Postcards from the Rogue Valley

We sat in a circle, eight of us, listening intently as the distant calls of moose in the Hoh Rain Forest filled the small room. ”Silence—the absence of manmade sounds—is an endangered species,” acoustical ecologist Gordon Hempton explained. “Quiet is the think tank of the soul.”

This spring I taught a class on podcasts at the nearby Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at Southern Oregon University, and Hempton’s conversation with On Being host Krista Tippett lit up our last meeting. 

I’ve fancied podcasts since 2014, when Sara Koenig’s investigation of a 1999 Baltimore high school murder became a break through hit, launching the award-winning podcast Serial. Today, reportedly one in four Americans listens to a podcast on a monthly basis and almost every day a new podcast—over 550,000 now—makes a debut.

I’m barely part of the craze. My list of favorite podcasts remains small—it doesn’t include news and politics—and most of my tips come from my thirty-something sons. “Mom, you have to listen to Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History,” Dan texted me one day. “It’s your kind of thing.” He was right and I added it to my favorites.

When I lived in New England, I listened to podcasts when in motion: driving Interstate 95, the artery that connects everything along the New England “corridor”; riding Amtrak if driving didn’t make sense; and, when we moved to Brooklyn, enduring New York subways where distraction or immersion are lifelines.

In Southern Oregon, I’ve shifted gears. I listen to a podcast every night—a pre-sleep ritual that gives me something to talk about the next morning, unless I fall asleep midway.

I pitched “Welcome to the Amazing World of Podcasts” as an introductory class and limited enrollment to 15 students. I explained that multi-tasking is the norm with podcasts—listening with ear buds while commuting or working out or cleaning up. Sitting still and listening in a group, as we would do, might be a stretch but we would figure it out.

I hoped our time together would be an experience of small discoveries, I said.

Thinking hard about what podcast to serve first, I landed on an episode from Radio Diaries called “The Last Place,” which explores a subject close to home for me and my over 60 peeps: getting old. Radio Diaries puts tape recorders into the hands of citizens—teenagers on the southside of Chicago, prison guards, gospel preachers, and more—and encourages them to tell their stories. In “The Last Place,” the storytellers are residents of a retirement home in Evanston, Illinois. 

A man gives up the keys to his Cadillac Deville. A woman shares her secret concoction to relieve arthritis pain. Down the hall, two octogenarians meet, court and decide to get married.

One of the most poignant segments in “The Last Place” begins: “It’s Betty [aged 96] again. I woke up early this morning, about 5:15. Each morning I get up with some pain and discomfort and I sit in the living room. The morning sun is coming through the windows.” Betty has a bad knee and the surgeon has told her there is nothing to do other than wear a full brace or amputate her leg. Fighting tears, she says, “Even if I do become more disabled, there are things I can do. I’ll be fine, not perfect but fine.” 

“How did they interview this woman at five in the morning?” Stan, a retired businessman and world traveler, asked.

I remind the class that these are radio diaries, not interviews. Betty and the others were volunteers, speaking into the recorder when and how they wanted, picking their own subjects. 

“Wonderful,” Stan said.

Later that day, I thought about my own work with young people in which I gave them cameras so that they could capture their daily life in images. It never occurred to me to hand them tape recorders and invite them to narrate their world.

At the next class, we listened to a popular episode from Ted Radio Hour called “Simply Happy.” TED Radio Hour presents “ideas worth spreading through renowned talks from the TED stage” and, in this episode, five happiness “experts” offered their secrets, including staying in the moment, slowing down, living with less, and practicing gratitude. Our group pushed back. While each secret had merit, they agreed, the experts have the wrong list. “I’d go with more friends than less stuff, any day,” says the woman next to me. Several chafed at Harvard psychologist and best-selling author Dan Gilbert’s assertion that most people overcome traumatic experiences in several months.

“What did we learn today?” I wondered.

“We make our own happiness,” Irene, an NPR fan, said. “Experts don’t necessarily hold the keys.”

At our third meeting, I began by asking who shopped at Trader Joe’s (there’s a store in Medford, 15 miles north of Ashland). Everyone raised their hand. 

Why?  More hands: 

“The staff goes overboard to satisfy customers.”

“The store brands are high quality.

“When it comes to choices, less is more.”

“The prices are reasonable.”

“I worry about getting stuck in a slow check-out line when I shop,” Stan said. “At Trader Joe’s, the staff direct the customers at check-out and level the playing field.”

If they were going to produce a story about Trader Joe’s, whom would they interview, given that the company’s owners are a German family, it’s privately held, and notoriously secretive? The group drew a blank.

“Let’s see,” I said as I pushed play on the Freakonomics episode, “Should America Be Run by . . . Trader Joe’s?”

We hear from two business school professors who have studied Trader Joe’s, a Trader Joe’s super-fan who lives in Seward, Alaska where there are no Trader Joe’s, and a former advertising executive who quit his job to work on the floor at the famed grocery store.

Before the class ends, we settle two points. One, that it’s nice to come across an institution—even if it’s just a grocery store—that seems to work well for several constituencies on several dimensions. Two, that Trader Joe’s is too collaborative and frugal to run America.

“I just can’t get the story out of my mind,” several students said the week after we listened to “Dr. Gilmer and Mr. Hyde,” another tour de force of investigative reporting by Sara Koenig of This American Life.

Step-by-step, guided by Sara Koenig’s inquisitiveness, the tale unfolds.  

Dr. Benjamin Gilmer gets a job at a rural clinic. He finds out he’s replaced someone—also named Dr. Gilmer—who received a life sentence after killing his own father. But the more Benjamin’s patients talk about the other Dr. Gilmer, the more Benjamin pushes to understand how a good man can seemingly turn bad.

He eventually learns that the first Dr. Gilmer suffered from Huntington’s Disease, uncovered in a simple DNA test, which explains his altered personality and sudden aggression. Daily doses of Celexa help clear Vince Gilmer’s mind but he remains jailed. Huntington’s is incurable.  

Stories like these, our group agreed, spark disbelief: Is this true? Did it really happen? Two doctors named Gilmer at the same rural clinic? 

Sadness follows. “It’s hard to get over the life lost, the injustice,” Lorraine, an author, said.

Our fifth class combined a first-person story from The Moth Radio Hour—live stories told in theaters and clubs across the country—with two essays from Modern Love, readings by notable actors from the popular New York Times column. 

In “You May Want to Marry My Husband”—read by Debra Winger—Amy Krouse Rosenthal, ten days shy of dying from ovarian cancer, invites other women to love her husband.

“I have been married to the most extraordinary man for 26 years. I was planning on at least another 26 together….He is an easy man to fall in love with. I did it in one day…. I want more time with Jason. I want more time with my children. I want more time sipping martinis at the Green Mill Jazz Club on Thursday nights… So why am I doing this? I am wrapping this up on Valentine’s Day, and the most genuine, non-vase-oriented gift I can hope for is that the right person reads this, finds Jason, and another love story begins….”

In his own essay two years later, “My Wife Said You May Want to Marry Me,”Ms. Rosenthal’s husband, Jason, writes:

“If I can convey a message I have learned from [Amy’s] bestowal, it would be this: Talk with your mate, your children and other loved ones about what you want for them when you are gone. By doing this, you give them liberty to live a full life and eventually find meaning again. There will be so much pain, and they will think of you daily. But they will carry on and make a new future, knowing you gave them permission.…”  

A man in our group quietly sobbed as we listened to the husband’s essay. Another student said that she’d found the essays life giving, not tragic. I marveled at the deep love between Amy and Jason—it showed what’s possible.

Krista Tippett’s interview with acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, “The Silence and the Presence of Everything,” seemed a fitting end to our six-course meal.

“Listening is not about sound. Don’t listen,” Hempton says. “Simply listen to the place. And when you listen to the place, you take it all in, which is exactly what we’re meant to do.”

In the discussion that followed, we talked about how the chatter of our own voices in our heads drowns out the world around us. Three members of our group have tinnitus and described how at night, their ears fill the silence with their own sound, sometimes unraveling sleep.

Back in Brooklyn, where I’d first heard the On Being interview with Hempton, I took my tape recorder to the streets to hear what I failed to hear as I walked to the subway each day, lost in thought: the police sirens, the garbage trucks, footsteps, nearby conversations, jet planes taking off from LaGuardia airport.

After hearing Hempton again, I brought my tape recorder to the greenways and trails that surround me here in Ashland. I heard the honks of geese overhead, the sad cooing of mourning doves across the meadow, the wind in the redwood tree behind our house, a dog’s bark.

One day over lunch, my friend Diana looked up from her sandwich and asked: “I don’t mean to be irreverent, but what’s the deal with you and podcasts?”

I put down my spoon. “They are food for thought,” I said.

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