Barret Baumgart: The Desert is a Haunted House

Speaker 1 0:01 I'm Frank Vitali, Columbia, Falls, Montana, and you're listening to the wild idea. Bill 0:08 And thank you for joining us for this very special and very spooky Halloween edition of the wild idea. Today we are joined by Barrett Baumgart, whose book yuck digs into a piece of the intersection of human nature and wild nature that we've not yet explored on the show, discussed and what it reveals about us. In the spirit of the season, we're going to try to sit in that place and explore his book and its setting, which happens to be Joshua Tree National Park, as we lean into the weirder parts of ourselves and the desert Anders, I know you're excited for this one. Anders 0:42 Oh, hi, Bill. Bill 0:44 God, Anders Reynolds 0:47 I love Halloween so much. You know, when I agreed to co host this project, way back when, one of the imaginary conditions I made up in my head and never told you about was that I was gonna demand we have Halloween episode and a Christmas episode. These are the High Holy Days for people like me who have no personality. So here we are, one of us dressed as Paul Bunyan and the other is babe the Blue Ox hosting our very first Halloween special. And never, in my wildest dreams, or would that be my wildest nightmares, did I think we'd have such a good guest or such a good topic? I'm really excited to explore this landscape through a darker lens. Bill 1:29 Yeah. Barrett Baumgart is joining us from Los Angeles. Barrett, thank you so much for coming on the wild idea today. Barret 1:35 Yeah, thank you guys. I'm really excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Anders Reynolds 1:38 The title of your book, yuck references the scientific name of the Joshua Tree, and it digs into one of the parts of nature that that repels us even as it reveals something true about ourselves. You know, my take is the book sort of ask us to grapple with the parts of nature that maybe resists our control, and the setting of your book couldn't be better for today's special episode, I think Joshua Tree is is the desert landscape that's grounded so much of your work. It's also the perfect staging ground for spookier, more unsettling encounters, because the desert isn't just vast and beautiful, it's also haunted in its own way, with ghost towns, Deadly Heat, venomous creatures, strange folklore, you know, that stretches all the way from UFOs to Yucca men. Anyway, we'll get into all that. But thanks so much for leaning into this weirder place with us today. Barret 2:31 Yeah, no problem. No. I love it. Joshu tree is definitely a weird spot. Happy you're having me for this Halloween Special. Anders Reynolds 2:39 Okay, before we start. I want to talk a little bit about your book, which enjoys the full title, yuck, the birth and death of the weird and wondrous Joshua Tree, yucca, breviola. I really enjoyed reading this book, which, you know, in format and narrative, is as tangled as the branches of a Joshua Tree. And to my mind, it seemed to be a metaphor for the surreal and grotesque development of Southern California and the over consumption that defines so much of the United States today. When did you stumble on that metaphor? Like, what inspired the book? Tell us a little bit about it. Barret 3:18 Yeah, the book initially began as a wedding favor, I was going to get married in Joshua Tree in 2020 and covid canceled it. And Joshua Tree being so hip and my mind constantly embedded in that landscape, I wanted to write something brief that would kind of justify why we were having this wedding out there. And so I started, you know, I thought I'd write some really brief lyric essay, kind of weaving some history, curating a bunch of facts for guests, kind of justifying why we were dragging them out of LA out to this wasteland most people from the East Coast had never heard, ever been to. And when the wedding was canceled, that research just continued, and I just kept uncovering layers, yeah, like an onion, stranger and stranger, and a lot of history that people hadn't, hadn't dug up, I couldn't find a lot of stuff I was finding in any other books. So that was exciting. I kept going the metaphor of overconsumption, and they get started when I found this, this really surprising history that really hasn't been reported or talked about, that the Joshua drew we're so obsessed with today, you know, kind of fastest growing national park, most photographed, super hip backdrop, you know, in the outskirts of LA for photography commercials, film on and on and on. I was so shocked to realize people, initially, you know, white Europeans, when they stumbled on this thing, they utterly loathed it. They hated it. They called it demonic, infernal, grotesque, monstrous, I just was able to dig up this vast treasure trove of like Victorian vitriol directed at this totally harmless kind of you might call it strange, odd looking tree, but people were vehemently opposed to its. Existence, and they started building paper mills, however improbable that sounds the outskirts of LA County pretty organized, financed effort to turn this thing into paper. And you know this, this thing really became a book when I when I connected the fact that this, this ultimately doomed paper production of the Joshua Tree was occurring simultaneously, to Los Angeles and Southern California being the most promoted object, the most promoted thing, really, in the history of the planet, to lure, you know, vast hordes of mostly Midwesterners out to, you know, the sunshine climate of Southern California. So the attempted eradication of the Joshua Tree in the 1870s 1880s coincided with the first, you know, really big push to turn America into a land of subdivided single family units in a suburban sunshine climate, long explanation there. Sorry, but yeah, that's, that's kind of where the where the bomb went off in my head, like, wow, this, these two, this juxtaposition was powerful and kind of, yeah, grotesque itself. Bill 6:16 I sort of love this idea that in the book, you know, the European mindset kept trying to just make some use out of it, because there was, like, you said, this Victorian like, I don't know, hatred for this tree or whatever. And it it like so many, almost like ghost stories. It resists eradication. Like it just like, could you talk about how they tried so many days. I mean, you talked about paper, but like, they tried to make something out of it so that they could basically use it, get rid of it, turn it into a resource for our benefit. And it resisted all that. And now, like you said, it's become this, like, beautiful backdrop in the 21st Century for Instagram or, you know, whatever it might be. Barret 6:59 Yeah, it's quite, it's quite beautiful and strange. Yeah, that at the end of all this, yeah, most people who go out there aren't aware of this history. And, you know, it's this, this lovely, kind of alien, strange, whimsical backdrop. But yeah, I mean, for for 150 years prior to most people's knowledge, yeah, we were trying to wipe this thing off the face of the planet. And I think the first push was, was the paper pilgrims crossing the desert. You come over a ridge, there's 1000s of these things. They're just standing there, looking creepy. What are they doing? You know, I'm sure somebody, you know, many people were thinking, how can we use these things, firewood probably would have been the first thing they tried. There's, there's a bunch of great quotes in the book about how, you know, they don't really burn. They just send out this noxious smoke, terrible for firewood, trying to turn it into paper. You know, there's a great line somewhere in there in the book about, you know, this tree that would bend to no purpose, ultimately, was saved by the elasticity of its fibers. So for paper, ultimately, this thing was so so gummy and flexible. It's not really wood, it's not really a tree. Didn't work as paper. It's too expensive, too difficult to work with more grotesque details. I mean, they tried to turn the bark of the Joshua Tree into splints during World War One, and I'm not sure how the scale of that effort, but imagine the horror of you know, tren warfare and World War One, and they're shipping out the arms and twisted arthritic limbs of the Joshua Tree to these mangled men, where, I guess the the bark somehow was was flexible only in one direction or something. So they tried to use it as a splint to, yeah, even more horribly, I guess it wouldn't sterilize, so it just created more infection. They tried to use the bark as wallpaper and homes. Somehow, there was some English guy who thought he could make like a beer resembling an English bitter out of its roots. And I think it just poisoned him and killed him. Didn't take off. And, yeah, ultimately, what do we have today? We have this I don't know what the right term is for the US economy, but Joshua Tree kind of encapsulates it. It achieves absolutely nothing for us except the reproduction of endless imagery simulating paradise and authenticity in the desert for millennials on Instagram. So here we are. Anders Reynolds 9:40 You know, Bill and I talk a lot about wilderness on this show, and in fact, much of Joshua Tree National Park is designated Wilderness. But as you and Bill have already mentioned here today, wilderness has meant something different on this continent than it is meant in the past, you know, than it has in the Bible or even to the pilgrims. Viewed it as this dark place of temptation, long before it became a space out there associated with manifest destiny. And I sent some passages in the book where you'd done some thinking about whether we turned that dynamic back around, and if the areas we once saw as Paradise might now reflect back to us some pretty nightmarish thinking about, you know, capitalism, or the current state of things, am I on track? Barret 10:29 Yeah, you're referring to just the the level of consumption, the tourism that's taking place, kind of in these, in these formerly sort of desolate, Anders Reynolds 10:37 yeah, it seems to be a representation of that way of thinking in some ways, right? Barret 10:42 Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's hard to escape that, yeah, that train of thought when you when you see the train of traffic at the gates of Joshua Tree, you know, people waiting an hour to get into the park during during peak season, or longer, and, yeah, you know, I don't know how much you guys want to go into that. It's kind of a complicated question. You know, you don't want to poopoo tourism and people's interest in nature and visiting these places, but yeah, it is. It is a little unsettling when you, when you pop out of the wilderness, as I have backpacking in the Sierra Nevada, and realize, Oh, I'm now walking down into Yosemite Valley, it's filled with smog. You know, that reversal over time from, yeah, nature is some, some, something satanic, dark, evil, to, you know, whatever transition happened through the transcendentalists and the Romantics and the Hudson River School. Now, you know, we want to, we want to immerse ourselves in nature again, and it's, we're destroying it in the process, possibly some of these spots. Bill 11:45 Yeah, it's so it's so interesting to think about that we saw it. We definitely the huge royal we the European culture saw wilderness as something to be tamed and made pastoral to put to our use, and here the Joshua Tree resists all of that. So then we make this huge shift into like, recognizing that some of these places have an esthetic value, if you will, for us, like just the presence of places, which also is fraught with peril when we think about like we refer to these as unpeopled lands, when actually they, they were a peopled lands, right? They were, there were people living on the lands, but, but in that switch now, we found another way to degrade the natural word. I'm gonna, I'm gonna overuse the overused phrase of love places to death. But Joshua Tree might sit at the tip of that spear of a place love to death, right? Yeah. Barret 12:42 I mean, it's kind of depressing to go and list, yeah, the ways that you know traffic, for example, all those cars, LA, you know that gasoline nitrogen into the atmosphere, fueling, you know, the growth of invasive grasses. You know, any, any kind of grass existing in the desert between those trees is just fuel for fire. The trees didn't evolve with fire. So, yeah, we're in a complex, new kind of ecological window here, where the trees are absolutely threatened by all of that attention. And yeah, you know, there's, there's been a lot of you know, throughout covid Before that, people climbing the trees, hugging the trees, you know, they're super fragile. You know, we love them. Don't touch them. Anders Reynolds 13:24 Let's dig into Joshua tree a little bit. The desert often gets described as empty, but it's full of ghosts, ghost towns, failed business plans, abandoned homesteads. Do you think that sense of desolation feeds into the uncanny, the maybe even the haunted quality of Joshua Tree? Barret 13:49 Yeah, definitely. I mean, yeah, the oldest experience of humankind probably is fear and fear of the unknown, and you get out into the desert and there's nothing there. It's empty. There's there's immediately a confrontation, a confrontation with, yeah, the outside, the unknown, the desolation and those abandoned spaces, yeah, I mean abandoned towns, the the emptiness of the desert. Yeah, it can be uncanny. It can be disturbing. You're forced to reflect back on yourself, your position in nature, your relationship to this landscape. Some people find it spiritual. Some people find it boring. In a certain mood, it can be quite disturbing. How did, how did we get here? Where did we come from? I that's kind of, you know, I'm not the first person to note that, hardly, but yeah, those, those are big questions that can be, can be scary and take you to some interesting places. Anders Reynolds 14:56 And speaking of scary, your book deals with just. US, but the desert has its own body horror built in. You know, venomous creatures heat that can kill plants with spines that Pierce. Do you think horror and arcology are more closely related than maybe we like to admit? Barret 15:17 I don't know. I mean, we've made how many horror movies have we made from Jaws to crocodiles, arachnophobia, I don't know, alien blobs, yeah, I, I don't know. I mean, yeah, nature. Nature is kind of a haunted house. We come from it. We're born of it. We still don't understand, you know, all the interrelations and the complexity. So, yeah, I feel like, you know, I mentioned the unknown before, yeah, the moment you step out into nature, into the jungle, even, even the sparse barrenness of a desert like you said. I mean lurking between, you know, Joshua Tree fronds, black widows, there's scorpions, there's rattlesnakes. Yeah, there's plenty of things that could kill you out there, Anders Reynolds 16:04 and it's not just the natural, but it's like the supernatural Joshua Tree has its reputation as a portal from UFO sightings to cult activity to, you know, trippy psychedelic experiences. Do you see the desert as a place where people are primed to encounter the supernatural? Barret 16:24 Yeah, I try and stay out of that, that culture, but I'm also super drawn to it, so I kind of love that question. But yeah, I mean the night sky. I mean, you know, the vastness of stars, the darkness, the lack of light pollution, there's, there's that in the desert. I'm not sure how you know this. This idea of like vortex is like Joshua Tree has special access to some sort of energy field or other dimension, all that kind of hippie New Age woo stuff is super concentrated in Joshua Tree. There's, you know, the Integratron is this famous thing. I guess a ufologist in the 1950s thought he made contact with some sort of alien race and was supposed to build this dome that was going to lure them down. And now, you know, you can pay tons of money to go to a sound bath in it on a weekend, and it's always booked up. Yeah, I'm not sure how Joshua Tree has attracted all of that energy, but it's all throughout the southwest. Obviously, you know it must have started with Roswell, and if you step outside of Joshua Tree, it's surrounded by military installations from 29 palms Camp David Fort Irwin. North. China Lake is further north. My first book is called China, like revolving around that base. So yeah, that intersection between ancient, desolate, unknown emptiness and peak military, industrial technological research, satellite dishes, big, scary, barbed wire. And the word liminal comes to mind, you know, the collision between those two extremes, that kind of interzone. I guess that's what the desert, especially in southern California itself, is. It's this, when you get outside the vast, you know, the vast like monolithic development of Los Angeles and Southern California, and suddenly you're in the emptiness of Joshua Tree, the Mojave, something, something gets something clicks and gets activated within you. That certainly explains some of the popularity. And then, yeah, in these desert landscapes you're, you're then bumping up against these, these spooky military installations. So all that fascinates me deeply. And, you know, you don't want to get too conspiratorial, but there's, there's plenty of weird, weird stuff out there, and these beautiful wilderness areas where the largest military installations in the world are quietly hiding. It's fascinating. Anders Reynolds 18:59 I love these stories. And I visited Joshua Tree for the first time, and the only time so far last year. And I was there, I heard some desert rats talking about the yucca man, this kind of Bigfoot figure unique to the Mojave Desert. Have you come across any stories about that, or any other strange folklore or stories that kind of capture the spooky side of Joshua Tree? Barret 19:27 Yeah, I've heard, I've heard talk of the yucca man. You can definitely look up Ken Lane desert Oracle. I think he's, he's more of a curator of of the high weirdness, and you know, is going to dig into the cryptids more than I more than I will, but, yeah, the yucca man. I mean, it's a, it's a, it's some sort of cryptid legend in the vein of Bigfoot might have origin. And you know, some, some Native American folklore. It's hard to imagine an enormous ape requiring that many calories subsisting out there. And that does. Little landscape for 1000s of years undetected, but apparently he's a big, eight foot, hairy human like creature who, in some, some case, I think, in the 1970s with maybe some kind of legitimacy attached to it. Some something, grabbed some military guy's rifle and and broke it in half. Is, so goes the story. So there's, there's one documented encounter, strong, strongly documented encounter with the yucca man Anders Reynolds 20:32 Barrett, one last story about Joshua Tree that I wanted to be sure to ask you about was the legendary story of Graham Parsons, and I hope I have it right about his friends stealing his body and maybe trying to burn it or successfully burning it near cap rock. And it feels like you know, it's a story that belongs to the same world. Your book explores how humans interact with nature in ways that are uncomfortable, messy, maybe even horrifying, quite frankly. So tell us a little bit about that, and maybe how you think stories like that color the way people see. You know, the desert or Joshua Tree. Barret 21:11 Yeah, Gram Parsons died in I forget the, I think it was room eight at the the Joshua Tree inn overdosed, I believe, on morphine. And prior to that, he told some of his best friends that if he died, he wanted to be cremated at Joshua Tree. And yeah, that story is pretty famous and pretty crazy. I think Parsons or one of his buddies, actually had a hearse, and when his body was delivered to LAX, some of the friends showed up in the hearse, impersonating funeral directors, hard to imagine today through conversation at LAX pulling up drunk in a hearse, talking to some random dude out on the tarmac, convincing him to hand over a dead body. But that happened, and they drove it back to Joshua Tree, and in the vicinity of CAP rock, poured five gallons of gasoline into the coffin and set it on fire. Not much of a cremation, but, yeah, it burned, leaving, I think about like 30 pounds of the body. So not totally successful. And yeah, I don't know it's a on the one hand, story of friendship, and, you know, loyalty on the surface, but these, these guys were drunk. It was kind of an irresponsible act. I'm not you know, it wasn't a respectful cremation. There's different ways to come at it and criticize it, but it's a famous story and lovely in some ways, but, you know, not super respectful to the park, the environment and maybe the grand Parsons himself. But yeah, that's become a huge, huge piece of lore out there. And you know, many people travel out there to make a pilgrimage and pay their respects and that that room at the Joshua Tree Inn is definitely a desirable kind of spooky place to stay for certain people. Anders Reynolds 23:06 Well, irresponsible, but potentially well meaning acts are probably nothing new to Joshua Tree. I mean, if you read your book, you know they've been going on for years, and they probably will continue to go on for years and years. Barret 23:18 Yeah, it's certainly a crazy story, pretty, pretty badass of those guys. You can see why it remains. Yeah, a very famous story. It's so improbable. Bill 23:27 Following in the following is the tradition of Edward Abbey's buddies taking his body out into the desert and burying him. And now that creates the lore of where is it exactly that they buried Edward Abbey's body out in the in the desert, in Utah. I think it's interesting that, like you said, there's the mythology sort of goes beyond Joshua Tree to the desert southwest in general. And again, a lot of that probably is related to proximity to military bases and unexplained lights that you know probably come from military activity. I think it almost extends to sort of taking us beyond even just the southwest, the public domain, our public lands, these places that are dark and they open themselves up to this right like I spent a huge chunk of my life in western North Carolina, and there's the famous Brown Mountain lights. There's even Forest Service signs that try to sort of talk about the different interpretations. These are these sort of glowing orbs that you could see on brown mountain from, honestly, from sort of like places like the Blue Ridge Parkway and in other places. And I think there's just something to this idea that we go out into these dark, unknown places because we're so used to, if we're uncomfortable, we flip a switch, and now there's light and we can see everything that gives rise to this, but also think that's part of the draw, right? That's sort of that we're drawn to the uncomfortable, if you will. And if that means we turn that into ghost stories, that's okay. That's part of what this part of what being uncomfortable and being out there is all about, in my mind. Barret 24:58 Anyways, yeah, it's. Interesting parallel. People will always ask, you know, you like horror films or roller coasters? Why do you want to do that? Why do you want to feel uncomfortable? I mean, it's an interesting parallel to draw, to wilderness. Yeah, like plenty of people, you know, I tell them, yeah, I worked for the Forest Service, and we had a 90 pound pack, and I'm carrying rock hammers and iron bars to smash boulders. And even if you're not doing that, you're going backpacking, you're sitting on a rock for five days, you're carrying your own food, and you're You're shitting in a bag. Why would you do that? It's a really good question. I think we do. We do benefit and enrich ourselves or or at least we're drawn perversely back towards something we've lost an encounter with the unknown, with nature, something bigger than ourselves. And the intersection of wilderness in horror is like we're kind of, you know, getting toward is, is a real thing. I we're seeking an encounter with something, you know, in the most general sense, greater than ourselves. And, yeah, sometimes, you know, maybe directly frightening. You know someone who spends their life climbing mountains. You know the mountaineer, Wilderness Explorer. Yeah, what are they chasing? I don't know. It's a tough thing to explain. Bill 26:14 I think, as we come to the close of this very special Halloween edition, I wanted to ask both of you, we've all spent time in the backcountry, maybe, maybe kind of impromptu here, but I'll start with you. Barrett, can you share maybe one of your most sort of surreal, maybe even, shall we say, scary experiences in the backcountry that you want to share on this Halloween edition of the wild idea? Barret 26:40 Oh, man, that's such a good question. So many, I think the one that I usually come to most often that was that was the most chilling. I was backpacking in Big Sur, and we'd hiked in to a hot spring, timed it so there would be nobody out there. Monday, me, my buddy, are totally alone on a river, narrow trail, 2030, feet above a creek, leaving the hot spring, total dark, not no moon, barely see the stars. Canopies so thick overhead. We're walking this narrow trail uphill, up the river, back to where we had this tiny camp. And my headlamps on, it's sketchy, it's cold. You know, the trail is just this, this 1010, inch wide thing along the river, and in my headlamp, I see another light in the distance, and I begin to, you know, mentally prepare this weird encounter on the trail. I'm gonna, this is the first person we've seen. What the hell? Why is there one dude with a headlamp, like, half a mile away on this sketchy trail right now, and I'm watching this, you know, adjusting all right. There's gonna be an odd encounter stepping past this person in the night, and then this light slowly floats up, like just 100 150 feet to the top of the trees and sinks back down again at this slow speed. And I'm stopping there just like, What the hell did someone just throw their headlamp up and it's got a parachute on, and sinking back down. And I keep walking. It rises again to about the same height. And I stop, and I'm lifting my head up and down, looking at this light. And I can see my own beam somehow is interacting with this light, like my own white light is kind of worming around on this tiny little orb. And long story short, I realized that this was this, the huge eyeball of some animal, just like 10 feet in front of me, reflecting my headlamp back to me, and it had been lifting and lowering its head studying me as I approached. And I my skin went cold, and I started involuntarily singing like a, like a, like a child, as this thing, like growled and bolted up like the vertical bank along the creek. And I was scared shitless. My friend didn't even see it. He didn't even know it had happened. As I went on singing with, you know, for no, for no apparent reason, I was spooked. Anders Reynolds 28:59 God, what's creepier? It being real or it not being real. I mean, man, Bill 29:08 so Andrews, how are you going to follow that up? I want to hear your most scary encounter. Anders Reynolds 29:12 I can't look I've never had an encounter I would call supernatural. I've never seen a ghost, but I have been been in a situation where someone I was with was absolutely convinced they had and I think the important thing was that I believe them, even if I didn't see it. But I went on gaming trip with a few buddies that involved pretty long drive down like a graveled forest road or two before we got to the campsite, and a friend of mine kept insisting that he was seeing the same person standing at each intersection that we hit like each time we would move from one forest road, you know, to take a ride or a left and drive on another, he'd ask if we. Saw a guy standing there, and he would say it's the same guy as earlier, and it was pitch black. We get to the campground, we're like, setting up. My friend is, like, beside himself, and the other two of us that are on the trip are like, Oh, we don't see anything, but it feels like, you know, we shouldn't just like erase his experience, and so we're trying to, like, validate what he's saying, but ensure him that it's all okay. But he was, I mean, he was ready to climb out of his skin and out of the car. He was absolutely convinced that, you know, somehow this man was showing up despite the fact that there were miles and miles between each encounter. So it was, that was pretty, that's pretty spooky. Bill, you must have one too, right? Oh, I mean, Bill 30:40 I have several from the back country. I think this the most scared I've ever been in the back country. This won't sound like much of a ghost story, but when I was about 14 or 15, my family, extended family, my aunt and uncle and my dad and I took a buddy of mine. We were hiking You know, one of my favorite places in the world is the black mountains in North Carolina. And we were hiking up this trail. It was going to be a 12 mile day. It was, it was six miles with about 3500 feet in elevation gain, and then about six miles across the spine of the black mountains, which are the highest mountains in the eastern United States. And this was, I'm old enough that we weren't wearing wicking fibers. We were wearing jeans and cotton T shirts. You know, this was like July in the South. It was a hot day as we were making that 3500 foot, you know, six mile hike and but the blacks, as they often are, were, you know, inside a cloud. So once we reached the red line, ridge line, we went from like 90 degrees to damp and 58 degrees. And my buddy, my 14 year old friend, he didn't get covered up fast enough, like he, you know, I think we had actually just gotten down to, like, having jeans and our hiking shoes on had been such a sort of sweaty climb up, and he went hypothermic. I mean, he went like, out of it, hypothermic, like he was slurring his words, incoherent, and the terror on my dad's face when he realized what was going on, of course, we got him covered up. We tried to figure out a way to get a fire going. It was like so we were inside a cloud. It was everything was soaking wet, dripping wet. It's part of the joy of that place and the thought of that we were either six miles and 3500 feet of elevation loss to get him out that way, or six miles across the up and down, and that trail goes up and down over every peak of the of the of the Black Mountain Range. And I thought we were stuck there for the night with a guy who was in really bad shape. And it was really scary. Obviously, it's not sort of the macabre or or whatever, but it was a scary moment. We managed to get him moving, which, of course, warmed his body up, and about halfway out that six mile hike across the ridge line, you know, he was kind of back to normal. The funny thing was, my uncle and my cousins, who'd gone ahead to try to get help in case we needed it, the Rangers really wouldn't come after us. They wanted to wait till dark to see if we got out, but they had convinced my uncle by that point, but that my buddy was on drugs. Was it drugs? And no, it was. It was full on hypothermia. But, man, it was, it was scary. We were in a dark, damp, wet place with somebody who was not well, and it was, it was a scary moment, for sure. Well, Barrett, I want to thank you for joining us. This has been a great conversation to have around the the end of October and our and Andrew's wonderful holiday of Halloween that he enjoys so much. Those of you enjoying this conversation, you know we've been talking with Barrett Baumgart, author of the book Yuck, the birth and death of the weird and wondrous Joshua Tree yucca. Raviola. Barrett, just thanks so much for joining us. This has been great. Anders Reynolds 33:41 Yeah, Barrett, this was a treat, not a trick. So I really appreciate you spending time with us today. Everybody go pick up a copy of yuck. I promise you'll enjoy it. And thanks, Barrett. Speaker 2 33:52 Yeah, that was super fun. Thank you guys. And Happy Halloween Bill 33:57 coming up on the wild idea podcast, we study a complicated part of the history of environmentalism. We tackle the real challenges of humans living in large carnivore habitat and how management decisions can have tragic consequences. And we travel to the American prairie. We also get to chat about beasts of Bren, the real heavy lifters of American wilderness, with mule dragger. If you like the podcast, we hope you'll do two things besides subscribing, and please do subscribe. Give us a review in your favorite podcast app, and we hope you'll take a minute to recommend this to a friend or a colleague. Even take a minute to send them a link. And if you want to go deeper on what we're doing here, sign up for our newsletter at the wild idea.com and we look forward to seeing all of you on down the trail. Speaker 3 34:39 The wild idea is a production of wild idea media and hosted by Bill Hodge and Anders Reynolds. Production and editing by Bren Russell at podlad Digital, support by Holly wilkeshevsky At day pack digital. Our theme music Spring Hill Jack is from railroad Earth and was composed by John skihan. Our executive producer and ring leader is Laura Hodge. You can find the wild idea wherever you listen to or download your favorite podcast. If you have a minute, please take a minute to give us a rating, and if you really like us, we hope you'll subscribe. Learn more about us at the wild idea.com you. Transcribed by https://otter.ai