A Story and a Song (A Memory Palace/Song Exploder Crossover Event)

Last weekend, I was standing on a bluff above the ocean, and I felt one of my very favorite feelings. It's this feeling that I love so much that I have come to realize that I tell these stories here on the memory palace Largely because I'm chasing that feeling. Uh maybe trying to conjure in others too.

It's a thing that happens to me, and honestly, maybe only me. Uh you may not relate to this at all. But sometimes I'm flooded with this sense of the past and the present overlaying on top of each other in the same space. I'm suddenly aware Of myself there in the present moment as just one person living one life in the flow of time. It is heady and kinda dorky. Um but I love it so much. Um it happens most often when I am returning to a place.

I did on this particular weekend on this particular bluff in Rancho Palace Verdes, a town on the Southern California coast. And so there on this perfect California day, looking down and out and across the water from up there. I had both a sense of that place's history, um about how the resort where we were staying was once an amusement park called Marineland, and was there for decades until SeaWorld, its main competitor, a couple hours down the road in San Diego.

Was denied a permit from the United States government to capture any more live orcas. And so they went to Marineland and bought not just both the orcas that it had on display at the park, but the whole park along with it. And shut it down. And then I thought about how the hills and the fields around that spot were farmed by Japanese immigrants for nearly a hundred years, except for the ones in which those farmers were sent to concentration camps by that same United States government.

But how before that it was all ranch land for horses and cows. By an eastern land baron come west to extend his empire. Now before that it had been the land of the Tongva, who had fished and fish. Foraged and raised their kids therefore. And at the same time I thought of my own history in that space. How we used to go to the resort there kind of a lot when it first opened up, before it just got crazy expensive. It was so easy to picture my daughter there as a toddler.

Pool and then as a big girl holding my hand as we stepped on the rocks of the tide pools at Abalone Cove. And then a bit older. Farther out on her own, waving me over. Wanting to show me something she'd found in the water. And every time I stand there now and look out across the water that somehow seems to shimmer more there than just about anywhere else I know, and see Catalina Island on the edge of the horizon.

I always think about two different memory palette stories. One about Florence Chadwick, a swimmer of chance. And how since writing that particular story I will always know that Catalina is twenty two miles away, and Florence Chadwick swam there from the California mainland three times. And another story that um you're gonna hear in just a minute.

Forever when I look out to Catalina, I'm gonna think about my friend Rishi. I've known Rishikesh Heroi for something like a decade, I think. Um, we are colleagues at Radiotopia, mutual admirers of each other's podcasts. A few years back he moved quite close to me, and so now and then I will walk my dog up into Griffith Park. And she and I will stop and pick up Rishi and his dog on the way.

We'll talk about work and life and dogs and music. Talk a lot about music. New bands the others should check out. Uh music we make ourselves. And a while ago, um, Rishi sent me a rough recording of a song that he'd written, along with a text that told me that I was probably gonna recognize some of my influence in that song. And I did. And it made my day.

I literally and I have been thinking about this and haven't come up with anything better, so I literally am not sure that there is a nicer feeling as an artist than to have another artist say that your work has inspired them to make something of their own.

And so here's what's gonna happen. I'm about to play a story I wrote a couple of years back after visiting for the first time Catalina Island. Then after that you are going to hear from my friend Rishi, who will tell you a story about hearing that story. And how it played a small role in helping him finish a lovely song from his latest album, this little ripple of inspiration.

So a memory palace story, then Rich Case Herway, my friend and neighbor, who does the brilliant and pioneering Song Exploder podcast. Among a million other things, is gonna take over.

This is the Memory Palace, Namitimeo. A postcard from Catalina Island, twenty three miles off the coast of Los Angeles, summer twenty twenty three. The buffalo aren't here anymore. The guy in the Hawaiian shirt and sandals tells us down by the good bathrooms that are worth the walk down the hill from the campground.

He is happy to tell us that he has been coming to Cataline for years, but he is sad to tell us he has never seen its famous buffalo herd in the area toward which we are planning to hike. Not at this hour. Just as the morning ferry from San Pedro unloads and Boy Scouts pull on their packs and frat guys seal cases of third tier beer with duct tape to keep them safe in the back of the truck and the ride out to the cabins.

And so before we even begin our hike, we abandon our hopes of seeing the buffalo. Or biceps. Read on my phone on the boat ride over that they are the same thing. And so we make our way to another trail. cutting through the tiny seaside resort town of two harbours, past its cabanas and rustic pavilions in mid century beige, as the ice cream shop prepares to open up and As a bachelorette party, freshly disembarked, discovers that their weekend in the island coincides with wine fest.

with its unlimited pores, and a DJ spinning till midnight. that will echo among the hillsides that cradle the harbor, and the boats within it flying flags that signal their allegiance to America, California, the life of the pirate or the parrothead or no shoes nation, and the Bachelorette and her girls are superstows.

There will be ocean views on this hike along the cliff's edge, waves and white sails, a whale sighting if we're lucky. But the closest we will come on this day to spotting a bison are two signs we will encounter on the trail. One warning us to keep our distance in the unlikely event that we bump into one, and another telling the story of how they came to live on this island off which you can see Los Angeles, when there isn't too much smoke. The sign keeps the details vague.

And in line with recent scholarship that has called into question the old story that still makes its way into the Taurus brochures. That story goes that a small group of bison were brought over in 1925 by Paramount Pictures to appear in a cowboy movie called The Vanishing America.

But production costs ran over, and one of the line items that was cut from the budget was the one that would have paid for the bison to be brought back to the mainland. And so they were set free to roam in their new home so far from the range. But there is a newer story that I enjoy about how someone at the Catalina Historical Society tracked down a crumbling print of the vanishing American.

Threaded it carefully through the sprockets, and soon on the screen were flickering cowboys and wagon trains and ten gallon hats and everything you'd expect from Western except the Similar situation happened with another theory. This one about the buffalo being brought over to film a picture called The Thundering Herd, and then leaving the titular herd on the island for future productions.

Making the conveniently located Catalina with its rolling hills and parch grass valleys a veritable one stop shop for people in the business of making westerns. But as with The Vanishing American, someone tracked down the thundering herd and the story fell apart. That movie does indeed have a herd. But it is doing its thundering, silently, in a place that is clearly not Catalina. That is most likely Montana. And so we do not know exactly how Catalina's famous bison got.

Though the truth is probably somewhere in there. Some other movie or some enterprising producer importing them on Speck. Hoping the herd would entice filmmakers to cross the water. Pamela here in Highland. The event is free and open.

But in 1925, there was nothing running the mill about Buffalo. You, like me, have probably heard about the incredible rain and tragic decline of the American buffalo. We know the story, and the story you have heard is probably pretty close to the truth. At the beginning of the 1800s, there were somewhere between thirty and sixty million buffalo in North America.

the majority of which were in the Great Plains at the edge of the American West. And that thirty to sixty that vast range speaks to the unknowability of the number, as no one was counting, and how would they if they were? And also speaks of the way that number would fluctuate dramatically decade to decade.

Bison are the Western Hemisphere's largest lamb mammal, and they had their predators, wolves and humans, but with some herds as large as a hundred thousand animals, the threats to their population were planetary. Droughts and disease, harsh winters, the earth and its cycles, with which the population would rise and fall in some unheard harmony. But then in the early decades of the nineteenth century there were suddenly rifles and wagon trains.

and trains of steel and smoke and men within them shooting buffalo for sport. You've heard this. And the trains and the towns that built up along the tracks changed where and how the herds could move and migrate. limited their range, their access to food. Meanwhile hunting buffalo was becoming an industry, and men were making fortunes selling meat to the growing population in the east and in all those new places along the new train tracks.

selling bones for fertilizer, turning hides into clothing, as they had been forever, but this was new. And this was too much, much too fast. And making money making the belts that ran the machines that made the Industrial Revolution go. Buffalo skin is more elastic than cattle skin and it made for a better belt.

Made strong straps on the saddles of US cavalrymen, who spent much of the nineteenth century waging war on the people who lived alongside the Buffalo in their unknown millions for centuries before. While the military leaders in Washington didn't eliminate the buffalo to starve and subjugate the native peoples who relied upon their herds, not explicitly, not directly, but were surely complicit.

Because it was happening anyway, and they did nothing to stop it, because it was making their goals of conquest in the West easier to achieve, and they just had to sit back. Will the numbers mean anything? What is thirty to sixty million? Can we picture thirty to sixty million buffalo? Were the two million said to have been slaughtered in the single year of eighteen seventy?

Were the five point four million killed in three years between eighteen seventy two and eighteen seventy five I can't wrap my arms around numbers that large or hold in my head that five point four million individual animals. 1,000, 2000 pounds each. Five or six feet tall at their woolly shoulders. They could run thirty miles per hour, that care for their young, that can smell and hear predators up to two miles away. Five point four million killed in just three years time.

But I can picture three hundred Buffalo and five hundred. I can wrap my arms around those numbers if not quite get my head around the thought that in eighteen eighty four A single human lifetime from the start of the nineteenth century when some thirty to sixty million bison roamed North America as they had an equally unimaginable number since they first crossed the land bridge from Asia an unimaginably long time ago. In eighteen eighty four.

there were between three hundred and five hundred buffalo left alive.

Somewhere around 150 bison are somewhere around here on Catalina Island, and though we don't know precisely how the ancestors of this herd first arrived in the island in nineteen twenty five. We can say that they would not be here now without fifteen Buffalo, juddering down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and horse drawn wagons in nineteen oh seven.

They had been guided up wooden ramps by cattlemen with long sticks, under the supervision of William Horniday, the elegant director of the Bronx Zoo, and a friend of President Teddy Roosevelt, and a man named Madison Grant. The three men bonded at the tail end of the nineteenth century over their love of nature and animals and hunting them.

and being in wide open spaces, and drawing big manly breaths of mountain air scented with pine and lavender, and over the sadness they felt, about what had been lost to progress. For all their pride in railroads and westward expansion and the triumph of American capitalism and cities growing at the foot of the Rockies like wildflowers and white Christian families tilling land once controlled by heathens and savages.

Those achievements didn't come without costs. Where was the romance? There was something grand about that time. not long ago at all, just a blink of an eye when brave men set out to tame that land, vast and unknowable and wild. It was a shame to see it go. It was a shame about the buffalo. Remember the buffalo? How they thundered across the plains. A mighty animal, strong and noble, an American animal. And they set out to save it.

They founded the American Bison Society, one of the first organizations dedicated to the preservation of what we now call endangered species. They did what those organizations still do. They raised money, they got writers to take up their cause in the press. They lobbied Congress.

It helped a lot to have the President of the United States in their corner. And I need to say here, as this story that has grown so dark begins to climb up again toward the light, that if you are looking for inspiration in the American Bison Society, Look at their model. Look at their achievements. But don't go looking for heroes. It is so often a sucker's game when you are dealing with the giants of the early environmental movement in the United States.

so often so wrapped up in bogus race science, and this is the case here. If you read about the American Bison Society, you will read about its prime mover, Madison Grant, who loved the bison. He didn't want them to disappear, but his interest in their cause came primarily from his fear that the five hundred odd buffalo still around were interbreeding with cattle.

Just like the white race was interbreeding with non white people. He was a racist, he was a eugenicist. He came up with the concept of a Nordic or master race that needed to be preserved at all costs. And while he was saving the bison, he was writing a book that was so foundational to Nazi ideology and to the Holocaust. That it was the first non-German book to be reprinted by Hitler's government.

that Hitler himself wrote to Grant to tell the founder of the American Bison Society that, quote, The book is my Bible, and that book was entered into evidence to support the case of the Nazi defendants during the Nuremberg trials. fifteen bison in horse drawn carts in Manhattan in nineteen oh seven. Crowds cheering from the street. More hundreds at the train station. To watch the animals moved onto box cars.

Outfitted with hay and water and blankets to keep them warm as the train raced on through the night. These fifteen bison were on their way to Oklahoma. where a preserve had been established by federal law, and where dozens of their kind awaited them, and at every stop and along the tracks were people People at one time pioneered. Not resettled on reservations or in new cities in older. In the new world created by railroads and machines run by belts of buffalo.

People waited for hours to watch the trains go. They never thought they'd see a buffalo again. I will not see a buffalo today. I'll be back at some point. Try to time my hike better next time. Maybe sign up for this bison observation tour for eighty nine ninety five that I just found on a website listing the top things to do in Catalina. You just scroll down the page for a while. It's listed there between paddle boarding and mini golf. I saw some buffalo last spring.

My daughter and I took a quick southwestern road trip and went up staying in cabins on a bison preserve. A herd of about fifty animals left to roam free on six hundred acres of grassland and through stands of pinions and junipers and sturdy oaks. They're beautiful and so strange and fast. It was incredible to see them spring up and run. Then there was another larger herd, a bit down the road. at a ranch selling farm to table bison steaks.

There are about four hundred and fifty thousand buffalo today. Some are there for admiring from afar, to restore balance to Western ecosystems, to try to right a terrible wrong, to repair Yeah. Most are for eating. About twenty thousand live in what they call conservation herds. The other four hundred thirty thousand are raised as livestock. And about 150 are here on this island because someone wanted to make cowboy pictures. They're here somewhere.

Cared for by the good people of the Catalina Island Conservancy. Safe on this island without predators to smell, just the sea air and California poppies, diesel from the ferry, and hear the rumble of its engines. Bachelorette singing along to mister Brightside and Don't Stop Believing as the Winefest DJ goes on till midnight, and the waves rolling and rolling in.

When I started working on this album a few years, I decided I was gonna try writing in a new way. Instead of white knuckling my way through every idea for every song on my own, I wanted to collaborate. I decided I was gonna be like a satellite. Trying to pick up signals from anywhere and anyone. In September of 2023, I went to New York to co-write some songs with my friend Fen Lilly. I had had this image of riding a roller.

I was thinking about all the different times when I know I'm supposed to be having some kind of profound or beautiful or exciting adventure, but internally I'm having a completely different experience, something that doesn't feel I brought that little idea in as a possible starting And Fenn and I ended up sketching out something that felt promising. It wasn't totally there yet, but there was a line that we came up with that stuck with me. What if this goes on and on and on?

But then when I got back home to LA, I couldn't quite crack the song. Something about the verses and the way that I was trying to tell the story just wasn't totally But I held on to just that one line. And then a couple months later, I brought that line into a different writing session with my friend Uade. And she and I wrote a whole new verse with new melody and new lyrics. And that line, what if this goes on and on and on, kind of became the chorus. Mm-hmm. But the song.

And then a couple weeks later, I went for a walk. I live exactly one and a half miles away from the Griffith. There's pretty much exactly one hour to hike up there and back. So I do that a lot, especially when I want to clear my This was a Sunday afternoon and I had a couple of memory palace episodes saved up waiting So I put in my earbuds and I started making my way up through Griffith Park. And I put on episode 206: The Thundering Herd, The Vanish.

And a funny thing happens when I listen to the memory. I've been listening to Nate DeMeo's voice since 2012, almost 15 years. I know the sound and the cadence and the delivery. It feels like music to me. It feels like the sound of a band that I know and love. And it's not just that it sounds like music, it has the feeling of the kind of music that I want to do.

There's a combination of nostalgia and melancholy, but not in a detached way. There's a curiosity that makes you want to lean in and listen more closely. And when I hear a new episode for the first time, it's both exciting and comforting. And I was hit with all of that as I made my way up the path to the observatory. And I started listening to Nate tell the story of the displaced buffalo who ended up on Catalyst.

And something clicked. I felt like this story that I was hearing was lining up with something that I was trying to reach with the song that The buffalo who are on the island now are generations removed from the original herd. So they don't know anything else. But I was wondering if they could feel that displacement, if they could feel that something was wrong as they looked out at the expanse of the ocean.

I made my way up to the observatory and on a clear day like The view goes all the way across Los Angeles and to the Pacific Ocean, and far in the distance, you can see the silhouette of Catalina. I went home and I immediately wrote a whole new verse for the song about the Buffalo on Catalina. And I felt like this idea that I'd been carrying around finally found its home. goes on.

Rishi's album In the Last Hour of Light comes out on april twenty fourth, But that song Roller Coaster is available as a single on any platform you like right now. Or you can head over to rishices.co slash rollercoaster. I'll have a link in my show notes as well. My story, The Thundering Herd, The Vanish American, was originally released in August of 2023. It was written and produced by me, Nate DeMeo.

The show gets research assistance from Eliza McGraw. It is a proud member of Radiotopia, a network of independent podcasts from PRX, a not-for-profit public media company. You can learn more about the other Radiotopia shows, including Rishi's own Song Exploder and Home Cooking with his friend Simeen Nasrat, and the West Wing Weekly at radiotopia.fm. You can follow me on Instagram or threads at the Memory Palace Podcast. on Blue Sky at Nate Demayo, and on Facebook at the Memory Palace.

You can always shoot me an email at Nate Demeo at the memorypalace dot us. Uh and my book is now available in paperback, which is very exciting. So you can find it wherever you buy your books. And if you go to a place where you buy your books and they don't have it on the shelf, tell them about the book. Tell them to put it on the shelf. Those kind of things really matter. And their shelves will be all the more beautiful for it.

If you yourself are an independent bookstore owner and you would like to have me come and do a reading and signing, um hit me up and we'll see what we can work out. I really love, love doing bookstore events and um everywhere every time I've done one. It has really worked out well for the stores and the patrons, so hit me up. Let's see what we can do. Back with a new story soon.