TUS01503-Podcast 01 2025 January Part 2

Marc Moss: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Tele Something podcast. I’m your host, Marc Moss, founder and executive director of Tell Us something. The next Tele Something event is October 7th, 2025. The theme is Walk on the Wild Side. You can learn about how to pitch your story and get tickets@tellussomething.org. This week on the podcast,

Mark Schoenfeld: I’ve been told I look like Matt Damon and you’d have to imagine me. Skinnier with more hair on my head and less on my face. Little bit.

Kelley Provost: My hand finds its way to my purse. I do not let go of these hot five fingers that are my child’s hand, and I grab my phone and it does not ring a second time. My sister and my husband lock eyes with me. We know that this is the news that we’ve been waiting to hear since we left Missoula.

Marc Moss: Four storytellers share their true personal story on the theme. Hold my beer.

Tess Sneeringer: So I turn back to Officer [00:01:00] Becky who has a second question, which is, have you been drinking? And I say, no, ’cause I have not been drinking. And she walks closer than me and she smells me. And she goes, you’ve been drinking.

Jeff Ducklow: I looked to my left. And a tower of ice, probably the size of two Wilma buildings stacked on top of each other was slowly starting to lean away. And I just went, oh my God. My heart was beating so fast. I couldn’t feel it. It was, I was just frozen in disbelief.

Marc Moss: Their stories were recorded. Live in person in front of a sold out crowd on January 13th, 2025 at the George and Jane Denison Theater in Missoula, Montana.

I do have to apologize for the quality of the recording. The gain was set too high on the recording device and there was a lot of his and background noise. I did what I could to remove it, and a lot of that is gone in the process of removing most of the his, all of the applause and ambient noise went away.

The hiss is still noticeable in places. These stories are great [00:02:00] though, and it has been too long. That they’ve been sitting dusty on my hard drive. So let’s get to it. Tell us something acknowledges that we are gathered on the traditional ancestral and unseated territory of the Ponderer Salish and Kni peoples when tell us something engages in land acknowledgements, we try to make them specific to the time of the year that the live event took place.

Keeping that in mind, we know that traditionally storytelling is reserved for the winter months for many tribes. This was a practical choice given the fact that during the other seasons people were busy growing, gathering and hunting food. When the stories on this episode were recorded, it was winter with long, dark evenings, the snow and wind blowing outside, and that is wind telling stories is used to entertain and to teach the children.

Another reason for winter storytelling is that many traditional stories contain animal characters. [00:03:00] To be respectful. People wait until the winter when animals hibernate or become less active so they cannot hear themselves being talked about. We take this moment to honor the land and its native people and the stories that they share with us.

First up is Mark Schoenfeld, who dives into a captivating story of a college sophomore’s unexpected adventure abroad from a covert mission to buy bootleg DVDs to an even more clandestine identity as an undercover evangelical Christian missionary. What happens when a spontaneous prank involving a Matt Damon lookalike turns serious, forcing a confrontation with an organization that calls itself the company and challenges the very meaning of faith?

Mark calls his story. What would Jed do? Thanks for listening. I should start by saying that I can’t tell you where this story takes place. The main [00:04:00] reason is that I would like the option to go back.

Mark Schoenfeld: If I, you know, wanted to, I was a sophomore, just finished my sophomore year of college. I had never been abroad, but here I was halfway across the world and that night, one night we went out on town, a couple guys from the program and myself, we were on a mission to buy. Bootleg DVDs.

So we were in this open air market and uh, the two guys and I had invited, this guy had met in the country to help us because we had no idea what we were doing, and he was going to show us. This opener market and teach us how to find bootleg DVDs. [00:05:00] And it was a lot like, I would imagine trying to find like a woodpecker or something in Greeno Park because there’s a, call it, it’s kind of staccato, it’s D dd.

Listen, and you kind of move around past like some fake Gucci purses and DV.

Past the row of CDs and other trinkets there in an alley was a man with two suitcases and I imagine probably sunglasses, I can’t really remember, but he was looking, trying to look nondescript, and we went and uh, we had invited this friend Jimmy along and he was talking to the man and he was like. Okay, any motion for us to come back.

And he opened up these two suitcases and it looked like he had knocked off a Blockbuster video. [00:06:00] They were overflowing with DVDs and we were just like digging through them. ’cause you know, this is a long time ago. DVDs were a really big deal. I don’t even think Netflix was mailing them yet.

And if I was a college student, so I wouldn’t have been able to afford it. And these were a dollar each. Anyway, I was glad Jimmy was there because he was able to point out some issues that we might have with these DVDs. Like, say exam for example. It was 2002. The, the, uh, third Lord of the Rings movie hadn’t come out yet, but there it was in this suitcase, return of the King, except instead of Mortenson, it was Tom Cruise.

And I had to buy it, and it was legend and it was still a good purchase. And the same was true. Well, he, he also, Jimmy also noted [00:07:00] that there would be some movies that were in theaters and they were probably filmed surreptitiously. So I bought The Born Identity, Matt Damon. Terrible quality, pretty good movie.

You know, he is all like confused about who he is and he is a. So we bought some DVDs, went and had some food, and someone got the idea over beers to pretend like I was famous. See, my two friends in the group both had family from this country, so they could really blend in, they could speak the language.

And Jimmy obviously was from the country. Um, I was not, and I stood out.

And can’t tell you what country it was, but you can just guess that I stood out. And so they said, let’s pretend like you’re famous. It’s not a big tourist town. And I said, okay. And they said, who? Who do you look [00:08:00] like? Who could we say you are? And I said, well, I’ve been told I look like Matt Damon,

and you’d have to imagine me skinnier. With more hair on my head and less on my face. But I, a little bit, I also, I also get Louis Anderson,

which keeps me humble. So anyway, Jimmy and I go to this fountain area where people are taking pictures and hanging out and talking. And a couple minutes later, my friends from the program come and approach us. Talking excitedly come up to me, wanna, to wanna approach me, but Jimmy’s kinda holding him back.

But then I’m like, no, come on. And they come and I sign autographs and take turns taking pictures. And as we had hoped, there were like two more people, maybe four. And then I, you know, kind of repeated it and, and [00:09:00] Jimmy’s like talking to the people in the outskirts. And I can’t understand a word he’s saying except for Hollywood and Matt Damon.

But I’m just signing and signing, taking pictures with people, and I’m just caught up in it. And then I look around. If you were to zoom out, it would be this one white speck in just a sea of non-white people, basically the inverse of Missoula.

Not that I can relate, but. I start to get nervous. Um, and I look at my friends on the outside of the circle now, the ones from the program and they’re whiter than I am, and ask them, they’re these like two kind of official looking people watching us and not happy. And I turn to Jimmy and I say, Jimmy, we gotta go right now.

And he’s got this like shit eating grin [00:10:00] and I’m so glad he didn’t ask me why. Because I would’ve had to lie to him again. I had told him that I was a foreign exchange student, which is what my visa said. But the truth is, I was an undercover evangelical Christian missionary, and I was breaking every rule in the rule book

I had. I had come to the country a few weeks before. And spent all this time in this basement. So you can imagine with this guy who looked like a youth pastor telling us how to do things, and I’ll never forget his goateed face, the way it distorted when he told us how Christians were still persecuted in this country.

And so they gave us code words like God, the father was Fred, Jesus was Jed, and the Holy Ghost was Casper. [00:11:00] Uh. Christians were family and the organization, which you’ve maybe heard of, I won’t say real crusaders though. Um,

they were called the company, which is what they call the CIA and spy movies. Uh,

let’s see. There was competition for adding people to our family, you know, so we called the Mormon and Jehovah’s Witness missionaries, momos and Jojos, and this was fed to us. And they, and, and then there would be competition for our time. So say someone wanted to come and like practice their English on us and not wanna receive the gift of eternal salvation, we, they called them leeches.

Which I found only slightly less offensive than their term for the whole [00:12:00] mission, which was the Orients Express. I think they’ve changed it

at this point. I was, um, pretty disgusted with this organization. I decided to, you know, still do it. Uh, but I was gonna like, do it how I thought Jed would do it. Like ww JD what would Jed do? I had read the Bible, which we were the, the, the textbook. I mean, and I wanted that kind of authentic faith. So I called up, you know, after that night, kind of racked with guilt and just really wanting to be there for my friend that I’d made Jimmy.

I called him up and we went to the coffee shop, tea shop where we had first met, and like that night we started with tea and switched to beers. And as things got looser. I told him the truth that, uh, that I was a family member and that I [00:13:00] wanted to tell him about this guy named Jed. And he, he, he told me that he, he did feel like something was wrong in his life and that he did need something.

He said he often felt like he was, uh, a ship lost at sea. He was like, I’ve got a textbook story for that one. And I was really surprised he was so open and we met. Again and again. Every day after that, until it was time to leave, I was so disappointed. I wanted to go home. I wanted to sit on the toilet,

but I didn’t wanna leave Jimmy. The company told me it was my hubris, uh, that they, that I wanted to convert it. But what the truth is, the night before I left, Jimmy looked at me and he said, am 60% sure Jet is real. But I’m a hundred percent sure I’m a sinner, and the company told me that I had done the hardest part.

I [00:14:00] wanted to go back, but it turns out they don’t let you go be a missionary if you’re not a Christian anymore. So I’ll never get to, I’ll probably never get to see Jimmy. A almost willing to believe in the life.

Marc Moss: Thanks, Mark. Mark Schoenfeld has been a lot of things, a window washer, a screen printer, a public radio host, a middle school teacher, and an adjunct professor to name a few.

One thing he’s always been is a writer of stories, songs, and poems, which led him to earn his MFA in creative writing from the University of Montana. A disgruntled Texan Mark and his family now call Western Montana home. His work has appeared in print, online, and on air, which you can find@markshow.com.

That’s M-A-R-K-S-C-H o.com. In our next story, join Tess Sneeringer, a high school junior on Halloween night in 2009, as she navigates an exclusive party, a ninja clad twin brother. And a [00:15:00] sudden police raid that turns into a chaotic scramble for escape. What happens when a misplaced car and a nosy officer Becky, make this unpopular attendee, the unlikely culprit for the entire bust?

Tess calls her story a chance to be popular. Thanks for listening.

Tess Sneeringer: So there I was sitting on the hood of my mom’s pink Toyota Avalon with my twin brother David, and our friend Paul. Waiting for the cop in front of us to call back up. It was 2009. We were juniors in high school and it was Halloween and we got ourselves into this situation because I decided to go to a party, a party I was barely invited to.

This was really David’s friend’s party and he was always Mr. Popular. And I had my friends and we knew our place and we were not popular. And that is kind of how David and I existed in elementary school, middle school, high school, the whole way through. So much so [00:16:00] that when we got to this new high school on my first or second day, I’m still meeting people and they’re like, oh, you’re David’s sister.

And I was like, oh, that was fast. I guess I gave a my parents a little relief by making friends in the first place. ’cause I saw an email left up one time on the family desktop that said Tess had friends over last night. Thank God. But it was junior year at this point, and the social standings had been set.

But tonight, David knew he needed a ride home from this party and he wasn’t cruel. So he invited me to the party. And yes, I had my friends, we had our place, but you know, if you’re not popular, like okay, maybe, maybe tonight I could be popular. And so I go to the party, but I go late. And I leave DC where we grew up and go out into the suburbs to this house I’ve never been to in a neighborhood called Chevy Chase.

That is the name of the neighborhood. And this is the land of manicured lawns, big houses, cul-de-sacs, [00:17:00] like safe, quiet streets. And again, I don’t know this girl well enough to ever have been to her house, so I’m like trying to decipher the house addresses. This is before smartphone, GPS, and I finally. Find it and I pull over into the first parking spot find, and I, I do have a flip phone, so I text my brother, I’m here, and he comes out and he is dressed as a ninja so I can barely see him, and he is like beckoning me from the bushes.

Okay? So I follow him through this gate, down the stairs, into this basement where there’s full high school rager, ensuing. There’s Natty Light, there’s beer pong, there’s scantily clad Halloween costumes. And I am dressed as this like doth girl and I have a black wig and black lipstick and fake piercings and like a studded belt and combat boots.

And I love that Halloween costume. But that night it might’ve worked a little too well ’cause I went into the party and barely anybody [00:18:00] recognized me. And I really hope that’s ’cause it was the costume and not just ’cause they really didn’t know who I was. But I, I tried my best. I socialize, I held my own.

For about an hour until we hear pounding upstairs on the front door, and sure enough out the like basement windows, we see red and blue lights and the party is officially busted. And despite the host, having told everybody that you go out the back door only leads to the front, everybody goes out the back door and people are hopping fences, army crawling through bushes.

It is a complete. Cluster, everybody’s scattering. And I just glue myself to my brother ’cause I have no experience running from the cops. I, this is well outside my comfort zone. And our friend Paul attaches his fate to ours and joins our team of escape. And so we’re make our way around to the front of the house where we’re kind of in the bushes, but we can see the street [00:19:00] and we see the cop car kind of rolling down the hill, um, away from us chasing our friends.

And so we make a break for it. ’cause our car, I park the car a little bit up the hill, and the second I get my driver, my hand on the driver’s side door, I see the reverse lights from that cop car speed way back up the hill at like 20 miles an hour and stop right in front of us. Officer comes out, introduces herself as Officer Becky, and she asks me, do you know where you’ve parked?

Where I parked? What, and I look around and I see that I am blocking the neighbor’s driveway. They have a car in that driveway. And in the following moments of silence, I realized that I am the only reason the cops have busted this party I was very invited to. So I turn back to Officer Becky who has a second question, which is, have you been drinking?[00:20:00]

And I say, no, ’cause I have not been drinking. And she walks closer than me and she smells me. And she goes, you’ve been drinking. And I’m like, I don’t like, what do you want me to say? But in my head, my father, the ever present lawyer in my life has told me that if I ever end up at a busted party while sober, I should tell the cops to say, I offered to take a breathalyzer test and make them put in in writing.

And so Officer Becky says, you’ve been drinking. And I say, breathalyze me. Officer Becky doesn’t even have a breathalyzer test. She’s a, she came to gimme a ticket, maybe tow my car and ended up ally busting an underage party. So I’m sitting on this hood with me, my brother and Paul, who are probably cursing my name offering to give breathalyzer tests and we’re just waiting there ’cause she has to call backup and these two.[00:21:00]

Fools decide to make polite conversation with Officer Becky and, oh, I’m so sorry. I have to work on Halloween. That’s such a bummer. And this cop is like, actually it’s my favorite night of the week to work. Oh, okay. Super fun loving person here. And then she decides she wants to search us. And again, these two really emboldened tonight, uh, decide to put their.

Recently learned, uh, civil liberties course material to an application and say, do you have probable cause? And she asked them, well, do you have any weapons? My brother is dressed as a ninja. He goes, I have some nunchucks. These are my nunchucks. I took karate. He used them for his costume, hands them over, she searches us.

She doesn’t find anything. And she asked me for our, my id. And I look [00:22:00] nothing like my id. I have a black wig on. I have all this stuff. So I hand it to her and I’m like ripping everything outta my face. Wig piercings out, like trying to smear my makeup, just trying to like it’s me, I swear. And that’s as about about as much as she has to do with us until finally this cop second cop car comes out and this guy comes out, he’s probably like 20 years old, and he just walks up to me and gives me the breathalyzer test.

And I’m like, I don’t know what to do with this. Like, how do you use this thing? And so he takes it back, he unwraps it, he like undoes the straw, hands it back, and Officer Becky goes, you can take this, but you’re not gonna pass. And in my head I’m like, hold my LaCroix. Watch me and I blow into this lyer test, hand it back.

And I see this young cop just like flip the screen a little bit to Officer Becky and then I can see it. There’s three beautiful zeroes. Plus passes flying colors [00:23:00] and Officer Becky goes, have a safe note and that’s it. So the three of us get in the car, you know, we’re all mad at each other for how the other handled the situation.

Um, but we get back to our house in one piece and Monday rules around, and the school day is pretty uneventful for me. But then I get to softball practice and I, one of my friends comes up to me and she’s just like, Hey, are you and Monica okay? Monica’s my softball co-captain, and I’m like, why would Monica and I not be okay?

She goes, oh, well she was at that party and she got her third citation and now she has to go to court. And in my head, two things. One, the first two citations were not my fault. The third one, definitely, I’ll take that one. But the first two were. The second thing that I realized is my name has probably gotten drug through every A OL in instant message group chat.

Like every side conversation, people probably hate my guts, but [00:24:00] I’m not even worth being angry to my face. I’m that unimportant. And in that era that was kind of worked out in my favor ’cause I didn’t have to deal with their hate to my face. Um, and I can’t say I dabbled that much into the popular crowd anymore in high school.

Um. But we made it. My friends and I graduated. College got better years after college got better, and so I just wanna say if any of you are in high school or have a high schooler for which any of this sounds familiar, this too will pass. And if you peaked in high school, I am so sorry. Thank you.

Marc Moss: Thanks Tess.

Tess Sneeringer has lived in Missoula for six years and landed here after spending the first half of her twenties as an outdoor educator across the American West, far away from her childhood home in Washington DC [00:25:00] telling a story for tele something became a Missoula bucket list item after she saw her first show in 2019.

So she told a story in 2021, but then she stayed in Missoula longer than she thought she would. So. She figured she’d do it again. Her first appearance featured a survival story set in the Utah Desert, and she’s back on this episode of the podcast with another survival tale. This time of high school social life.

Coming up after the break,

Kelley Provost: my hand finds its way to my purse. I do not let go of these hot five fingers that are my child’s hand, and I grab my phone and it does not ring a second time. My sister and my husband lock eyes with me. We know that this is the news that we’ve been waiting to hear since we left Missoula.

Jeff Ducklow: I looked to my left and a tower of ice, probably the size of two Wilma buildings stacked on top of each other, was slowly starting to lean away, and I just went, oh my God. My heart [00:26:00] was beating so fast. I couldn’t feel it. It was, I was just frozen in disbelief.

Marc Moss: Stay with us. Remember that. The next tell us something event is October 7th.

The theme is Walk on the Wild Side. You can pitch your story by calling 4 0 6 2 0 3 4 6 8 3. You can learn about how to pitch your story and get tickets@tellussomething.org. Thank you to our story sponsor who helped us 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.

Learn more@goodfoodstore.com. Thanks to our media sponsors, Missoula events.net. Blue Dog Media and Missoula Broadcasting Company. Learn more about them and listen online@missoulabroadcastingcompany.com. Thanks to our in kind sponsors Float Missoula. Learn more@floatmsla.com and Joyce of tile. Learn about Joyce and the work that she [00:27:00] does@joyceoftile.com.

Alright, let’s get back to the stories. You are listening to the Tell Us Something podcast. I’m Marc Moss. In our next story, Kelly Provost shares her raw and honest journey of self-acceptance and defiance. Beginning with a lifelong struggle against body image that culminates in a breast reduction, but just as newfound confidence blossoms on a dream European vacation.

A phone call in London’s West End moments before the Lion King performance delivers a life altering diagnosis that changes everything. Kelly calls her story Careful what you wish for. Thanks for listening.

Kelley Provost: We were about ready to walk in to a production of The Lion King in London’s West End when I was diagnosed with breast cancer, now, I always knew my breasts were going to kill me when I was 12.

I thought it was going to be from embarrassment because I realized for the first time that they’re [00:28:00] supposed to be there. 13 and 14 more of the same. I am buying bras for just very little content, but it’s making me feel a little better about myself to, uh, you know, be a part of middle school. 14 and 15.

Come and boy, howdy. So did the knackers violently, seemingly overnight they appear. Think two globes on a stick, not what I ordered. Thank you very much. So the tone of the embarrassment shifts from non-existent to, oh my god, I gotta hide these ladies. Um, a very intricate, very large lever and pulley system exists to keep them found in where they’re supposed to [00:29:00] be and hidden.

Saying goodbye to button up shirts and sassy straps, and God forbid strapless on any occasion at all. And it just becomes this whole thing. So from about 16, I would say till 38, it was hide and seek. It was, you know, under pillows. Hiding my bra hooking up and just lamenting and loathing the breasts that I had so desperately in seventh grade.

I must, I must, I must increase my bust. You know, be careful what you wish for.

So I had looked into getting a breast reduction before and when I was about 21, I had some good insurance. And, uh, I made the appointment and I went in and they had said that, um, that was all fine and dandy, except for [00:30:00] that I wouldn’t be able to nurse future baby. I have no idea why at 22 that mattered. I mean, the way I was living my life was not conducive to a child in any form, but I thought, oh no, I better not do that.

And, uh, so I didn’t. So life goes on and I’m, I’m having the boobs. It’s all a big mess. And, uh, I meet the love of my life and we start having beautiful babies. And finally these large ridiculous mammies do their job and they nourish two beautiful, healthy babies. So by the time I’m 38, I’m, I’m back on the breast reduction train thinking I might do that.

It took a while to convince the, uh. Insurance company that running as I am a runner with size. I mean, we’re talking like double K shit you’ve never heard of, they don’t sell ’em in Dillard’s, y’all. Um, you know, I, I’m, I’m sending pictures after a 20 mile run, like do it, [00:31:00] you know, blood, ugh. They finally agreed to this breast reduction.

So at 43 years of age in 2015, I get. And you’re going, what took me so long? Well, I’ll tell you this. I finally had the figure. I had wanted. I was proportioned. I was happy. They were beautiful. And so from 43 to 44 to 45, I bought all the clothes I wanted to. I do love fashion. I was having so much fun with it, and I decided I was having so much fun that I was gonna take these beautiful ladies.

My husband, our two young sons, and my sister to Europe. So we all went, my family and my chest and myself and my cute suitcase filled with a lot of clothes that I was excited to wear on many different occasions. We were starting off in London and we’re gonna do a week in Paris, and then two [00:32:00] weeks in Spain.

So I cultivated my outfits carefully. So here we are. In London. It is July 5th, 2017. We had landed in Europe on July 2nd, so we’re just day three in. We’d had a day of sightseeing and we’re gonna have a little lie about in our flat in London. Before the nights events, we were really excited about this one, the kids, because they like the Lion King.

Of course, it’s on London’s famed West End. We know the production is. Brilliant costumes, acting all of the events. I am mostly looking forward to looking good with London’s elite in the West end, having a fabulous meal. Soaking it all in nodding yes, I see you. You look so good. Me too. Right. And uh, you know, just, just really [00:33:00] enjoying a night out with London’s culture.

As one wilt with expectations, they begin being dashed almost immediately. What turned into a three hour break, turned into a two hour break, turned into a one hour break, and I don’t look fabulous. I’m hot. I hate being hot. We’re late. I hate being late. And instead of my fabulous sit down dinner with really insensible shoes that we took an Uber to, it’s looking like we might not eat at all and we might not make it to the theater on time.

Damnit, dammit, dammit, dammit, dammit. So we hop on the London, uh, metro system and we pop off that Piccadilly Circus, think Times Square, think. Super crowded. Think any other time in my life I’d be soaking it all in, loving every minute of it, but instead I’m feeling [00:34:00] real gross. ’cause we’d eaten McDonald’s.

We were very overdressed. Um, I’m hot, I’m sweaty. But we, we, we land in Piccadilly Circus. Very crowded, very busy. Lots of bodies that I didn’t create or I’m not married to or related to touching me. And we’re late and it’s starting to be a real problem for me, and I’m losing the battle to not ruin the evening for everybody.

And I death grip my 6-year-old son’s hand, and it’s hot and it’s sweaty, but I ain’t losing this boy. And I’m kind of watching my husband’s blackhead Bob as he navigates us to what we know is the West End and the theater. And we’re looking for that marquee that says The Lion King. And my phone rings. Now you might think that from what I just described, that I would fumble for my phone and it falls off and breaks, and that’s the story.

But it’s not because I’m [00:35:00] waiting for this call. Tom Petty had it right the way is the hardest part, so my hand finds its way to my purse. I do not let go of these hot five fingers that are my child’s hand, and I grab my phone and it does not ring a second time. My sister and my husband lock eyes with me.

We know that this is the news that we’ve been waiting to hear since we left Missoula on July 2nd. Is this Kelly? Provost? It is. This is Dr. Ty. It is breast cancer. Hey. Thanks Dr. Tai. That’s what I thought. Um, okay. Got a run. Now when there is a crack in the universe such as that, you sort of remember everything that happened before then, and very little of what happened immediately after.

But I can tell you it was something [00:36:00] like Dr. Strange or The Matrix, but without the capes or the portal or the drugs and. Uh, I took a second. My sister, my husband, I don’t know if I uttered it, but we all simultaneously knew that I had just been diagnosed with cancer, breast cancer. I didn’t know what kind, I didn’t know how fast moving.

I wasn’t sure if I could continue on for the rest of my vacation. And time didn’t stand still, as it turns out. So we’re still rushing. We’re still going, and we make our way into that Dang theater. Stunned. Not completely surprised. But you know what a feeling, never have I been so grateful for the lights to dim so that I could come into my body.

My death flashed before me. And unlike other times, I’d fantasized about my death because I had, let’s face it, um, this, this time [00:37:00] I wasn’t thinking, oh, they’ll be so sad. I was like, man, I married a good man. He’ll remarry and she will love those kids. My sister has the best relationship with them that she possibly could.

They will miss me, but they could read my diary because I have conducted myself in such a way that I leave behind a leg. Legacy of love and beauty. So. Intermission hits, lights come up. I tell my husband to go get the kids some souvenirs, and I get the information that I was really looking for, which was, can I stay on vacation, or is this shit super serious that I need to fly out early?

We’d already discussed such a proposition. I make my way outdoors and I, I get on the horn and I, I reach St. Ronnie, a community medical Senator Center. She is a nurse navigator and she starts telling me information that I’m digging. She starts saying things like, it’s [00:38:00] stage one, it’s slow moving. It’s the good kind of cancer.

There’s, there’s no such thing. FYII love ani, but no. And, um, I’m relieved. I’m relieved that I can stay on my vacation. I decide I’m gonna be done trying to watch my figure so that by the time I get to Spain, I look great in my bathing suit. Because here’s the thing, please don’t wait for a cancer diagnosis to eat all the tear soup, extra butter on your bread to live your life out loud, to rip your top off in every beach in Spain, which I did.

I encourage you to start living now and you can keep your top on if you want.

Marc Moss: Thanks Kelly. Kelly Provost is a survivor, a thriver, a lover, and a lover. She loves Duran Duran fashion. Laughing and dancing. Watching people be proud of themselves is her favorite thing [00:39:00] ever. Her goal is to create a community of people who love themselves so much.

That they inspire others to do the same. A life coach. A life lover, a life liver. Closing out this episode of the Tell Us Something podcast, Jeff DLow embarks on an adventure Wish, a seminary graduate Turns sea kayak guide Jeff recounts the incredible dangerous decision to paddle towards and touch. A Tidewater glacier in Alaska.

What began as a bold pursuit of a memorable death could quickly become a fight for survival against one of nature’s most unpredictable forces. Jeff calls his story a terrible idea. Thanks for listening.

Jeff Ducklow: So before I tell you what happened on August 7th, 2015, I need to clear up a couple things. The first thing is it wasn’t when I looked back.

That I knew what I did was stupid. I knew before I did it that it was stupid. [00:40:00] The second thing is, even if you graduate from Princeton Theological Seminary with a master’s in Divinity, yes, a master of Divinity,

it doesn’t necessarily make you any wiser. And for those of you. Who might judge me as a man with a death wish. I say, no, it was not a death wish. It was an adventure wish. So skipping over the part where a seminary grad who is headed for ministry becomes an adventure guide heading towards a glacier. I’m gonna save that for the next, tell us something with a theme.

Hold my Bible.

But since this is hold my bear. It was a warm Alaskan summer day and I was paddling in a remote fjord all by myself because it [00:41:00] was my day off from sea Kayak guiding. It’s at this time I got one of the worst ideas I’ve ever had. It was the most unrecommended, the most dangerous thing I could do that day.

I decided I would approach one of the most powerful, unpredictable forces in nature. I would approach my sea kayak a Tidewater glacier, and touch it with my bare hand. Now again, I did not have a death wish, but I have to be honest, I always admired family trees that had really interesting deaths.

And I thought, you know, being crushed by a glacier, that’s, that’s pretty good.

I had seen others like trampled by elephants in [00:42:00] Borneo or died after catastrophic igloo collapse. I never wanted a mundane death like died while choking on a hot dog at the state fair. That wouldn’t do. But crushed by a glacier, not too shabby. So I decided today was the day as I started paddling. I’m thinking this is a terrible idea.

Now, the glacier I’m talking about is huge. At the face of it, where it comes into the water, it’s a mile long. It’s about 500 feet high. It stretches back. It’s basically a river of ice going 13 miles up to some very high of elevation where it’s a 700 square mile ice field. So I dunno if you’ve been around glaciers, but it’s basically this river of ice always moving downhill.[00:43:00]

And the tide water glacier in particular is very unstable because as it comes into the ocean that water is starting to erode the foot of the glacier. I’m making it even more unstable as the rest of it continues to move downhill. And sometimes they pop, they crack, and at other times it might sound like an incredible boom of thunder when a big chunk of ice will break off the face of the glacier and land in the water.

In fact, it’s so compelling. Cruise ships would come and they would watch the Glacier Cat Now. As a guide. I knew this, and yet I continued forward.

The other thing about the glacier is when it calves off, it leaves icebergs in the water, and in this case, it really matters because you’ve heard of the phrase tip of the iceberg. [00:44:00] These tips were huge. These were very large tips.

After the last story, I want you to hear ’em saying tips.

Some of these tips were the size of submarines or a house and what that meant as a sea kayaker. If you’re cruising by one and it decides to roll like they do. It will scoop you up to an early grave. So you try to stay away from the berg. Remember the Titanic? So now I’m paddling, and if you’ve ever been in Alaska, you also know it’s so huge that it’s almost impossible to judge distance.

I’d never gone anywhere this far with with my clients. So. [00:45:00] An hour, hour and a half had gone by and it seemed I wasn’t much closer. And then I get to the spot where I’d seen cruise ships, where they watched the glacier calving and calving, by the way, doesn’t involve cattle. I was confused for about a month up there looking for cows in the water.

Someone help ’em. Um, it’s just big chunks of ice that break off and become icebergs. So I get to the, this place and it’s, it’s a half mile back because that’s the law that a cruise ship needs to stay a half mile back from the glacier because when a big chunk of ice breaks off, it can create a wave as high as 30 feet.

It can also create an underwater tsunami just as large, which could capsize, uh, a large, and just for reference, I’m in a sea kayak.[00:46:00]

Which is basically a 14 foot tube of plastic, and I’m going past that mark, and I’m thinking, this is a terrible idea, but somehow I feel like I’m being sucked in against my will. I thought I heard the ice saying, come to the eyes, and like, yes, my frozen Lord. And now I’m getting pretty close and I see where there’s a group of harbor seals.

They’re hauled up on the ice like they do. And normally they’re super cute. They have these big eyes and they’ll pop up next to your kayak and look at you. But this time they look more concerned.

I thought I saw one. Say what? In the name of humanity. And I don’t know if seals are religious, but I’m pretty sure I saw one of them with his flipper make the sign of the cross

and bean [00:47:00] seals. They followed me for a while. That’s what they do. But then they suddenly disappeared as if to say, we have pups to feed, we have fishing to do, and even though we’re waterproof, this is as far as we go. And now I get to. I really close to the glacier. I can’t see the top of it, just the wall in that.

And suddenly the temperature plummets and the atic winds, as they call ’em, are blowing off the glacier and I’m freezing. There’s gear for these kinds of expeditions, but I wasn’t wearing it.

And I’m getting up closer to the glacier. It’s amazing. It’s blue, it’s white, and it looks like. Giant rock crystals rising up from the sea into the sky. It’s like I landed on another planet. I’d never been this close before. And then I remember why I went and [00:48:00] kept on going and now it’s like 50 yards, 25 yards.

What am I doing? But I’m in too deep, my friends. And now it’s 10 yards. 10 feet, and I stop paddling. I drift in.

I’m looking straight up, 500 feet of ice over my head. And I don’t know if I touched it too hard.

I looked to my left and a tower of ice, probably the size of two Wilma buildings stacked on top of each other. It was slowly starting to lean away, and I just went, oh my God. My heart was beating so fast. I couldn’t feel it. It was, I was just frozen in disbelief. And then I thought, here comes the Darwin Award.

I, and [00:49:00] I had certainly earned it. It was nature’s way of saying, excuse me, we, we don’t think you should reproduce. And it was a cold hand on the shoulder saying, we’re gonna have to take you outta the gene pool. And then I thought, I heard the ice again saying, come towards delight Jeff. Come towards delight.

And for a moment I thought, okay, I thought I didn’t really have a choice anyway. Then I thought I heard the voices of loved ones saying, don’t go towards the luck. And then I thought, I heard the voice of my very practical mother saying, oh, great, now who’s gonna mow my lawn? And just then the will to live was ignited and with an incredible,

that’s what it felt like. I paddled as hard as I could, and I was just [00:50:00] waiting for this multi-story wave to crash down on me with huge icebergs. And I saw a huge iceberg in front of me. So I started going towards it and I was able to get to the far side of it. And as I did, I heard an amazing sucking sound and I thought, this is it.

And I looked over to my shoulder and this iceberg is about the size of a small house, went straight up out of the water, like an atomic cloud. And I go, this is it. But I also remember thinking, so that’s what the bottom of a glacier looks like.

And so I was still paddling for my life when suddenly I realized I was spared all the energy for that falling tower of ice was absorbed by this iceberg, and in suddenly I looked around. It was sunny, it was warm, and I was alive, and I, I started paddling in reverence. [00:51:00] No more whistling, no more singing. I passed by the seals again.

One of them was shaking his head saying, you lucky son of a bitch.

I got back to the lodge. I didn’t tell anybody what I’d done.

I went into my cabin and I pondered and I came up with this. I paddled away agnostic on whether or not nature was my friend or my buddy, but I also came out a believer. That nature wasn’t against me. This experience didn’t get me back on the religious road, but I do believe that day I made my peace with God. Thank you.

Marc Moss: Thanks, Jeff. Jeff Ducklow has always loved nature. As a youngster, he spent most of his free time playing in the woods and felt more at home there than he did anywhere indoors. He considered nature his friend, even into adulthood when [00:52:00] he decided to turn his passion for nature into a career as an adventure guide.

Yes, Jeff felt he and nature were buddies, A belief he wholeheartedly embraced until the events in his story that you just heard shook his faith and gave him more insight into the nature of nature. Thanks for listening to the Tell Us Something podcast. Coming up on the next episode of the Tell Something podcast,

Nita Maddox: he walks up and he’s got this completely unredeemable action adventure movie, and I pull up his account and it’s just bad movie choices and $50 in late fees, and he tries to introduce himself again, and I was like.

Listen buddy. You have terrible taste in movies. You owe $50, you’re gonna need to pay us $20 of those late fees. Take your crappy movie and kick rocks.

Joyce Gibbs: And so I run around to the back where the, where the nesting area is while she’s eating her food. And I open up the cage or open up the back of the hutch.

[00:53:00] And there they are. Four furlough eyeballs closed. Squirmy little baby rabbits. And they’re squirmy so much so that one of them falls out of the back of the hutch and lands in the snow and it starts screaming

Amanda Peterson: and I was in it. So by in it, I mean that by age 16 I had signed a purity contract with God.

Really it, it was just a piece of paper that some guy in a church printed, but to me it was from God and I was signing it for him. Thus, I took it very seriously and I wore a purity ring.

Marc Moss: Listen to the stories from our return to Butte America in April of 2025. On the next episode of the Tell Us Something podcast.

Subscribe to the podcast so you’ll be sure to catch these [00:54:00] stories. On the next Tell us something podcast. Remember that. The next tell us something event is October 7th. The theme is Walk on the Wild Side. You can pitch your story by calling 4 0 6 2 0 3 4 6 8 3. Learn more and get your tickets at Tell us something org.

Marc Moss: Welcome to the Tell Us Something podcast, I’m Marc Moss.

We are currently looking for storytellers for the next Tell Us Something storytelling event. The theme is “Didn’t See That Coming!” If you’d like to pitch your story for consideration, please call 406-203-4683. You have 3 minutes to leave your pitch.

The pitch deadline is May 27. I look forward to hearing from you.

Please remember to save the date for Missoula Gives May 5th through the sixth. Missoula Gives is a 24 hour online giving event. Remember to support Tell Us Something. During Missoula Gives, May 5th through the sixth. Learn more at missoulagives.org.

Tell Us Something acknowledges that we are in the aboriginal territories of the Salish and Kalispel people. The land we walk on, recreate on, grow our food on and live on is sacred land.Being mindful is a practice. We may not always be mindful of the gift that the land gives us and the wisdom that it has.We take this moment to honor the land and its Native people and the stories that they share with us.

This week on the podcast…

Tess Sneeringer: this big chunk of sandstone had broken out from under her and she’d fallen about 10 feet and she was standing and she was limping and complaining about her knee.

Joyce Gibbs: He looks at me, the TSA officer, and he says, I’m going to have to confiscate this. And I said, yes, yes, please do. Yes, take it. Do your job.

…four storytellers share their true personal story on the theme “Stone Soup”. Their stories were recorded live in-person in front of a sold-out crowd on March 30, 2022 at The Wilma in Missoula, MT.

Lizzi Juda: Am I arrive at this place where I’m greeted by this beautiful man with a short lime green Tutu and these antenna and another man who’s wearing nothing but a tool belt.

Brent Ruby: There’s two camps when it comes to picking up hitchhikers, those that my wife and most of my coworkers are in and dammit, I just made eye contact with her. I have to stop. I have to. So I pulled over

Marc Moss: We wouldn’t have been able to produce this event without the help of our title sponsor, Blackfoot Communications. We are so grateful to the team at Blackfoot for their support. Learn more about Blackfoot over at blackfoot.com.

Our first story comes to us from Tess Sneeringer. After her friend falls down a hill on a rock scree, Tess Sneeringer puts her training to work. She, along with several of her friends, paddle through the night to bring their injured friend to safety. Tess calls her story “All Aboard the River Ambulance ”. Thanks for listening.

Tess Sneeringer: So four of us were floating down the green river in Utah in two different canoes and they were tied together. And two of us were paddling. One of us was taking a power nap and the fourth person was managing some extreme pain with a substance that is now illegal in Montana. And it was two o’clock in the morning.

This trip had started earlier that day as the long awaited personal trip. After a grilling summer spent backpacking with teenagers in the woods and spirits were high when we launched earlier that day. And I remember when we pulled over for lunch on this beach, on the side of the river, I pulled up the canoe was sitting on the bow and was dipping crackers into hummus.

When I heard my friend Erica Yelp behind me and I look over and she’s about 20 yards downstream on the bank. And all I see is this cloud of sand stone dust. And she’s over there with our friend Christina. So I wander over, I guess what had happened is she had been climbing up this little bluff to get a picnic spot.

And this big chunk of sandstone had broken out from under her and she’d fallen about 10 feet and she was standing and she was limping and complaining about her knee and of the four of us, three of us, our wilderness first responders. And the fourth is an EMT. So we kind of dove into our knee assessment situation.

But at some point she looked up at me and she goes test. I think my back is bleeding and she was wearing a white sun shirt. So we hadn’t seen any blood, but I lift up her shirt and sure enough, I see a five inch long centimeter wide, just gaping wound as if someone had cut her with a knife. And it was sure enough slowly bleeding down her back.

So I put her shirt down and it takes every ounce of me to tell her, yes, your back is bleeding. I’m going to get the first aid kit. I’ll be right back. And I tried so hard not to sprint to the canoe and instead use that time to calm my own nerves down, get the first aid kit, come back. By that point, we had her laying face down.

Everybody had seen the cut at this point and Jack, the other trip mate and Christina had made a plan to try to go get cell phone service. And they’d put me in charge of first aid. And there I am standing over her with my desert rat, sun dress and my big floppy hat. And now two blue nitrile gloves thinking.

Okay. It is time to put you back together. And as I said, it was, uh, it looked like someone cut her with a knife and granted, we never found. Like slicer, but the first aid was relatively simple. So we were still waiting for Jack and Christina to get back. When she asked me, she goes test, why is everybody freaking out?

And I was just like, without trying to make her freak out, even more explained like, Hey, your cut is big enough that we’re worried about infection and your knee is enough in enough pain that we can’t be here for five days, which was the plan. So we got to go. And the way that this river works is we’re on the green river paddling towards the confluence with the Colorado river and the green river is Flatwater and the Colorado river is whitewater.

So you can’t just paddle out. You schedule a motor boat to pick you up at the beach. That’s the intersection of the two rivers. And we had scheduled a boat for five days from then. It was about a 50 mile trip. That’s a really relaxed river trip, 10 miles a day, plenty of time for side hikes, relaxing. So we had scheduled it for five days from then, but as we were looking through our paperwork from our outfitter and the permits, we saw that they’d given us a schedule of all the other boats that were coming. While we were on our trip, there was two boats, one, which was ours five days from now and the only other one scheduled was the very next morning at 10 o’clock. So we had to cover about 45 miles by 10 o’clock in the morning. But if you remember those teenage trips, one of the ones that I led the most often involved a canoe trip, and to make our mileage on the last day, we had a routine of waking the kids up at three o’clock in the morning, putting them in boats, tying the boats together and paddling this flotilla of canoes down a very similar desert river.

So I knew, I knew it could be done and doing some quick rough math. I thought we had just enough hours if we paddled through the night. So Jack and Christina get back from their short-lived attempt to find cell phone service. I pitched this plan to them, suggest that we paddle until dinner time, pull over, eat food.

Can’t forget to eat food. paddles, pull over sleep for a couple hours and launch again around midnight and paddle until we hopefully get to the boat. And as we were paddling that evening, they said yes to the plan as we were paddling, you know, we were booking it. So everybody we passed could tell we are in a situation where our boats are tied together.

And we’re paddling with like 80% effort. And everyone we passed, as soon as they learned what our situation was, they had something to give us. Someone had extra Vicodin from an old wisdom to surgery. I’m not kidding. They gave us new first aid supplies to change her dressing. And an older gentleman even offered us his paddling chocolate, which was weed chocolate for, for his arthritis, which was very, very generous.

And so we paddled, we executed that plan, just how I lined it out. And we launched again at midnight, after a horrible anxiety written hour of sleep. And we made it about two hours until Jack who’s in the front of my canoe, turns around and he’s like, Tess, I don’t know if this is going to work. I’m falling asleep.

I don’t know if we’re going to make it. And so we came up with new plan involving maps, , so that every 20 minutes, one of the three, paddler’s got to take a nap and cause we had tied the boat together, right? So there’s three paddlers. And we tried to make Erica as comfortable as we could. That’s a tall order when you have a bum knee, a huge gash in your back and it’s a metal boat, but we tried our best.

And when it was my turn to nap, I was out cold. I put my sleeping bag in my feet, I’d pull it over. Me and people had to shake me awake when it was my turn to paddle again. But we kept that rotation going all night long until finally the sun came up and we were tasked with figuring out where the heck we were, because all night I’d been trying to estimate like, how fast are we going?

How many hours have we been paddling? Continually trying to answer the question. Like, are we going to make it? And so when the sun came up, I had to use all that mental math to be like, okay, I think we’re about 15 miles away from the takeout and how the map works. River miles are labeled on the map. And in this case they were counting down to the confluence, but sure.

There’s a line on the map that says 15, but that doesn’t mean there’s like a steak on the side of the river that says 15. So instead it’s a topographical map and I’m having a lineup, natural features to what I’m seeing. And so, you know, I’d be like, okay, I think if we’re here, there should be two canyons on the right and a tributary on the left.

And then there’d be three canyons on the right. And I’m like, shit, I have no idea where we are. And I was probably trying to struggle with that for almost an hour, just constantly trying to line up reality to my map somewhere within the range of where I thought we were until finally we saw some folks breaking down a campsite and we knew that the campsites are kind of also labeled according to the river mile.

So if we knew what camp they were at, we would know how far away we were. So we shouted over and they shouted back that they are at camp four. So we weren’t 15 miles away. We are four miles away and we had plenty of hours to go. And at that moment we threw down our paddles. Erica shoots this like drugged out fist into the air.

We eat something. That’s not this stay on granola bar that we’ve been eating all night because at that point we knew we were going to make it. And sure enough, we pulled into the beach. There was a whole crowd waiting for their scheduled boat. But as soon as we. You know, they learned of our situation news spread fast.

And again, people had something for us. We got someone cooked bacon for us, the made coffee, someone set up a shade umbrella so that Erica could sit under the shade. It was like a super sunny beach. And there was even a surgeon there who had this beefy first aid kit and volunteered to clean out her wound again, which was super nauseating to watch.

But we got on the boat, we got her to the hospital. She ended up needing a lot of stitches and she had a torn ACL, which explains the knee pain. So after that moment, we split up to our respective fall seasonal gigs. But every time I think of this trip in many trips, since, you know, the reason I go on these trips often is to connect more intentionally with myself or the people I’m going with.

And explicitly not all the other people who are out there, the point is to get away. But in this situation, it was all those other people that made our evacuation safer, easier, smoother, and already I’ve been on another trip or I was approached in an evacuation for help. And I take great comfort knowing that that give and take will be a lifelong exchange among perfect strangers, as long as we continue to recreate in these wild places.

Thank you.

Marc Moss: Thanks, Tess.

Tess Sneeringer grew up escaping the suits and the stress of Washington, DC by following her older brother down the current of the Potomac River every summer. She is now settled in Missoula and works for Parks and Recreation.

Our next storyteller is a Tell Us Something storyteller alumni. You can listen to all of the stories that she’s shared on the Tell Us Something website: tellussomething.org. Joyce Gibbs has some very special hunting bullets confiscated at TSA, she resolves to get them back. “Only in Missoula. Only on Christmas.” or “If You Don’t Ask, You Can’t Hear Yes.”

Thanks for listening.

Joyce Gibbs: On December 25th, 2019, I was at TSA in the Missoula international airport. It was very early in the morning. And so mark and I were the only people at TSA. We clocked in with the clerk at the front, and then we went to the conveyor belt where we put our, took off our shoes and put our jackets down and put our backpacks down and took out the computer and then walked through the tunnel and assume the position.

And I walk out of the tunnel and the TSA officer says, is this your backpack? And I say, yes, it’s mine. This is my lucky backpack. I had had it for several years and. The best part. So far of this backpack was the day that we had already gone through TSA and the backpack contained a smell, a smell that had been ruminating in our house for several weeks.

I couldn’t find it. And we were at the gate of our plane and I realized this smell is attached to me. So I’m digging through, I’m taking things out of the backpack and I take out a box knife. I have already been through TSA and I show it to mark. And he says, you should put that away. And I said, yes, I should.

And put my hand into three rotten oranges. So thankfully the rotten oranges went into the garbage and, uh, I continued on that trip with my box knife. I actually made it through TSA again, and I still use that box knife every day. So I tell the TSA officer, yes, that is my backpack. Do you think you might have some bullets in here?

And I think, and I say, well, yes. Yeah, I probably do have bullets. They’re probably in that little pocket on the belt that I didn’t think to look in. And he opens up the pocket and he pulls out three pieces of ammunition for a 3 38, 6, actually improved hunting rifle. If you don’t happen to know what a 3 38 up six actually improved is it’s okay.

Because my father built this gun. It is a beautiful gun. It’s my hunting rifle. It also is something that you can not buy in a store, which means he also built that ammunition, which is something you cannot buy in a store.

He looks at me, the TSA officer, and he says, I’m going to have to confiscate this. And I said, yes, yes, please do. Yes, take it. Do your job. That’s awesome. Thank you. Thank you. I’m going to put my shoes on. I’m going to put my coat on. I’m going to go upstairs. We go upstairs and there’s my sister. I know she would be there.

My sister has come in on an early flight from Portland and she is. There to meet us to say hi to surprise later, to drive out to my parents’ house and surprise them for Christmas visits. So we get together at the gates they’re upstairs and she gives me the things that Santa Claus left at her house for me.

And I give her the things that Santa claw have left my house for her. And we sit and have a little chat for awhile because, you know, we had gotten there two and a half hours early. And as she’s about to leave, I start thinking like, okay, mark, stay here with the baggage. I’m going to go with Nessa. And we walk out to TSA and we walked to the clerk and I say earlier today, I got some bullets confiscated.

I’m wondering if I could have those back. And the clerk says, I’m going to have to ask my, my manager. And I’m like, okay, that’s fine. And there’s a couple people in TSA. So it weighed about five minutes. And, and, it’s the same gentleman who confiscated my bullets. And I tell him those are very precious bullets.

Those are. Bullets for a gun that my father made. And, he has to make all these bullets. And I don’t know if you know, , about reloading ammunition, but it is a, a very long process. First, you have to fire a cartridge, you have to fire the ammunition so you can get the brass casing that the bullet comes in, and then you collect a whole bunch of those.

And then you take out the primer from the brass casing, and then you tumble them in a rock tumbler to clean the brass of any residue that might be on them. And then you use calipers and very specifically, , find the measurements of the bullet to make sure that it will still be safe to have the cartridge to make sure it will safe, be safe to once again, pack with powder and put a new bullet in.

And so then you can then again, fire it, hopefully on a day that’s not too hot or not too humid because it might misfire if it was an extreme heat process, all these things, all this that my father has studied that he has perfected as a science for the last 60 years. And the TSA officer looks at me and he says, well, those already went to the safety office and I say, oh, okay.

He says, well, you go down to baggage claim and you take a right and you go to a glass door and knock on the glass door. And so my sister and I go down to baggage claim and there’s a glass, I promise there’s a glass door. You’ve never seen it. And you knock on the door. And this young Jew, this young woman comes out in her brown and tan Sheriff’s uniform with her pistol on her hip.

And she looks at me and she looks at my sister and she says, can I help you? And I say, this is my sister. And she’s leaving to go to my parents’ house. And you have some bullets that were confiscated from me that she might be able to take away to give to the person who actually made them today. And I’m going to go through TSA again and I’ll fly out of here if that’s all right.

If that’s okay. And she looks at me and she looks at my sister and she said,

She goes to, uh, the desk and she pulls out a number 10, 10 coffee can, and she kinda sticks her hands in it and does this swirl and, and there’s lots of clinking and it sounds like there’s like four box knives in there. And, and she pulls out three bullets for a 3 30, 8, 6 actually improved. And she says, are these them?

And I say, yeah, that looks like them. And I step away and she hands them to my sister and I say, thank you. And she says, Merry Christmas.

Marc Moss: Thanks, Joyce.

Joyce Gibbs is a resilient, creative and adventurous woman who was raised in Missoula. After a brief stint in New York City and then in New Orleans, she bought a dilapidated railroad house on Missoula’s Northside and spent the next 15 years remodeling it and making it her own. Joyce loves being in nature on Montana’s abundant rivers, and hiking and hunting in the woods. When she is not busy building beautiful spaces with her tile installation at Joyce of Tile, you can find her riding her motorcycle, gardening, going for neighborhood walks with her husband of 12 years, Marc (that’s me!), and their kitten Ziggy.

In our next story, Lizzie Juda finds awakening after middle age in a story that she calls “Something’s Cookin’ in My Pot”. Thanks for listening.

Lizzi Juda: thank you all for being here to support us and to listen to our stories. So I’m going to take advantage of this stone soup, uh, theme and tell you a bit about my journey through life, using the kettle or the pot as a metaphor for my self, my. Yeah. So I was born in the Midwest in the early sixties, and my pot was filled with Twinkies and canned spinach and three siblings and TV reruns, and overly salted broth.

And at the age of eight, my dad died and my mom disappeared into her scotch bottle. And this left this pot of ours that we called family with a massive crack in it. And nobody was talking about this crack. Nobody was doing anything that I could tell that was trying to repair the damage that was being done.

And so eventually this kettle of ours crumbled around our feet and I being the sensitive, intuitive caretaker that I am. Desperately tried to gather up all the shattered pieces and the scattered ingredients. And desperately tried to make some kind of magic brew or healing stew that would save us and that we could survive on.

And obviously this was impossible and exhausting. So I eventually left and came upon at the age of 20, my former husband who, Ooh, damn, I wasn’t going to cry. My farmer husband, who was this cast, iron stainless steel, nutrient dense kind of man. And he was like solid and grounded and a Virgo. And he, um, he contained me and grounded me in a way I had never experienced before I even wrapped a gold ring around myself for security and belonging.

And. Gladly just dumped my leaky brothy, cracked, sad self into his kettle and merged all my ingredients with his ingredients. And we lived with this nutritious and delicious life for years and years. And we created two really amazing children and have this beautiful life together. And then around midlife, I would say this grumbling and rumbling started quaking in my core to the point where I could not ignore it anymore.

And I knew it was time for me to take my pot and see if I could cook something up on my own. I needed to like figure out how to delineate what was my ingredients and what was all of the ingredients that were scattered around me. So I had been cooking in this one kitchen, my entire adult life. And as I left, I brought with me like this teeny little Bunsen burner and the.

Uh, flimsy little empty kettle and wandered around for quite a while, dazed and disoriented. And there was another D word in there, days disoriented and devastated and,

hungry as shit. And then I met this fiery powerhouse of a woman here in Missoula. And as we were getting to know each other, I started telling her that I was living on my own for the first time in my adult life. And I was trying to figure out like, how do you do relationships, where you can say what you need and you can receive support and don’t get lost in the sauce.

And she said, you need to check out this camp that is in Southern Oregon. I didn’t totally know what she was talking about, but I could feel this flame under me growing in intensity. And I could feel like water starting to swirl around inside my kettle. Like. She told me that this camp network for new culture is a place where people explore intimacy and personal growth in radical honesty and transparency.

And I just knew at that moment that that was the next step in my evolution. So two weeks later, I’m in my car heading to Southern Oregon for the first time on a solo road trip, since college, two long, hot, exhilarating days of driving. Am I arrive at this place where I’m greeted by this beautiful man with a short lime green Tutu and these antenna and another man who’s wearing nothing but a tool belt.

And I’m like, girl, you might’ve wanted to read the fine print because,

I knew no one at this camp. And I was saying to myself, Lizzie, this looks like some wild ass bull, yum that you may or may not want to put in your pot. So I stood around the edges and I. I’m a pretty open progressive earth mother, hippie chick kind of woman.

But I stood around the edges of this camp, like a wide-eyed coyote, checking out what the hell was going down. And I saw people picking up these handfuls of exotic herbs and spices and tossing them freely into their big old pots of stew. And then they were sharing their stew freely with all the other people.

And they were receiving this amazing stew back. And, they were nourished and they were fortified and they were, and I had, I was sitting there going, you know, I’ve like put like little sprinkles of salt in my bra and I wanted a taste of what these people were putting down. So, I have a minute left and I have like this much more of my story to tell you, so how am I going to shorten it?

Okay. So I’m going to tell you this part of it. So one day I went down to the river and I. I was hanging out with these people singing along the river and the harmonies were incredible and the sun was gorgeous and people are dipping in and out of the river laughing and telling stories and singing. And I got my courage up and I took a big breath and I stripped my clothes off and I got into the river and I could feel as I was standing there in front of people that I did not really know, I could feel this fear and this body shame and this sense of the cultural conditioning that I’ve carried around with me for my entire life.

Just start to

be carried down

by the waves of the river, down to the ocean. And I’ve been back to this camp many, many times, and I’ve learned to expand my ability to give and receive love. And I’ve learned how to. Merged deeply with people and then come back home to my own kitchen where I am cooking up this spicy organic Hardy, healthy, nutritious stew.

And I’m here to share it with everyone. And I know that I am being fed by this much bigger love that flows through all things. And it flows through you too.

Marc Moss: Thanks, Lizzi.

Lizzi Juda has been a proud resident of the westside of Missoula for nearly 33 years. She is founder and co-director of Turning the Wheel Missoula and has over 25 years experience teaching improvisational movement-classes, expressive arts groups, and ceremonial rituals. She is passionate about providing opportunities for people of all ages and abilities to play, move and connect deeply with themselves and express their creative spark. She is an absolutely avid advocate for accordion and alliteration artistry and is a wanna be beat poet. She considers movement and touch her first languages and is finding her way with words.She identifies most with being a mojo sprinkling pixie

Rounding out this episode of the Tell Us Something podcast, Brent Ruby buys a jar of pickes for a gathering with friends. No one ever opens the jar of pickles, so he brings it home. The hitchhiker he picks up along the way, is very happy to learn about this magic pickle jar.”Paws, Claws, Pickles and a Little Birdie”

Thanks for listening.

Brent Ruby: I didn’t know the dress

code,

so I have to start by saying, oh my Frick. I’m standing on the stage of the Wilma theater.

Did anyone see John Prine thing here?

Thank you.

Cause the rest of my life, I can say John Prine opened for me at the Wilma.

So a lot of people don’t like road trips and there’s a reason for that. And that’s okay if you don’t. It’s okay to admit it. Road trips force us to merge the things that are organized in our brains with the things that are unpredictable and the things that are practical and predictable get tangled with the unknown.

And that makes people uncomfortable. That’s okay. Some about 60 miles south of Dillon Montana on interstate 15, great stretch of

road.

There’s two camps. When it comes to the philosophy of roadkill, the first camp is my wife and most of my coworkers are in this camp and that is drive by that shit. I’m kind of in the other camp, which is if it’s interesting, if it’s feasible, if it hasn’t been there awhile and I’m stopping.

So I pull around. Get out of my big truck and I’m standing in the sun standing over a dead porcupine and my scientific brain is calculating, huh? It’s about 11 o’clock in the morning. When did it die? How old is it? Cause porcupines can live to be like 15, 18 years old. So I kick at it a little bit, look around there’s no one coming, taking this guy.

So

I grab it.

But before I moved it, I realized, you know, dead things smell. And this didn’t smell that bad. I mean, bed bath and beyond is not like saying, oh my gosh, this has got to be our next candle scent, but it wasn’t that bad until I picked it up. And then the smell got into my mouth. No, no matter. I still took it, put it in the truck and I’m on my way down to park city, Utah, where I was going to meet some colleagues for a multi-day meeting down there.

So we get, I get down to park city porcupine in tow, uh, or. And I meet up with my colleagues. And the first thing we do is go to the grocery store. And one of my colleagues says, okay, we need to just like hodgepodge potluck stuff for dinner, so get whatever you want. And we’ll put it together tonight. So I walk around the grocery store, still kind of smelling that porcupine.

And all I came up with was some shitty Utah, 3.2% alcohol grocery store beer, and an enormous jar of dill pickles. That was my contribution. But I did tell my colleagues, I don’t think we should eat the porcupine. So we ended up going to our condo, Airbnb, whatever, and, uh, having our meetings for the next few days.

Well, I, when we got there, I put the porcupine right in the freezer and the pickles. I put the pickles right on the counter. And for the next three, four days, nobody touched either of them. So the pickles just sat on the counter and I thought, well, okay, whatever, when it comes time for me to go, we’d separate.

And I’m like, I’m taking my stuff. So I grabbed my giant jar pickles. I mean, it’s, it’s that big, it’s big grabbed my giant jar of pickles and realized, oh, the porcupine can’t leave that in Airbnb freezer, probably penalties. But I thought I’ve sort of. Ben with that thing. It’s not fully salvageable. So I run next door to some fancy mountain bikers because it’s sparked city.

And I say, guys, I need an ax. Oh yeah, here you go. It’s a nice, it’s a pretty nice ax. And so I run back to the garage for wax and I had my four paws ditch, the rest of the porcupine and the garbage salvaged the paws and went into the kitchen and wash the ax off real good with soap and water and went back to the guys and said, thank you so much for the acts.

What do you need it for? Porcupine salvage. No big deal. So anyways, I load up my stuff. I load up my paws, my claws, and my pickles into my truck. And I’m heading north on interstate 15 and I’m about 60 miles south of Dylan. Again, it is just after a thunderstorm that kind of after a thunderstorm where the sun is so bright on the pavement and the rain is just evaporating off of that pavement.

So you can just feel it and see it leave the earth that rain, that same rain was thick on the Sage. In those Prairie’s so thick that, that Sage. With sneaking its way into the cab of the pickup truck. And it was awesome. I wish I had my sunglasses, but they were packed away with my paws and my claws.

That’s when I saw her. That’s when I saw her. And that’s when I saw her thumb. There’s two camps when it comes to picking up hitchhikers, those that my wife and most of my coworkers are in and dammit, I just made eye contact with her. I have to stop. I have to. So I pulled over, backed up. I get out of my truck, right.

Then she swings this big old backpack off of her shoulders. And I look at her and her shirt was stained with earth and strain and pain. And I said, oh my gosh, what can I, can I help you? You need help. And she says, if you could give me a ride to Lima, I would love it. I’m like, yeah, get in. I’ll grab your pack.

So she gets in the truck, I grabbed her pack. I’m like, whoa, damn. I said, girl only picked up one porcupine. How many gotten this backpack? Threw it in the back of my truck, got in the truck. And when I got in the truck, when both doors closed, there was the smell of human. Sweat

earth,

a bit of wet dog. It was so bad that I wished I had the porcupine in the backseat of the truck and she sticks her dirty handout and says, I’m birdie. Thanks so much for helping me. And she says, I don’t think I smell very good. And I said, no shit. And I said, Bernie, what are you doing? And I said, how can I help you?

And she says, I’ve been food lists for two days. I got chased by a grizzly bear, lightening storm, bad rain. And then I saw your truck and it was my hope to get out of this mess. And so I rambled up to the highway to get on, to get my thumb up in the air. And I said, I’m so happy to help you. I’ve got food. I, what can you, what can I do?

And she goes, I just got to get to the grocery store in Lima or Lima. And I said, well, what’s, what’s what’s tomorrow. What’s your plan? And she says, tomorrow, I’m coming right back here. I’m jumping back on the continental divide trail. I got to finish this thing. She was hunting it. So hiking it so solo. So I said, well, I can get you the Lima, but uh, I don’t know how you’re gonna resupply.

And she goes, I need to get to a grocery store. I said, birdie, there is no grocery store in Lima. And she said, I got silent. I said, I have all the food you need. I got plenty of food. And she goes, it’s not that the tears rolled down her dirty face and carved what looked like Topo lines from a map down her dirty cheeks.

And she said, food is not what I need. I have a ridiculous craving and have for the last two days

for pickles,

you’re taking up my time at that moment, whatever was playing on the radio, went silent. All of the angels from all of the people in Beaverhead county that had ever been hungry, tired, or perished on the Prairie, locked their wings in position. As I fumbled to reach over the seat to grab my giant ass bottle of pickles, I struggle over and get it onto the, onto the console.

And Birdie’s eyes were as big as the lid on that jar of pickles. And the tears came back following that same matter. Just ending up in a giant smile. At the end of her face, I pulled into Lima, we got out of the truck standing in the gravel and she insisted that we have a toast. She let me pick the first pickle out of the jar, which was good because her hands were filthy.

So we had a pickle toast in the Lima parking lot in the gravel. And I, we shared hugs, smiles, little tears, and I jumped back in the truck and started to drive away. And I caught birdie in the back rear view mirror of my truck. She was clutching that big ass jar of pickles and just kind of dragging her backpack along as dead weight.

And I queued up the John Prine. So what is the plan? What indeed is the plan? A little dirty birdie told me that there is no plan. All we have to do is add our own special ingredients.

Marc Moss: Thanks, Brent.

Brent Ruby is a research professor at the University of Montana and has been on a near 30-year quest to do good science. He also is committed to writing his own brand of ornery poetry during his relentless study of applied human physiology. One of Brent’s research goals is to effectively share his research findings to improve the health and performance of wildland firefighters. Brent spends time outside of his research in the great outdoors of Montana with his wife Jo and their border collies, Wrango and Banjo. Brent also enjoys building hollow wood stand up paddle boards, woodwork, art and writing children’s books. Check out his books, download free coloring book pages and more at wrangoandbanjo.com.That’s W-R-A-N-G-O-A-N-D-B-A-N-J-O.COM

Pretty great stories, right? I’ll bet you have a story to share. I’ll bet you do! And I’ll bet that you have a story to share on the theme “Didn’t See That Coming!” The next Tell Us Something live event is scheduled for June 27. It is an outdoor show and is guaranteed to be a lot of fun. Why not participate? Pitch your story on the theme “Didn’t See That Coming” by calling 406-203-4683. The pitch deadline is May 27. I look forward to hearing from you soon. I’ll call you as soon as I get your pitch.

Please remember to save the date for Missoula Gibbs May 5th through the sixth. Missoula gives is a 24 hour online giving event. Remember to support? Tell us something. During Missoula Gibbs, May 5th through the sixth. Learn more at Missoula. gives.org.

Thanks again to our title sponsor, Blackfoot Communications. Learn more about Blackfoot over at blackfoot.com.

Thanks to our in-kind sponsors:

Joyce Gibbs: Hi, it’s Joyce from Joyce of Tile. If you need tile work done, give me a shout. I specialize in custom tile installations. Learn more and see some examples of my work at joyceoftile.com.

Marc Moss: Missoula Broadcasting Company including the family of ESPN radio, The Trail 103.3, Jack FM and Missoula’s source for modern hits, U104.5

Gabriel Silverman: Hey, this is Gabe from Gecko Designs. We’re proud to sponsor Tell Us Something, learn more at geckodesigns.com.

Marc Moss: True Food Missoula. Farm to table food delivery. Check them out at truefoodcsa.com

Rockin Rudys The go to place for everything you never knew you needed! Visit them online at rockinrudys.com

Float Missoula – learn more at floatmsla.com, and MissoulaEvents.net!

Next week, join us for the concluding stories from the “Stone Soup” live storytelling event.

Rachel Bemis: I just wanted to let you know that I told Ruth about your trip. And I let her know that your travel companion canceled and that you didn’t feel comfortable traveling alone.

Darius Janczewski: when I defect in 1984 in Italy, I don’t remember worrying about consequences of my, uh, of my defection. No desertion. I don’t worry about, don’t remember worrying about my family and my friends or seeing my country.

Katrina Farnum: I’m like busy. Right. I got stuff to do. I got places to be. And all of a sudden, like, that’s it, there’s no more fuel and I’m coming to a stop, like at the worst spot.

Jeff Ducklow: Little yellow markers are everywhere. I don’t know what the hell is going on. And I see maybe a thousand feet away what could be a trail, but it’s super steep embankment. And I start going down and it’s ridiculously steep.

Marc Moss: Tune in for those stories on the next Tell Us Something podcast.

Thanks to Cash for Junkers, who provided the music for the podcast. If you’re in Missoula, you can catch them playing live at The Union Club on May 14. Find them at cashforjunkersband.com

To learn more about Tell Us Something, please visit tellussomething.org