacon over an open flame. I’m not talking about your typical Sunday morning bacon. I’m talking 4 to 5 a.m. slabs of bacon that you can only find at a butcher shop. My siblings and I would search the forest floor for the best sticks to whittle into skewers for the bacon. My grandpa taught us how to pepper and salt the bacon and cut slits into the slabs and slowly cook it over the flames.

As the bacon sizzled and the grease started to drip, he taught us to catch those grease drippings and slices of white bread that had copious amounts of paprika sprinkled on them. Roasting bacon over an open fire only happened once or twice a year. But I can still taste the charred pork and the greasy, spongy bread.

As the airplane begins to make its descent into Chicago, my grandmother leans over me to ask my mom a question in a mix of German and Italian. “What?” My mom asked. My grandma then proceeded to explain to my mom that her cousin had gone to the butcher shop in Austria and found the choicest cut of bacon to send home with my grandma as a gift from my father.

Now, what prompted this disclosure were repeated announcements by flight attendants, explaining that because of a foot and mouth disease outbreak, certain products weren’t being allowed into the United States, including meat. Now, mind you, my grandmother already had one item confiscated at the airport in Europe. They took a dagger-sized letter opener out of her purse before I was going through security. This, too, was a gift from my father.

And though she could not wrap her head around, after all, it had only been three short months since the World Trade Center had been attacked, and travel security was clearly different. At some point, I should say, my mother must have conflated foot and mouth disease with mad cow disease because I’m sitting in between them, hearing my grandma argue why she should be able to keep the bacon, asking why are the cows mad? And her cows were never mad because she treated them well. And after all, this pork is from the pig, so why should it matter? It shouldn’t be confiscated. I’m in between them, picking up bits and pieces of this conversation. One, because I only understand so much German, and two, because I was somewhat delirious. I had developed a 103 fever on the ten-hour flight home from Europe. I was terribly sick and desperate to get off this plane.

As we were boarding, it became clearer and clearer that my grandma did not want to give up this bacon. My mom was sensing this, and without any warning, she shoved her hand into my grandma’s purse, located the white butcher paper-wrapped meat, and hid it behind the women’s bathroom. I remember thinking to myself, I guess we’re not going to turn this over to the authorities. My grandma and I were at her heels, but by the time we got to the bathroom, the meat was already in the trash can. My mom pushed it way down deep into this large trash can in the women’s bathroom.

My grandma is still protesting. “Does this I know, Zonda, this is a son.” We turned around and headed toward the baggage claim area. I let my mom and grandma look for our luggage. I was feeling sicker by the minute and told them I was just going to sit next to the wall and rest. I hadn’t even gotten settled next to the wall when I saw my grandmother race past me, clutching her purse. I’m a little bit worried about her, so I start to stand up, and I see her run past me again, clutching her purse. This time I notice that there are three beagles at her heels, and they’re tethered to three men in uniform. I started following my grandmother, and I see that she’s located my mom, and she throws her purse into my mom’s face and keeps walking. And I shouldn’t say she was running so much as speed walking. It was as if all of the laps at the mall had prepared her for this very moment. The three beagles stopped at my mom’s feet, sat down, and just looked up at her. She’s holding the purse, humiliated.

I walk over to my mom to help support her in these conversations. She’s been interrogated by these three men in uniform. I was struck that the men were with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and they had guns. I was also struck that they had beagles as opposed to, say, German Shepherds or Labradors. It turns out the USDA detector dogs are known as the Beagle Brigade, and the Beagle Brigade’s job is to find the bacon.

And. Protect America’s food. Supply. My mom sheepishly led the authorities to the bathroom, helped them locate the meat, and our mom and I sat down for what felt like two hours to fill out paperwork for this slab of bacon. Meanwhile, my grandma was nowhere in sight. We finally made it through customs, where we were reunited with my grandma and my dad, who was driving us home.

A few days later, my mom called me to share a story. She said she had just been on the phone with my grandmother and that she was terribly upset because apparently her cousin had called to ask how my father had enjoyed the bacon. She felt like she had to lie and was lamenting that she had to lie. She was yelling on the phone to my mother.

I never heard from under another sin. I asked my mom how she was doing. Where is Momo now? Is she at home? Oh no, honey, she replied. Your grandmother is at confession.

00;17;22;12 – 00;17;47;07
Devin Carpenter
remotely for the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an academic collaborator with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Kiki lives in Missoula by way of Wisconsin and Washington, D.C., and is a national expert in policy issues that affect our nation’s seed supply. She is passionate about protecting family farms and community food systems from unfair and destructive corporate practices.

Next up is Adria Jwort, who as a trans woman, wrestles with Montana’s anti-LGBTQ climate and complex relationship with her dad. The club Q shooting prompts her to return home, prioritizing family despite ongoing struggles. We call her story from Vegas to Montana. A father’s call. Thanks for listening.

00;18;11;01 – 00;18;41;22
Adria Jwort
And that there was that one time I didn’t want to come back home to Montana. It was, It’s a place it felt like where colonization made me feel like an alien in my own land. but there’s also this saying that I keep coming back to. Including yesterday. Right. we. Actress from Billings. Right. I go to Helena, Missoula, Livingston, Yellowstone Park.

Whoever had taken this trip literally about probably a couple hundred times by now. But when you’re round the bend past Columbus, right before Big Timber, you could see the Crazy Mountains and the view, you know, just so frickin’ magnificent. I remember two weeks ago when I came up here, I just remember the sky was, like, just piercing blue.

I didn’t know how to describe. I’ve never seen the sky that color; it was just described as neon. That made the Crazy Mountains seem 3D. Now let’s get out a camera, pull over, and take a picture. It’s photographic. Can I appreciate the art of it? But for that time, I was just like, you know what? I’m just going to keep this one for my memory.

But going back to the time I didn’t want to come back to Montana. I had been in Las Vegas, writing fellowship, and while there, I just felt like I felt my art had my social tribe, whatever, fellow goth and everything. And I lived in the Arts district, and there was I just felt like safe. And I had just been through hell in Montana the last year.

I’d been through some lawsuit and or like, literally hosting rallies where my name was being projected on screens and everything, and I was getting all kinds of threats. I actually won a libel lawsuit because the guy couldn’t stop threatening me. And like, people were showing up to where they thought I worked and everything. Just calling me a pedophile groomer or whatever.

And they’re going to, you know, fire me, I guess. But anyways, so I won the lawsuit and I’m in Las Vegas, had a settlement, and I just kept driving by apartments, like, wanting to know how I could afford down payments and then maybe get a job here. And it’s all going through my head and everything. I didn’t, you know, but there’s also this pull back to here.

But at the same time, at the end of my fellowship, the club shooting happened. And I remember distinctly, because I had come back from the golf club, and I was just feeling like. So chill, like maybe. Yeah, this is the spot. This is it. I think I want to live here, and I open up my Twitter feed, start scrolling, and right away I see this comment.

It’s like, hey, has anyone seen my friend? They perform at the they perform at Club Q, has anyone seen them? And it was just like weird seeing these three texts. Has anyone seen them? Or they say part of the okay, they perform there? And I was just trying to figure it out. And it all came together that night that there was a mass shooting and, yeah.

And it was just so surreal watching all these stories come together. Just people just like looking for their family, their friends, their best friends, drag performers, lover of the gay club. Shut up. And that Monday there was an anti-drag queen bill introduced. I was like, oh, what good timing. And by that, I was like, yeah, fuck Montana, I ain’t coming back and I know it’s going to get worse.

And I was telling people this and they just thought I was crying wolf, whatever. But it’s like, okay, yeah, you guys can do your own stuff up there. I’m just going to stay here. But that night, my dad called and we’d always had a complex relationship with. By being trans, I mean, the call it complex. Another statement, he was like, comes what?

I cannot trans. I mean, he’s like, kind of in denial of it. I mean, I was just kind of going bathe and whatever. But one day he saw me in the newspaper. I’m also in the newspaper as an activist and was wearing a dress and everything. And then I guess that was basically out of the closet for him, and he just freaked out and everything.

This kid is on the front page of the local state section, as you know. It was a terrible picture. I remember that really. But it freaked out, like bad, like I’m by a stepmother. She texted me saying, I never seen your dad like this. He’s like the strut, his whatever I there is seen him like this often.

His head, you know, and he knows. But anyway, like, hurt really bad because I didn’t expect him to accept that he knows better. Like Evangelia. Cool. Christian, but a deacon of the church. But he’s like a legit good guy. I mean, we were growing up, we used to like take all these kids at this Royal Rangers. It was called those kind of a Boy Scout groups.

He’d take them to the mountains. They’re all underprivileged kids from the poor parts of Billings. And they were just like, you know, he’d take about ten of them in his Volkswagen van. And, you know, that was what he liked doing. He just liked being a good Christian guy, I guess. And, yeah, I just really looked up to him and that there’s like a he also, like, raised us, three of us boys growing up basically as a single father.

Lots of times because, my mom, she would also go on, and say drug benders and what time she left for about eight months. And after a few months, we just cruised around looking for her mother. We pulled out of some downtown Billings bar, and I just seen her pulling her out, and then, these other guys, like.

Hey, get your hands off of my dad. I never seen him get violent before. I really. Cox’s pissed back. And because those are her kids over there, we’re sitting in the back of a truck like the little cab of a Mazda. And then. And then they all just backed off, and then they said, you better go talk to your kids.

My mom came over and it was like, if whenever I want to try like a thousand actresses in a movie, I needed to come up with a scene to make me cry. That would be it. It was my mom saying, I guess this is our final goodbye. Except I didn’t cry. I just like, learned to stop crying right then because my little brother, a year younger than me, he put his head in my lap and just started bawling and I just had to be there and comfort him.

So. And his like little, had cried big tears and it was just so, I don’t know, I just kind of lost emotions for a while. And that’s always the thing that always comes back in heartbreak. But, so my dad, he dealt with a lot of that, and I went to a 40 Under 40 award once, and then they said, who’s your hero?

And I put my dad. That’s an I put it meant it. So for him to just like, just totally just freak out about my being trans was so, just made me very distraught. I think I really said that word, but, anyways, so but that Monday after Club Q shooting, he calls up and I started calling him back after a few months and we kind of restarted a relationship because we always called each other.

It was always like, I mean, we missed each other. So of course he was. He still loved me. He didn’t approve of my lifestyle, as they say, but as I kind of try to explain Gothic, his lifestyle being transitioned. But, you know, he’s old school evangelical. That’s his religious beliefs. And it’s like, come what you like to like, judge and like say, but you know, to him it was just his religious beliefs and I don’t excuse it.

But at the same time, it was just like. You know, he called that. Yeah. Two days after Club Q shooting and after I was decided not to come back. And he was very, very concerned. Like, hey, when are you coming back? I never heard that in his voice before. Okay. Are you okay there? You know. Okay. How are you getting back?

So you’re going to North Dakota after that, but where are you stopping at Salt Lake City? As soon as you get there, call me. Just, you know, he kept saying, call me, let me know where you’re at. And I know it was because of that club shooting, I knew it was because he knew that his kid could die just for being LGBTQ.

And that was in his head. I mean, he didn’t say that, but that I had never heard it in his voice before, and he already had a my little brother who’s a year younger, he’s been murdered and he knew he didn’t want to lose another son. But just our, yeah, son who became our self, so yeah, that was it.

Right? I mean, I was still churning in everything and I said, yeah, I maybe I better come back and get my stuff, you know? But I was still thinking of that. But then I saw this article in the paper, some guy had been shot like seven times. He’d survive, come because he’d been to Colorado.

Had just been there from North Carolina, I believe. All the details. But anyways, he wasn’t even LGBTQ. He just saw this club going on in. It’s hip and happening because as kids we are good at partying and it’s like, hey, cool. But at the end up getting shot seven times left the club made it to two blocks away to 7-Eleven.

They cut his shirt open and everything and everyone in there that 7-Eleven tried to keep him alive and all I could think was, I just want to call my dad. He’s fading in and out, he said. That’s the last thing I wanted to do. It’s like it’s call my dad. That’s my best friend right there. And before I die, I just.

Can you just give it? You know, that’s his only thought and but, you know, and I just felt that so much right there. And it’s like, now what system. Sometimes it’s like we. Yeah. That’s, basically it right there. That’s one of the things I said. I just can’t leave my family, I guess. So that’s why I’m back here.

So thank you very much.

00;28;37;06 – 00;28;45;12
Kera Riverra

Adria L. Jawort is a Northern Cheyenne fiction writer and transgender/2 Spirit journalist based in Billings, Montana. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, and Indian Country Today, among other publications. She is the Executive Director of the nonprofit Indigenous Transilience.

Marc Moss
We’ll be right back after this short break. You are listening to the Tell Us Something podcast.

00;28;51;25 – 00;29;16;04
Teri Wing
For seven years with Sarah, I was in hiding and actually I had my kids in hiding to, Initially, she was very patient with it all, but eventually she decided that she was living, my life in hiding with me and not her life, because she had actually come out when she was in her 20s.

00;29;16;04 – 00;29;31;18
Chloe Williams
So I loved Women on Hawthorn and in Portland for eight years. Yeah, there was drama, there were tears, there was joy, there was heartbreak. And I really sort of saw the first glimpse of my real self during that time.

00;29;31;18 – 00;29;35;08
Marc Moss
That’s after the break. Stay tuned.

Thank you to our story sponsor, the Good Food Store, helping us to pay our storytellers. Learn more at Good Food store.com. Thanks to Golden Yolk Griddle, who also showed up as a story sponsor. Learn more about them at Golden Yolk griddle.com. Thank you to our accessibility sponsor, Parkside Credit Union, allowing us to hire American Sign Language interpreters at this event.

In order to be a more inclusive experience, learn about them at Parkside fcu.com. Thanks to our artist sponsor Bernice’s Bakery, who paid our poster artist. I learned about them and their delicious baked goods at Bernice’s Bakery mty.com. Thanks to our media sponsors, Missoula Events, Dot net, the Art attic, The Trail Less Traveled, and Missoula Broadcasting Company including the family of ESPN radio.

The trail 133, Jack FM and Missoula. Source for modern hits you 104.5. Thanks to our in-kind sponsors. Float. Missoula. Learn more at float msl.com and choice of tile. Learn about Joyce at Joyce of tile.com. Please remember that our next event is September 18th at the George and Jane Denison Theater. The theme is Never Again. You can pitch your story by calling (406) 203-4683.

Tickets are available right now at Tell Us something.org. Please follow us on all the standard social media channels and subscribe to our newsletter. In order to be informed about all of our events. Welcome back. You are listening to the Tell Us Something podcast. I’m your host, Mark Moss.

In our next story. Teri Wing leaves Butte, Montana for convent life before leaving and finding love and family. Her journey home was a wild ride. Teri calls her story going home the long way around. Thanks for listening.

00;31;28;27 – 00;31;39;04
Teri Wing

Oh my God!

Okay, so I’m, 18 years old, and I’m sitting on a train that’s ready to leave Butte. This was before airplane travel was invented. And I’ve got three people that I graduated from high school with, and we’re kind of terrified. Excited, but terrified and worried about the choice we made. We are headed a thousand miles across the country to Kansas, where we are going to join a convent.

Now, before we left, my best friend hands me a box and she says, don’t open this until Rocker, which is like 20 miles away. So we get to Rocker and we open the box and there inside are about ten baby jars with various forms of booze from her dad’s cabinet, a jar of ice, a packet of sins and breath mints, and a pack of cigarettes.

And so, for about 300 miles after Rocker, we weren’t anxious anymore. It was really, really mellow. So I get to the convent, and there were so many things about it that were kind of weird to me. One of the things was the silence. I mean, I never really had tried it out, and so, but at first it was just an hour in the afternoon.

And so, at a certain time in the afternoon, we were to stay silent. I guess we were supposed to be praying, and then a bell would ring and we would drop to our knees and kiss the floor and just stay like that for a while, you know? So I was fine. Pretty much the silence was all day, except for one hour in the evening when we had what was called recreation, and we could talk to each other.

But the nuns had a real problem with something they called particular friendships. And these were kind of spooky. And so if you were observed during that recreation time on more than a couple of occasions talking to the same person, you were pulled aside and talked to about these particular friendships, and they were not approved of.

And they were very dangerous. I think what they’re really talking about is particularly lesbians.

During the second year that I was there, the superior called me into her office one afternoon to talk about my dad, and she told me that my dad was interviewed at a hospital and he’d had surgery for cancer. And just a short months later, my dad, who had been my rock, my safe harbor, my protector in a dysfunctional family, he was gone at the age of 54.

At the end of that summer, I got the news that I was assigned to go to Independence, Missouri, to a Catholic school to teach fourth grade. And I love that. I love little kids. And we were called a religious community. A religious community. But in fact, we were eight individuals living together under one roof, completely isolated from each other.

And it was really lonely. And so I talked to a friend of mine and she said, you know, I think you need to figure this out, so why don’t you go up to Topeka and talk to Doctor Hall, who’s the therapist? He might help you out. So I go up there and I’m with Doctor Hall for an hour, and he, every five minutes, he says, at the end of the hour, I’m impatient.

I say, tell me what you think. What do you think? So he leans across the desk and he says, well, sister, I think you need to give it another year before you decide what to do. So I thanked him and left, and I’m driving back to Independence, and I feel this rage building in my chest. And I think to myself, Doctor Hall, you fucking son of a bitch.

I have just told you that I’ve been unhappy for six years. And you say, give it another year. So when I got back to Independence, I called the mother house and said, I’m out of here. So they gave me back my $100 dowry that I gave them when I entered without interest. I’m out. And so I had enough to buy a nice dress to get a train ticket.

Still no airplanes. Still a train ticket back to Butte. And as the train is pulling out of Kansas City and I see the station disappearing through the windows, I thought, you know, I’ve really kind of come full circle because I’m sitting in the club car with a bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and I’m thinking, well, hello, Independence.

You know, as soon as I get to Butte and to my parents’ house, as soon as I walked in the door, I knew this wasn’t home anymore because my dad wasn’t there. For years after he was gone, his clothes were still in the closet. His hunting and fishing gear was still there, and I think I had a reaction of some really serious delayed grief.

And so I knew it was not home. So after a little while, I left there and I went to Spokane to enroll at Gonzaga to finish my degree. And so I did that. And then after I graduated, I got a job. I thought maybe Spokane was a place to stay. But one of the biggest challenges I had was dating.

Because you remember the last time I dated I was dating high school boys, and now here I am, and I’ve got no one but two young men. Like, one had a beard, and they’re both interested in me. And I’m really thinking that they’ve got more on their mind than a particular friendship. And I’m still a virgin. And so I was not interested in that.

So I did what any mature, responsible 20-something would do. I backed up my Mustang convertible, my old car, put everything I owned in it, put the top down, and got the hell out of town. And I came to Missoula for the first time. I came here and I enrolled in a graduate program in education at the university.

And after that degree, I had some jobs in Missoula. I got married and had a 12-year marriage that ended up not working for either one of us, but I had two wonderful, sweet daughters, which was a real bonus. And then at the age of 40, to my surprise, I fell in love. And I’m talking I fell really, really in love with Sarah.

And Sarah was a beautiful woman, so, so sensuous. She had these beautiful blue eyes that I could just get lost in. And she was smart and funny. And at the time, though, I was the curriculum director for the Missoula School District, it was the 90s, pretty visible job. And I was really worried about how my living arrangement was going to impact my job.

I was also really concerned about my girls, who at that time were in middle school. And in the 90s, there weren’t that many kids who were open about having two moms or two dads. And so for seven years with Sarah, I was in hiding. And actually, I had my kids in hiding too. Initially, she was very patient with it all, but eventually she decided that she was living my life in hiding with me and not her life, because she had actually come out when she was in her 20s.

And so she moved out and left, and I was thoroughly heartbroken, filled with pain of loss, with regret, with guilt. And so I tried to stay numb as I could using alcohol. But, you know, that doesn’t work at all. And so I checked myself into an alcohol treatment program to get my head straight, to get my feet on the ground.

Okay. And it worked. And so a couple of years later, both of my kids graduated and left the nest. And so at that time, I just didn’t feel like I could stay in Missoula anymore. There was the pain was still too raw of losing Sarah. And so I left and had a couple of jobs that I would try to fit in.

I always felt like a visitor. So in 2014, I came back to Missoula and I bought a house and my daughters by that time were married. They have kids of their own. They’ve got three little boys who have you ever noticed how noisy boys are and they throw things? I mean, we have baseball games in my living room and I’m guarding my windows the whole time.

We’ve got fierce hockey games going on in my tiny kitchen, and for me it is just such a joyful noise. I love, I’ve connected with my former husband and his wife through all of these marriages, births, birthdays, celebrations, soccer games, and I find that I’m part of a really wonderful extended family now and then there are my friends and the people from back 20 years ago welcoming me back to Missoula.

They let me know they still love me. For me, being with old friends feels like slipping my feet into a really well-worn pair of cozy slippers. That kind with that fuzzy stuff inside that feels so familiar and so comfortable. And so years ago, I had left Missoula with a broken heart. Since I’ve been back, I have found more love and community than I ever thought I could experience.

And I am so really, really glad that I’m home.

00;43;24;18 – 00;43;42;26
Devin Carpenter
the mother of two and a grandmother of three boys. Terry is a retired educator who loves dogs and other living things. She hasn’t yet climbed tall mountains, run a marathon, or jumped out of a plane, though she says she may put those on her bucket list.

00;43;42;26 – 00;44;02;13
Marc Moss
Our final storyteller. In this episode, Chloe Williams searches for happiness in love, places and self-expression before finally figuring out what love is and where to find it. Chloe calls her story the rusty screeching turn toward home. Thanks for listening.

00;44;02;13 – 00;44;10;13
Chloe Williams

The journey has been very long to find the answer. I looked for the answer in parents. I looked for the answer in love. And I’ve looked for the answer in places. For me, they were in none of those. The first place that I looked for the answer was in my mom, and she provided a roof over my head. In fact, many roofs, as you just heard. But holding on to her was like holding on to the tale of a burning comet that zigzagged through the world. She had mental illness, and it pingponged her off of men and off of spiritual practices, and then ricocheted her back to earth. And that answer hurt me and left me feeling dizzy and confused.

The next place that I looked for the answer was in the idea of love. And the idea of love was shaped in me by Disney movies. Magenta princesses with huge smiles, and that cheesy music that comes in with the happy endings. So by three years old, I would put myself to sleep every single night, laying my head exactly in the middle of my pillow and strategically placing my hair around my face in a ring, and then folding my hands over my stomach and waiting. Waiting for love to save me. So I loved fiercely, as fiercely as I could muster. The first boy that I loved was Jesse, and he was supposed to be the Prince Charming from one of those movies. In reality, he was just a tall, lanky guy that lived in a basement room, and every time I walked down the dark wood stairs to his room, I thought, maybe this is it.

But all I found in that room was that tinny soundtrack to the Street Fighter game, and then the stale smell of bong water. The next person that I loved was Kelly. The first girl that I loved. And she lived in a really unsafe home. It was dangerous for her there. So we camped out in coffee shops in the Haight-Ashbury, and I would lean in to hear the poetry that she would write to me over the bangs and clinks of the espresso shots being pulled, and that diesel drip smell of coffee that we could afford, and we would crawl into each other’s eyes for safety.

And then I got into college. I got into Mills College, and my mom was so excited. She was like, Chloe, it’s so great that you got into an all-women’s school because you won’t be distracted at all by. Little did she know that a month later I fell for a very cute butch girl, and that girl handed me a book that felt like the manual to who I was supposed to be. So I, oh, the book was “The Well of Loneliness.” And so I wore the makeup and had the long hair and wore the heels, and it really seemed to make her happy.

But the other women at Mills said things like “lesbian until graduation” and made me feel like a trespasser in this world that I really wanted to belong to. So when that cute butch girl took me on a road trip to Portland, Oregon for the first time, singing the soundtrack to “Rent” at the top of her lungs the whole way, I thought, maybe it’s a new city. That’s the answer. And so when I walked down Hawthorne Street in Portland, it felt like the green, beautiful trees that lined that street sort of just reached down and held me in an embrace and an embrace. And I loved it there. The energy was exactly what I was looking for. It was the hub of the queer community.

And I got a job right on Hawthorne Street, washing dishes at the Cup and Saucer Cafe. And I loved it. I washed those white plates, and the steam would rise up into my face. And I just got to watch all these beautiful women coming in and out of the cup. Spiky hair, cargo shorts, glinting eyes. And I remember a few shifts into my job there, I went home. I went to the backyard and shaved all my long blond hair off and looking into the mirror for the first time at myself with a shaved head. It felt like my skin just fit a little bit better. So I stayed on Hawthorne for a long time. In fact, one morning I remember working at the club. I was standing at the counter, waiting for customers to come in, and the cook, who I’d been eyeing for a few weeks, Amanda, came up to do some inventory, and she always wore this cute little train engineer hat off to the side.

And as she was standing next to me, I felt like my cells were vibrating and I wanted to connect. I wanted to reach out and say something, but I didn’t have the script. The script was old. It didn’t work anymore. So I looked around and tried for something and I tried reverse psychology and I said, “Not you again.” And that coy smile that she shot me in that moment, I was like, settled a little bit more into my body. So I loved women on Hawthorne and in Portland for eight years. And there was drama, there were tears, there was joy, there was heartbreak. And I really sort of saw the first glimpse of my real self during that time.

But something was missing and I did not know what it was. I got to a point, though, that I thought, well, maybe I’ll try the exact opposite. Maybe I need a dude’s dude. Maybe I need a hard-drinking, hard-fighting dude’s dude. And I found him. I found him in the Sandy Hut dive bar in Portland. And I walked in that night, and there was Crash sitting at the bar. Tattered motorcycle sweater, scarred knuckles. And I thought, he looks like he could keep me safe. But trying to make Crash my answer was kind of like trying to train a wild dog. I had to sort of ignore the frothing and the growling, to really get that horse training in, but I tried for another eight years to domesticate Crash, and with a ring on my finger and a baby in my arms and a house that we bought, I couldn’t ignore the scars that I got from that wildness.

And I followed that wildness all the way to Montana. Well, it turns out that parents are not the answer, at least not for me. And I’ve had to let my mom go for her to just kind of still be homeless and moving around and dealing with her mental illness without me on her coattails. Turns out love is not the answer. Not when it’s the kind of love that you have to sacrifice yourself for. And I had to let the wild dog go. Well, I wanted to let the wild dog go. And to be untamed and happy. And I love my half-wild son more every single day without losing myself. I actually took six years off of the idea of love, because I really had to, like, reframe the whole Disney version and create my own version of love.

And I get to do that today with an amazing woman who I can really be myself in front of. We get to witness each other settling into our skin more each day. It turns out that cities and places—San Francisco, Portland, Missoula—they are just cities with empty houses and empty streets. Unless you know how to make a home. Well, I choose to make my home in Missoula, and I choose to make it in my queer skin, which fits me so well. It turns out that the rusty, screeching, slow turn to myself was actually my home. I had to look away from all the people and the places and the things. And my answer? I am my home, and I’m going home to myself in front of you right now. And I will be going home to myself for the rest of my life. Thank you.

00;53;54;22 – 00;54;07;27
Kera Riverra
Chloe was born in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and raised in San Francisco. She spent some summers on a farm in Illinois. Eventually, she spent 17 years in Portland, Oregon, and ten years ago moved to Missoula.

Chloe has lived approximately 40 different addresses in her life, though she really has lost count. Storytelling was passed down from her mom in the many long car rides of her childhood, and that’s her favorite thing her mother gave her. Only in the last few years has she been called to try storytelling herself. And it feels like something her spirit needs to do.

00;54;29;23 – 00;54;43;00
Marc Moss
Thanks for listening to the Tell Us Something podcast. This episode was recorded live in person as part of the opening events at Missoula Pride on June 11th, 2024 at the Glacier Ice Rink Pavilion.

00;54;43;06 – 00;54;54;09
Michelle Reilly
It was like looking through the most beautiful kaleidoscope I had ever looked through all these vibrant colors and shapes and patterns of fractals and wonder.

00;54;54;09 – 00;55;12;09
Adel Ben Bacha
As she answers the phone, she softly says hello. And then silence. That silence felt like forever. But she breaks that silence with a delicate sob.

00;55;12;09 – 00;55;23;21
Zeke Cork
I didn’t know what it meant, but I couldn’t shake it. I thought maybe it was about my family, so I try to write about it, but there was always something missing. It stayed with me for years.

00;55;23;21 – 00;55;30;05
Ashley Brittner Wells
The coolest thing you could do in town was go to the games. And I desperately wanted to be cool, so I went.

00;55;31;05 – 00;55;58;02
Marc Moss
Tune in for those stories on the next Tell Us Something podcast. Please remember that our next event is September 18th at the George and Jane Dennison Theater. The theme is Never Again. You can pitch your story by calling (406) 203-4683. Tickets are available currently at Tell Us something.org. Please follow us on all the standard social media channels and subscribe to our newsletter.

In order to be informed about events and all things storytelling. Stream past episodes, learn more about upcoming events, and get tickets at Tell Us something.org.

Marc Moss: We are currently looking for storytellers for the next Tell Us Something storytelling event. The theme is “Going Home”. This event is a collaboration with Missoula Pride and we will favor folx in the LBGTQ+ community as we listen to story pitches. If you’d like to pitch your story for consideration, please call 406-203-4683. You have 3 minutes to leave your pitch. Our friends from the Deaf community are welcome to pitch by emailing [email protected].

The pitch deadline is May 4th. I look forward to hearing from you.

Another important date is on the horizon, too. Missoula Gives & Bitterroot Gives, is an initiative of the Missoula Community Foundation, is a 26-hour celebration of the Missoula and Ravalli communities. It connects generous Missoulians and Bitterrooters with the causes they care about. Causes like Tell Us Something. It is a day to celebrate and support the role nonprofits and donors (like you) play in making our Missoula & Ravalli communities great. Mark your calendars for May 2nd and 3rd and tell your friends about this opportunity to support Tell Us Something during Missoula Gives. May 2nd and 3rd.

Welcome to the Tell Us Something podcast. Tell Us Something is a nonprofit that helps people share their true personal stories around a theme live in person and without notes. I’m Marc Moss, your host and Executive Director of Tell Us Something! We acknowledge that we are gathered on the traditional lands of the Salish, Pend Oreille, and Kalispel peoples, who have stewarded this land throughout the generations.

As spring unfolds its vibrant colors and rejuvenates the earth, we recognize the interconnectedness of all life, and the importance of honoring Indigenous knowledge and practices.

In this season of renewal, let us commit to fostering a deeper understanding of Indigenous culture and history. Take time to learn about the traditional ecological knowledge of the original inhabitants of this land, and incorporate sustainable practices into our daily lives.

Together, let us strive to be mindful stewards of the land, fostering harmony and respect for all beings who call this place home.

A tangible way that we can do this is to practice leave no trace principles when we are outside recreating. Pick up our dogs’ waste when we are out hiking — don’t “get it on the way back” from your hike, get it when it happens, and carry it with you. Pick up trash where you see it, observe wildlife from a distance and avoid feeding them. By practicing some of these leave no trace principles, we can be stewards of the land that we claim to love so much.

We take this moment to honor the land and its Native people, and the stories that they share with us.

Sometimes adventure is chosen, sometimes it’s thrust upon you. In this episode of the Tell Us Something podcast, we delve into the journeys of four remarkable people:

A mother and daughter in Belize work together to navigate the challenges of entering the country with an expired passport, a determined diver confronts the depths of the ocean swimming against sudden swells and learns some harrowing news the next day when she returns to the water. An artist wrestles with self-doubt and the meaning of success. And a woman on a wilderness adventure faces a grizzly bear encounter, wolves and swarming bees on her ordeal to get out and help with a family emergency.

Traci Sylte: He opens the door and said, you’ll need to go to the U. S. Embassy right away. And talk to the consulate.

Ren Parker: I fight like hell to get up. Everything starts going really fast. I’m breathing air out as fast as I can, and I’m moving and swimming as hard as I can to get to the surface.  When divers dive, they need to decompress as they go to the surface.

Mark Matthews: And I  admitted for the first time that I’d given up the thing I loved. I’m Because I thought I was a failure, because I couldn’t make a living from it.

Kat Werner: I enter Pain Cave. Which is really just  alright, like, suck it up. Full on autopilot,  and I just, you know, one paddle stroke and one step at a time  trying to make it out of there. 

Marc Moss: Four storytellers share their true personal story on the theme “Close to the Edge”. Our stories today were recorded live in person in front of a packed house on March 26, 2024 at The George and Jane Dennison Theatre.

Remember this: Tell Us Something stories sometimes have adult themes. Storytellers sometimes use adult language.

Our first storyteller is Traci Sylte. An expired passport throws mother-daughter vacation into chaos! Listen to their dramatic encounter with immigration and how they turned a mishap into an unforgettable experience. We call her story “The Trip of a Lifetime”. Thanks for listening.

Traci Sylte: Descending from 30, 000 feet comes the following across the loudspeaker. Good afternoon. This is your main flight attendant speaking. Soon we will be coming through the aisles to pick up any unwanted items.

Please also have your, your custom form and your declarations formed, picked, filled out because we will be picking those up as well. Thank you for flying with us. We will be landing in Belize City in approximately 30 minutes. Beside me sat my daughter Becca, and it was just the two of us. She was 14 at [00:01:00] the time, and that was five years ago.

Old enough to begin filling out the customs form herself. And so I gave her her own form and she started filling it out. I began filling out the declaration form, making sure we had no, no unwanted fruits, no unwanted plant parts. Certainly nothing over 10, 000 in cash that we were bringing in. And then I started looking down at Becca and she was hesitating.

And, um, she’s sitting right here to the side of me and I’m, she’s, like, not filling out her form. And I look down and I said, Sweets, what’s wrong? And she says, Mom, my passport has expired. Yeah, right? And I say, that’s not true. Uh, let me see it. I look down, and sure enough, it had expired four months prior.

Four months prior, thirty minutes before we were to land in Belize City. Yeah. [00:02:00] And so I thought for a moment about like this, and I looked down at her, and I said, Okay, Becca, I need you to follow my lead. Can you do that, sweets? Just follow my lead. And she goes, Yeah, Mama, I can, I can do that. So we land, the customs line is long, and I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, because it was long enough for me to think about all the different things I could do to get us through this.

And it came down to one thing. I needed to be an actress, and I needed to be Meryl Streep. And I, oh, no, Jodie Foster. Jodie Foster is really hot right now, don’t you think? Yeah, Jodie Foster. So I had to be my best Jodie Foster. And so we are, we are coming up, and here’s the, up to the time where the, you see the official.

And I give the passports to her, and she looks at mine, asks me the questions, and then she hands it back, stamps it, and hands it back to me, and then she looks at Becca’s. And she looks at me and she says, Ma’am, her passport [00:03:00] is expired, did you know this? And I said, that can’t be. And, and I said, that’s just not possible.

And she says, it’s expired. And I said, that can’t be. Can I see it? So she hands it back to me, and I immediately start sobbing. And if, if, and I’m not an actress, but let me, and you guys probably like me watch movies, how do they do that? Let me say it’s possible you can, you can cry, you can cry. So I’m crying and I’m saying this is not true.

It can’t be, but it is. I don’t know how this has happened. Her dad just gave me the passport last night. We’re divorced. They went to, I didn’t think he’d laugh at that, that part, but yes. Okay. Yes. But yeah, we’re divorced. There’s, there’s clunky things, right? He, he handed me the passport last night. I’m telling the woman this.

And. They just went to Costa Rica last year. Passports don’t, they need to be renewed every ten years, right? And she’s not old enough. And she goes, ma’am, ma’am, [00:04:00] ma’am, calm down, calm down. Passport, and I’m crying, um, Passports need to be renewed for children under 18 years old every 5 years. And I said I didn’t know that.

And then she looks at me really sternly. And then she looks at Becca. And the interrogation begins. Who is this? This is my mama. What are you doing in Belize? We are in spring break. Where’s your dad? Why is your passport expired? Bang, bang, bang, bang. She asked Becca all these questions and Becca did not look up at me.

She just very calmly addressed this woman and after her interrogation the woman signals for another assistant to come and he comes and asks us the same exact freaking questions. Same thing, same response and I’m, I’m still trying to cry although the tears are starting to go away and Same thing, and Terry gets back, uh, and then he makes a phone call, [00:05:00] and he says, come with me.

And so we follow him down this long corridor, and then it turns, and I’m thinking all this time about spy movies and corrupt governments, and And cartels, drug cartels, and, and how vulnerable we are to these people at this time. And then we get to this door, and the door says, Director of Immigrations. And the door opens, he knocks, and the door opens, and this gentleman, let’s call him Raul, um, Raul, um, opens the door, and then he gestures for us to come in.

and sit down at these two chairs that were by his desk, and then he sits behind his desk and he looks at me, and I’m looking at him and I can see on the wall behind him, literally, no joke, there’s a picture of Jesus, and then on top of his file cabinets there are praying hands and I thought, I hope this works in my credit, or to my benefit, but drug cartels and corrupt governments, they’re religious too, so how is this going to work out?

So, he starts interrogating me the same questions, and I answer all of [00:06:00] those, and I’m not crying at this point. And at the end of these questions, I add. I said, I know it seems really stupid. Her dad and I were reasonably smart people, we just made a mistake. And I can tell you this also. Look at all of the consent forms, look at, we’ve got everything in line, and I can tell you that on the customs form it says, it asks you for the date of issue.

Thank you. Not the date of expiration. I never looked at the date of expiration. Neither did her dad. So then he turns from me to Becca. And he starts interrogating her, literally, with all the same questions. Who is this? And, and, and, then it comes, they think that I’m trying to smuggle my daughter in. It’s like, I just want to go out on the island and be with the sun and the sand.

And, and, I look at her and I think. She’s, she’s not looking at me, and she’s answering his questions with such poise and such grace, and it’s like, wow. She’s doing better than I am. And when she’s done with her interrogation, he looks back at [00:07:00] me, and his eyes had changed. At that point, I thought, Or maybe I knew that I was looking into the eyes of a father or perhaps a grandfather.

He literally, he turned and he went to a stack of papers on his desk. Oh, I forgot to tell you, at this point he was on the corner of his desk and he was looking over his eyeglasses like this at me. But he turned and he grabbed this, this, this piece of paper. And he literally ripped, I’m not joking, he ripped off a quarter of that piece of paper and he said, and then he put some of Becca’s passport information on it, he signed it and then he stamped it.

He said, this is your 14 day visitor pass to Belize, don’t lose it.

Yeah, he opens the door and said, you’ll need to go to the U. S. Embassy right away. And talk to the consulate, and don’t lose that piece of paper. So, I [00:08:00] also have to say that in my defense, I had this trip choreographed to the hour. I had two days on the mainland before we went out on the five day island excursion, two days afterwards, and I had to cancel all of that.

All of the mainland excursions that we were going to go on. And in that time, we got the passport application renewal, we got passport pictures, which is not easy to find all this stuff in Belize City in a third world country. It took a little bit of time and it was great for Becca and I, we really got to experience Belize City trying to find these things.

We called, we called her father, um, and got the, um, the, her birth certificate. FedExed overnight, we got, we got out on the island, we had a lovely time out on the island, did a lot of things, Becca snorkeled, and then she learned to dive out there. And while we were in the dive shop, the host of the dive shop said to us, I’ve never heard of such a story.

I can’t believe you’re here. And he said, you are likely going to have trouble getting back into the country.

[00:09:00] And he said, and just know that you can demand with the U. S. Embassy a 24 hour emergency passport. Just remember that. So, fast forward, I don’t have time to tell you all the things about the U. S. Embassy, that would take another ten minutes or more, um, but it was about as daunting. There were long lines, there were glass doors that I swear were three to four inches thick, um, There was, at one point, we heard a gentleman yell and say, if somebody doesn’t do something, somebody’s gonna get shot.

And we are getting the full, full experience here, this 14 year old here listening to all of this. And I also have to tell you that I put my mama bear on, and I, I had to, and I asked for a supervisor and another supervisor, and I demanded that emergency passport, and we needed it. It was, it was daunting.

But I’m here to say that the, but, and we got a private, we had a private host that helped us getting back and forth between [00:10:00] the, the, um, the consulate or the American embassy in Belmopan, which is an hour and a half away from Belize City, and we had to go back and forth several times, but we got to go in caves and visit his family and experience things that we normally would never have experienced.

And we made it. To our boarding gate 30 minutes before departure. Now we got on the plane and then we fly back in and we’re getting back into Missoula. And a lot of you guys can probably attest to this. The smell and the clear, the clear, cool air of Missoula was just really welcoming. And on our drive home, we were talking and reminiscing about the trip.

And, and Becca said to me, she goes, mom, that was the best trip that we’d ever been on. And, and she said. I think it was probably the trip of a lifetime. And I said, well, it was for me. You’re only 14, but yes. [00:11:00] It was a trip of a lifetime. It was epic. And she said, Mom, I gotta tell you something. Can I tell you something and have you not get mad at me?

She’s like, oh, here we go. She has a way of diffusing me before she even says something. And she said, Mom, I knew that the passport was expired before we left.

Thank you.

Marc Moss: Thanks, Traci.

Traci Sylte is a civil engineer and hydrologist who has worked for the U.S. Forest Service for nearly 34 years, and is currently the watershed program manager for the Lolo National Forest. She has a passion to maintain healthy watersheds, valley bottoms, rivers, streams, and wetlands. Traci is the product of two very loving parents.Her father taught her to operate a chainsaw and her mother facilitated dresses and piano lessons for her. The love of her life is her daughter, Becca, who is currently in her first year at the University of Washington. Traci continues to grow deeper in love with Missoula each year, because if one wants to learn to weave a basket with pink polka dots on a Tuesday, there’s someone probably doing it here. When Traci is not working, she is grounded by spending time with beloved family and friends, all things water, fly fishing, hiking, playing hockey with amazing Missoula women, fireside guitar serenades, sunrises, sunsets, all things music, and leaving things better than she found them.

In our next story, Ren Parker embarks on what was supposed to be a relaxing dive off Catalina Island that takes a terrifying turn. After fighting for survival in a desperate ascent, Ren knows that she must get back into the water the next day, and is met with devastating news upon surfacing. Ren calls her story “Deep Blue”. Thanks for listening.

Ren Parker: I am anchored on a small boat on the backside of Catalina Islands.  I’m getting ready to do a salvage dive with the two Johns.  And we’re standing there and looking around. It’s a beautiful sunshiny day.  Um, and we peer down the thing about the back side of Catalina Island is it’s open ocean. And for those of you who haven’t experienced open ocean, there’s nothing to stop the energy from the ocean.

When you are on the shore and you see a wave,  That is stopping all this force, but in the open ocean, it’s just there.  But everything seemed good for the dive that day, and we were about to drop down and get a lobster trap for a friend who had lost it during the lobster season.  As I slip into the ocean and slowly start ascending, descending into the depths, I look around and orient myself. 

On the backside of the island, there’s a shelf that’s about 120 feet.  There are these pinnacles that are about 60 feet that rise up like needles.  It’s very beautiful. If you look out the shelf, it drops down. And often when we speak of the depth, we use the word miles instead of feet. That’s how deep it is there.

You can see shadows moving and you never know what they are.  And as I go down, it gets a little darker and I touch the bottom of the ocean floor. It’s Sandy there.  We have only a few minutes to tie off the flotation device to get our lobster trap up. And, uh, that’s because the deeper you dive, the less time you have on the floor.

So we get that going and we, we, uh, light it up and it starts going up and up and then suddenly the surge hits.  I’m thrown 30 feet back and forth. I’m dodging pinnacles. I’m trying not to get smashed with rocks. I’m completely absorbed in the moment of trying to right myself and find some sense of balance.

For those of you that are unfamiliar with surge.  It’s like an underwater  river, but it goes back and forth and it’s very hard to swim against it. And this one was extremely strong.  By the time I had my wits about me and I’m trying to move around, I realized I’ve been breathing much heavier than I normally would.

And I’m starting to run out of air.  So I look around, I see the Johns. We all make the sign. We need to get out of here. And we start ascending up.  But it’s been really hard to swim and I’m exhausted and I look and I still have quite a ways to go and I’m almost out of air.  I look five minutes, five. Five, four, three, two,  and it’s gone. 

I fight like hell to get up. Everything starts going really fast. I’m breathing air out as fast as I can, and I’m moving and swimming as hard as I can to get to the surface.  When divers dive, they need to decompress as they go to the surface.  Air expands and gases expand in your system as you start going up. 

And if you don’t have enough time to off gas it out of your system, the ones that are stored in your tissue and your lungs, then it can create bubbles in your bloodstream and in your arteries and affect your organs.  I knew all this because I had worked at the hyperbaric chamber. If you’re unfamiliar with that term, it is a capsule that you go in when you get, um, decompression sickness from going up too fast or not fully getting the gases out of your system. 

And they put you back in pressure at depth so they can slowly bring you back up and you can off gas it the way you’re supposed to.  Um, I, this is in my mind, I break the surface  and there is foam and waves and I’m getting thrashed everywhere and I just keep dipping down and there’s no air in the, my vest and my BC.

So I just keep going under and I’m fighting to breathe and to get to the boat and somehow I do.  And I’m thinking about all these things and realize that I may be in some serious trouble.  But I wasn’t. I had done the emergency ascend apparently good enough that everything was okay. And, uh, I didn’t have to go into any sort of treatment.

And the next day, being a good cowgirl, I knew you gotta get back on that horse. And that’s how I was always raised. If something scares you, you go back and you try it again.  So I had decided I was going to go to the front side of the island where it was much calmer, where I had a lot more experience and just drop, drop down about 20 feet, just feel it and then drop back up and get the nervousness out of my system. 

So I walked from the back Harbor cat Harbor over to the front Carver. There’s a little isthmus there.  And as I’m walking there, I run into my friend, Linda.  There’s only about 40 of us that live on this part of the island year round. We’re all really tight. Linda was one of them. And was a good friend of mine.

She was witty and had this fierce sense of humor. She always had these beautiful long nails. Like, we were in the middle of nowhere and that girl looked fierce. Like, no matter what. And she would roll, she rolled the best joints with those long nails. She’d be like, oh, I got it. Just like, fabulous, you know.

I could never.  So I see her, and she’s looking fabulous, and she’s going, and she’s going to, um, get on her paddleboard, and we give, I give her a hug, I tell her what she’s doing, she’s all crazy girl, and I go.  So I get in my dinghy, and I motor out into this little lagoon,  drop the anchor, I have one of the johns in the boat to keep an eye out for me,  and I, I slowly go down into the water.

This area is about 25 feet, and it’s full of kelp, and it’s beautiful. And as you drop down, it’s the, the lighting becomes like a cathedral, or a redwood forest. It’s all dappled, it’s stunning.  And I get to the bottom, And the minute my feet touch the ground,  something is wrong.  I can feel it so deeply. It’s, it’s very upsetting.

So I immediately come back up and shake it off, you know, like I’m probably just still got the nerves.  And I come back and get back in the dinghy and we head to shore.  As I get to shore, I see the dock and.  I see my friend Lori running down it. She’s screaming and crying and she’s so upset. She keeps tripping and I had never seen anyone look like that before. 

So I quickly tied my boat up, walked up to her as fast as I could, and kind of caught her. And she was saying these things to me, but I, I didn’t understand what she was saying.  I kept repeating, what are you, what are you talking about? Finally, she said someone had died,  and I couldn’t understand the name, and finally she grabbed me, and she said, Rin, Linda has died. 

I had just seen her. 

Due to the  respect  I have for the,  for her life, I’m not going to go into details  of her passing, but one thing I will say, I worked in her ritual and I had to be a part of all of it.  So about 30 minutes later, everyone, all 40 of us were gathered  On the shoreline, in silence, nobody knew what to say, looking out at the ocean where we had lost our Linda. 

A woman started walking from the back. She was a local artist. She was slowly taking off her clothes to her bathing suit, and she had a handful of flowers. She started swimming out into the ocean and scattering them, and silently, we all started doing the same.  We got out there together.  And we all just swam in a circle  and spread flowers  and some people came from their boats and started pouring liquor into the water.

I’ve never heard silence like that before.  The next few weeks were a blur.  There was a lot of preparations and plans and trying to figure out this and contacting family and transportation.  I’ve always been the mother hen of everyone around me, and so I was just looking after, looking after, cooking for everyone, checking on everyone, but I had forgotten to check in with myself. 

And I got a call from my friend Chelsea. She had heard what happened,  and she said, Do you need to get out of that town? And I said, Yes. She said, Get on that ferry, and I did.  And she met me in Long Beach.  Got in her car and started driving up highway one up towards Big Sur. And slowly  I started my emotional decompression, which took a long time. 

And looking back, as I tell this story,  I realized that this was this moment, this critical moment in my life that took my trajectory and threw it into this chaotic space that I didn’t know was coming.  But when I look back, I see that that was the thing that brought me here. That was the thing that brought me  to many places within myself and in the planet. 

And I think that moments like that are only truly valued in retrospect.  And when I think back now to that time, what I remember  is how close we all were, how beautiful Linda was and how much we all love the sea. Thank you.

Marc Moss: Thanks, Ren.

Ren Parker is passionate about fostering a sense of community, and brings that enthusiasm to all of her endeavors. Ren grew up in Hawaii and lived on sailboats that she restored on the Pacific Ocean for seven years. She gave up her nomadic ways and moved back to Missoula to be close to family, and has been growing roots here ever since. Ren loves to dance and hike with her faithful dog, Poet, and spend time with her remarkable Missoula friends. She is a regular storyteller at the weekly storytelling event Word Dog, and hosts a weekly storytelling radio show on KFGM Community Radio where she is station manager. Her show is called Once Upon a Radio Wave.

Coming up after the break:

Mark Matthews: And I  admitted for the first time that I’d given up the thing I loved. I’m Because I thought I was a failure, because I couldn’t make a living from it.

Kat Werner: I enter Pain Cave. Which is really just  alright, like, suck it up. Full on autopilot,  and I just, you know, one paddle stroke and one step at a time  trying to make it out of there.

Marc Moss: An artist’s life takes a dramatic turn on a snowy night and a woman stranded in Alaska, grizzly bears on one side, a father in crisis on the other.

Stay with us.

Thank you to the Good Food Store who, as the Story Sponsor, helped us pay our storytellers. Learn more about them at goodfoodstore.com. Thanks to Spark Arts who provided childcare for the performance. You can learn more about Spark at sparkartslearning.org. Thanks to our Stewardship sponsor, Blackfoot Communications, who helped us to give away free tickets to underserved populations. Learn more about Blackfoot, celebrating 70 years, at goblackfoot.com.

We are currently looking for storytellers for the next Tell Us Something storytelling event. The theme is “Going Home”. This event is a collaboration with Missoula Pride and we will favor folx in the LBGTQ+ community as we listen to story pitches. If you’d like to pitch your story for consideration, please call 406-203-4683. You have 3 minutes to leave your pitch. Our friends from the Deaf community are welcome to pitch by emailing [email protected]. Learn more and get your tickets for the June 11th event at tellussomething.org.

The pitch deadline is May 4th. I look forward to hearing from you.

Another important date is on the horizon, too. Missoula Gives & Bitterroot Gives, a 26-hour celebration of the Missoula and Ravalli communities. Mark your calendars for May 2nd and 3rd and tell your friends about this opportunity to support Tell Us Something during Missoula Gives. May 2nd and 3rd.

You are listening to the Tell Us Something podcast where people share their true stories around a theme live in person without notes. I’m Marc Moss. Storytellers in this episode shared their stories in front of a full house on March 26, 2024 at The George and Jane Dennison Theatre in Missoula Montana.

Our next storyteller is Mark Matthews. Mark’s life takes a dramatic turn on a snowy night. He’s a struggling sculptor with seemingly nowhere to go. Listen to Mark’s story of passion, resilience, and rediscovery of the thing that he loves. Mark calls history “Thanks for This Wonderful Gift”.

Mark Matthews:

Um, on January 1st,  1992, I abandoned a career in art.  About a decade earlier, when I was 30 years old,  I started sculpting full time after quitting a job in Boston and moving to a small coastal village in Maine where everything was wicked good. 

I started my career carving wood, and I loved it. The entire process I would walk through the forest looking for broken limbs from trees or I would salvage a log that was destined for the firewood pile.  I carved many images of dancers. Ballet dancers, uh, dressed in, uh, tights and leotards. Modern and flamenco dances with, um, flowing skirts.

Couples doing a contradance swing or, um, the Cajun two step.  I also did musicians playing fiddles, violins, accordions, and guitars.  Sometimes I would liberate a figure from a single piece of wood, and over time I started constructing  sculptures. For instance, I would carve one leg, the torso, and the head out of one piece of wood, attach the arms in different attitudes, and the other leg could be jutting out in any angle. 

I had a lot of luck showing my work in galleries, and in fact, the gallery owner said,  your work entices people to come in.  And sometimes I witnessed that  after delivering a new piece, I would hang around talking to the director,  and people would come in the gallery and go from sculpture to sculpture saying, look at this, look at this.

And then they’d come up to the owner and they’d say,  We want to buy that painting, it fits the decor of a living room.  And I realized early on that not many people know how to live with sculpture.  But I made enough money, uh, to keep out of the starving artist, uh, category.  And many a day at the end of,  many times at the end of the work day,  I would just say thank you for this wonderful gift. 

In 1989,  I moved from Maine to Montana.  And, at that time, Missoula was a soft landing place for artists, writers, dancers, musicians. There weren’t many jobs, but the rent was cheap. For instance, you could rent a room, uh, a studio apartment at the Wilma Building for 150 a month. 

And, when I started exploring the Rocky Mountain West and the Pacific Northwest, I got my work into galleries in Seattle, uh, Kalispell, Big Fork, Truchas, New Mexico, and Palm Desert, California.  And also, um, a lot of my work was, uh, rather large, from five feet, uh, and I had one ballerina that was on point with her hands overhead that was eight feet tall, but they were very thin. 

But I had to transport them in a, uh, cargo  trailer.  And I wanted to make things that I could just put in the back of my Ford Ranger pickup.  and deliver it to a gallery. So I enrolled in a one credit independent study in ceramics at the university.  In fact, many people enrolled in one credit independent studies in a lot of subjects at that time so that they could get the health insurance. 

Um,  Where was I?  Oh, so I took my portfolio to Beth Lowe and Tom Rapone, and they looked at it and said, Oh yeah, you can work here as much as you want, uh, use as much clay as you want, as long as you mix it yourself. And it was a beautiful community of people, welcoming, supportive people. Uh, Bill and Cheryl West were there from Idaho, working on their graduate, um, degrees.

Uh, Joe Batt, was also working on his graduate degrees. He was the, um, lead singer in stand up Stella and, um,  Glenn and Amy parks was frequent, uh, visitors to the studio as was Jeanette Rakowski. We used to work at the downtown bakery before it burned down. 

There was one thing wrong though. The galleries weren’t selling my work  by the fall of 1991.  I found myself sleeping. And the camper on the back of my Ford Ranger pickup truck is one of those campers with the fold up doors.  And I would park just off campus. It was illegal to park without a sticker. And get up early, shower in the men’s, the old men’s gym, and cook my meals on a camp stove in the ventilated kiln room. 

But still, life was wonderful. I was making art.  And the weather was beautiful. No snow. Uh, no freezing temperatures all winter long.  Into the fall. In the early winter.  And, at the end of the day,  especially when I finish the piece, I would say thank you for this wonderful gift.  Oh, I forgot one little story.

Uh, Tom Rippon invited me to  sit on his sculpture class.  And, you know, I wanted to make these small things. And the first thing Tom said in class was, Everybody’s going to make something over six feet tall this semester.  I ended up making a statue of Hank Williams playing his guitar, seven foot tall, and a Lady Grizz basketball player holding a ball on her hip, and a couple of other pieces. 

So, um,  during winter break, my parents sent me a plane ticket to go visit them, and I got back to Missoula the afternoon of January 1st, 1992. Phew.  You deplaned on the tarmac at that,  at that time. And I walked out into warm sunshine, still no snow in the valley, and  thought, what should I do? For the rest of the afternoon.

Um, I didn’t feel like going to work at the studio. Uh, I usually camped up in, um, Deer Creek on the weekends and I didn’t feel like going up there. I thought I’ll go see a matinee movie.  So I went to the old triplex cinema at the end of Brooks, just before you head out to Lolo. And I chose to see dances with the wolves  about 20 minutes into the film. 

The screen went blank, the house lights came on, and an usher came down the aisle, and he said,  You may want to head home. There’s a wicked winter storm blowing up the Blackfoot. We’re going to get about two feet of snow and freezing temperatures.  I walked out into the lobby, and the wind was blowing so hard it was holding the exit doors open, and I could see the snow blowing parallel to the parking lot. 

Reached the Ford Ranger, got some winter clothes out of the back, and got in and instinctively drove to the ceramics studio, which shares the Quonset Hut with the Grizzly Pool,  intending to sleep there overnight.  I parked right in front of the door, even though I had no parking sticker.  Grabbed my sleeping bag out of the back. 

Reached for the door handle and for the first time in two years it was locked.  Got back into the Ford Ranger. Slowly drove off campus. Came to the intersection of Madison Street and there was a pickup truck.  Just sitting there in the middle of the intersection.  And I left the ranger idling and I went out and, to see what was going on.

And a woman rolled down her window and said, I can’t see anything. And the ice was encrusted on her front, front um, windshield. About a half an inch. So I took her scraper, uh, cleaned her window off. And as I’m doing that, I’m thinking, Hmm. How can I get this woman to take me home for the night? 

I couldn’t think of anything, so I handed the scraper back to her and she thanked me profusely  and drove off.  And I got back into the Ford Ranger and just sat there.  And when you’re homeless, you kind of lose contact with your friends.  And I’d heard of the Parvarello Center, but I didn’t know where it was.

And, and I didn’t feel right. My motto had always been, artists make art, they don’t wait on tables. So I had gotten myself into this situation.  And then I heard a voice. And it wasn’t inside my head. It was coming through my ears.  And it was the voice of Jeanette Rakowski. And she had said, If you ever get in trouble, you can stay at my place. 

So I made it over to her humble abode on the west side  and grabbed my sleeping bag and knocked on the front door and Jeannette came to the door, wrapped up in her bathrobe, opened the door and said, what the hell are you doing out there? Get in here.  She made me dinner. We chatted a while.  She went off to her bedroom to read and sleep.

And I spread my sleeping bag out on the sofa.  And for a while, I just stared at the ceiling.  And came to the conclusion that I can’t do this anymore. And I gave up. Heart. 

Twenty years later,  I’m working as an adjunct professor at, uh, Montana College of Technology when it was out by the, uh, county fairgrounds,  uh, teaching English comp and creative writing.  And I used to go over to the old Salvation Army store, which was also across the street from the fairgrounds.  And I’m going through the VHS  tapes, and I see Dances with the Wolves. 

I said, I’ve never saw the end of that film.  So I take it home and watch it.  Stopped it about half an hour in. And went downstairs to get a snack. And halfway down the stairs, I started weeping.  I’m like, what the hell is going on? The movie isn’t even sad.  And at that moment, all those memories of January 1st, 1992 came descending upon me. 

And I  admitted for the first time that I’d given up the thing I loved. I’m Because I thought I was a failure, because I couldn’t make a living from it.  And as abruptly as I gave up art, I decided I would take it up again.

Marc Moss: Thanks, Mark. Throughout his adult life Mark Matthews has worked as an artist, author, freelance journalist, wildland firefighter, and dance caller and instructor. He currently shows his sculpture and oil paintings at the Roosevelt Arts Center in Red Lodge, and at Manifestations Gallery in Eureka. Over the past dozen years he has visited scores of schools across the state of Montana, for Humanities Montana, teaching children of all ages how to contra and square dance. For more information about Mark’s art, and to hear an epilogue of Mark’s story, visit tellussomething.org.

In our final story, Kat Werner is stranded in Alaska, grizzly bears on one side, a father in crisis on the other.  In the face of fear, and with the help of her hiking crew, a community rallied and shared burdens. Kat calls her story “The Arctic Pain Cave” Sensitive listeners be aware that Kat’s story discusses someone who has suicidal ideations. Please take care of yourselves.  Thanks for listening.

Kat Werner: Kat Werner

I am on the Koyukuk River in the Arctic Circle in Alaska.  I’m with my husband, Curtis, and my friends, Samson and Cody.  For the last four days, we hiked hauling 80 pound packs to get to our river put in.  And it’s our first day on the river,  and we’re about two miles down. And when I look ahead,  everything happens really fast. 

I see a giant grizzly bear covered in blood,  and it’s charging at Samson, who’s the first in line.  And before I know it, something catches my eye on the left, and I look over, and there’s a wolf.  And as I start screaming,  the grizzly bear must get confused because it backs, backs off, and it hauls a massive caribou caucus. 

up the shore,  which gives us a much needed break to get the hell out of there,  take a deep breather,  because that was a close call.  And it was one of seven grizzly bear encounters in a 24 hour period. 

It’s our third morning on the river, and it’s one of those beautiful, sunny camp mornings.  And it’s, you know, it’s, I vividly remember it because the sun is shining, everybody always says, oh, Alaska, there’s all these bugs and it’s raining, but it was just beautiful, and I’m in a tank top, I’m hanging out with my friends, we’re really not in a rush, because we’re in the Arctic, and we have 24 hour daylight.

So we’re just hanging out, we’re sharing stories, we’re drinking tea,  and eventually, we’re like, alright, we should probably get going, it’s like noon.  And so, as we start packing up our stuff, I’m thinking, oh, I should turn on my Garmin inReach. And check if I got any messages.  And so if you don’t know what a Garmin inReach is, it’s a communication device.

It’s a satellite communication device that allows you to send and receive messages and it has an SRS function, but you’re not able to make or take calls.  And so I turn on the inReach and it takes a couple minutes to connect to the satellite  and within quick succession, I get two messages.  The first one is from my mom. 

And it says, bitte ruf mich an,  please call me.  The second one is from my mother in law Michelle.  Cat has to call home. It’s an emergency.  And my stomach just drops.  And I wish I could tell you  that the story I’m sharing tonight is just a good old adventure story.  You know, it’s really challenging physically and mentally, but overall, it’s a really good time. 

And that’s not the story that I’m telling. 

And so, to give a little bit of context to those text messages,  I have to look back at that year, and my dad, back in Germany,  who was having a really challenging year.  Despite any prior mental health issues.  He, pretty suddenly, and within a really short period, developed a really deep and severe depression. 

And so the morning of the day before we were set to leave for Alaska,  I remember calling both of my parents  and they didn’t answer.  And I got this standard, you know, Apple text message that just says, we’ll call you right back. And I’m, I’m already like, that’s weird. Like something’s going on. What’s going on?

I don’t know.  And so,  when my mom FaceTimes me, a couple hours later,  my dad is sitting right next to her and, you know, he doesn’t look, he doesn’t look at me at all, and he’s just in a pile.  And my mom says, you know, we just spend  some time with a crisis therapist who assessed your dad for suicidal thoughts. 

And, right away in my mind I’m thinking,  I can’t go on this trip, like,  what am I going to do?  And my mom says, you know, it’s, it’s okay. We have the support that we need, and we have the services, and you should go on this trip. 

And I do. And Kurt tells Cody and Samson what’s going on, and they’re great.  And the next morning, like 5am, red eye flight out of Missoula, before we leave, last minute I grab my passports, my German and my American passport, just in case.  And so, we head out, we get to Fairbanks,  and I’m just in a really weird headspace going into this trip. 

I’m really, yeah, I’m really just struggling to stay present and, you know, engage with my friends and soak up the beauty that is the gates of the Arctic National Park, one of the most remote places in the world.  And I’m really just worried the whole time.  And then I get those text messages.  Your dad tried to end his life today  and he’s at the hospital. 

And I respond to my mom and I say, I can’t call you.  At a minimum, I’m five days out from calling you.  And that’s five days of  hard, hard, hard back breaking work, trying to make it back to Coldfoot, the last truck stop, about six hours away from Fairbanks.  And so I’m like, well, alright, what do I do? I can’t curl up here on this sandy shore.

I can’t call a heli evac. I have to keep moving.  And, at that point, I enter  what my husband refers to as the pain cave. Which is really just this, like, alright, like, suck it up. So like, just go inside, and And just full on autopilot,  and I just, you know, one paddle stroke and one step at a time  trying to make it out of there. 

And I don’t talk, and I don’t engage, I just function.  And we all come together that morning on the river, and we basically brainstorm. How can we get out of here as fast as possible?  And we put in a massive day on the Koyukuk that day.  We finish the next morning,  and we make it to our exit, the Rock Creek exit. 

And,  I wonder if anybody has ever planned a trip following a blog post?  Especially if that blog post said,  This is not recommended.  It’s actually strongly discouraged.  That was the Rock Creek exit.  And it started out with a hike, well, a hike up a flowing creek.  My left little toe was literally numb for six months after that trip because the water was so cold. 

And you know, eventually the canyon gets really narrow and we get forced up the bank, um, this left, shitty side hill slope, the thickest alder bushes you can imagine, um, we labeled it the schwagadoom because it was, it was such thick alder and it’s hot and it’s humid and, um, We are hauling these heavy packs, and really, any time you needed a break, all you had to do was just go, uh  huh. 

Because it was so thick, you couldn’t go anywhere.  There is miles of muskag, so we’re just sinking into the slimy, muddy water. There’s bugs, there’s bees nests on the ground.  At our best, we’re moving a quarter of a mile an hour.  It was a full on sufferfest. I’m in my pain cave.  We make it. We get to Coltsfoot. 

I call my mom.  And I knew the whole time, really, that I’m, I need to go. I need to get home.  And so, you know, this whole time I’m just consumed with worry. Am I going to lose my dad?  And so after, you know, a pretty long, restless night, the next morning I flagged down the first person that walks.  Out of the Coltwood truck stop, and it happens to be a German dude, and I’m just like hey Can’t make mid name in each most of the house.

I have a problem that I’m yep. All right jump in the car I Get I get to Fairbanks There’s a six hour stretch from Coltwood to Fairbanks where you do not have cell phone reception I get to cell phone reception my phone blows Up hey, did you take the rental car keys with you by chance?  Yep, yeah, I did So I get to Fairbanks Leaving my crew stranded, but it is a trucker route, so thankfully, I’m just like, telling the German guy, hey can you pull over, I need to flag down this trucker, trucker takes the keys back up the road, that all worked out. 

I sleep at the Fairbanks airport, I get to Seattle, I fly to Frankfurt, I jump on a train, I get to my hometown of Nuremberg, my friend picks me up, I get to the hospital, I see my dad.  And the first thing he says, he’s just like, well.  What can I even say?  I just say. I don’t have to say anything.  I just give him a big hug and just,  Hey, I’m just so thankful I get to see you. 

And so when I look back at that experience in Alaska, but really that whole year,  it’s safe to say that that was the closest to the edge I’ve been in my life  physically and mentally and emotionally.  And here is what, over and over again, pulled me back from that edge.  It’s my oldest childhood friend back home who dropped everything  that weekend and that night to be with my mom and support her. 

And it’s my friend here in town who hand bedazzled these solar shields, if you know what they are. They’re these giant grandma sunglasses you can put on over regular glasses.  They’re styling.  Because I was so stressed out that I had a really bad eye infection,  and it’s my friend who left a care package with a note on my patio that said, this fucking sucks. 

I’m here for you.  And my therapist, who reminded me that there’s a lot of hardship and grief that can’t be solved,  but it can be shared.  And Curtis, who keeps planning these miserable epics,  despite everything.  And really, there’s a dozen more people and a dozen more acts of love and support.  And I think, for me, that’s really the beautiful thing about this story, that it’s my story,  and it’s my dad’s story.

And this community of people. that came together for me to rally around me.  That’s my community,  but it’s also my dad’s community.  And you know, his path,  um, wasn’t, wasn’t straightforward. It actually got a lot harder before he got to a better spot, but he is planning his next visit to Missoula this spring. 

Yup. 

He loves Missoula.  Ever since he first came here, he loves going to the break to read his German newspaper.  He loves taking his Harley with a German flag on the back to the locks a lot for a late breakfast.  He loves having a blue moon. I know there’s better beer, but he loves blue moon.  Having a blue moon on the patio with me. 

And so,  if you see him this year, wandering around,  Downtown Missoula, likely wearing some German shirt with like some German phrase or reference to the German national football team.  Please say hi, welcome him back, give him a high five, and tell him, Archie, you’re awesome. Thank you. 

Marc Moss: Thanks, Kat. Kat Werner was a German high school exchange student in South Dakota — some of you might remember her last Tell Us Something story about that experience and meeting her husband there.She has called Missoula home for almost 15 years. Kat is a licensed clinical social worker and faculty member at the University of Montana School of Social Work. Things that fill her soul are: any outdoor or wilderness activity, traveling the world, genuine human connection, cooking and eating good food, and creating and checking off a good to-do list.

Tune in next week to hear the concluding stories from the Close to the Edge live storytelling event 

Kathleen Kennedy: And I was simultaneously indignant  and sympathetic. 

But I also had this I was feeling like I would love for squatters to come there and, and light a fire and burn it down, like problem solved.

Susan Waters: And the voice said, do you want to stay or do you want to go?  And without even thinking about it, I said, if I still have work I need to do here, I want to stay.  And the voice said,  okay.

Annabelle Winnie: I do wonder if what we think of as traits for neurodivergence, if they’re really adaptations, there are ways that the body adapts. 

Behaviors adapt, and even the brain itself adapts to a world that often feels too, too bright, too loud. It’s just too much. 

Amanda Taylor: we were texting each other every day, morning to night. We called them play by plays, which I also loved cause it made me feel sporty.  I’m like, yeah, we’re sending play by plays.

Marc Moss: Listen for those stories at tellussomething.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

Remember that the next Tell Us Something event is June 11th. You can learn about how to pitch your story and get tickets at tellussomething.org. 

Thanks to our media sponsors, missoulaevents.net, and The Trail Less Traveled, Missoula Broadcasting Company including the family of ESPN radio, The Trail 103.3, Jack FM, and Missoula’s source for modern hits, U104.5 

And thanks to our in-kind sponsors Float Missoula Joyce of Tile.

When you patronize these businesses, thank them for their support of live storytelling in Missoula.

Please remember that our next event, in partnership with Missoula Pride is on June11 at the Glacier Ice Rink at the Missoula County Fairgrounds. The theme is “Going Home ”. You can pitch your story by calling 406-203-4683, and we encourage our friends in the LBGTQ community to pitch a story.

Learn more about Tell Us Something including how to pitch a story and get tickets for the next event at tellussomething.org