This week we present stories from two people finding their boundaries with the wild world of animals.
Part 1: Adam Selbst competes with tigers for the attention of his mother.*
Adam Selbst is a writer and graphic designer from Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He hosts the monthly Big Irv’s Storytelling Roadshow and has been performing around NYC for the last 8 years. Adam lives in a bodega art collective with 64 other people and in his spare time he enjoys being slowly poisoned by an ancient, weird mold in his shower and throwing elaborate dinner parties.
Part 2: Weighed down by the burden of leadership as she supervises the construction of a telescope, Erika Hamden finds comfort in an unlikely spot.
Erika Hamden is a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Arizona. She develops UV detector technology, builds telescopes, and observes galaxies and hydrogen all over the universe. Her last project was a UV telescope that flew on a high altitude balloon. She is currently leading a team working on a proposal for a UV space telescope. When she isn't building or thinking about telescopes, she has a serious yoga practice, is learning to fly a plane, and loves hiking in the desert around Tucson. Before she went to grad school, Erika worked as a chef for a year. She is still really into eating. Erika is interested in sharing stories about how hardware gets built and the very human personalities that are behind scientific discoveries.
* We wrote a follow-up post about calculating how many tigers are kept as pets. It’s surprisingly difficult!
Episode Transcript
Part 1: Adam Selbst
So my parents have just retired and they moved down to North Carolina. They’ve been there about a week before I got the phone call from my mom.
“Adam,” she said, “You're not going to believe this but in North Carolina it’s legal for us to own a tiger.” It had been one of my mother’s lifelong dreams to own a tiger.
So my family was well known for collecting strays. We always had a couple in the house. My mother loved strays. The first one to attack me was when I was learning how to crawl. It was our cat Patience and I had blundered into her. I’m 45 now. I still have a faint scar on my face from this attack.
A lot of parents, upon having a pet hurt their first son so badly, would have sided with the child. That isn’t how things worked in my house. To quote my mother, “I think Adam probably learned his lesson. Besides, what are we going to do? Get rid of the cat? That wouldn’t be fair. The cat was here first.”
In the end, they decided not to get a tiger, not for any of the reasons that you would think but it’s because they already had two cats and they didn’t know if those cats were going to get along with the tiger, and that wouldn’t be fair because those cats had been there first.
It’s fine now. My mother made up for it by working for the local tiger rescue organization. What is a local tiger rescue organization? A lot of people ask me. That’s fine. I’m prepared for this question. I'll answer it.
You see, since it’s not illegal in North Carolina to own a tiger, a lot of people think this is a really cool idea and they go out and do it. Here’s the thing. It’s actually quite expensive to own a tiger, first of all. Second of all, I don't know if you guys know this, tigers are actually quite dangerous. Third, and most importantly, once you own a tiger, they're actually pretty hard to get rid of.
Adam Selbst shares hi story with the Story Collider audience at Caveat in New York City in July 2019. Photo by Zhen Qin.
But it’s okay because in North Carolina they’ve got a system. If you have a tiger that you don’t want, what you do is you get it into your car and you drive out to a rural section of North Carolina and you just let it out. I know, but the system works. You can’t argue with it. If they had a tiger they didn’t want then they don’t.
So my mother started volunteering for this organization that would go around and pick up all the tigers that had been let out and would bring them back to their compound that’s like several acres and care for these tigers for the rest of their lives. The name of this organization, by the way, is called Carolina Tiger. They are truly doing God’s work. You should give them money. I do.
I spent a lot of time at Carolina Tiger over the past few years and I had a favorite tiger. My tiger’s name was Jellybean. Jellybean was a white tiger. I don't know if you know much about white tigers. They're pretty rare in nature. It’s a recessive gene. You need two recessive genes to come together and make a… I don't really understand that biology but it happens about once in every 10,000 tigers in the wild.
But white tigers are in demand at circuses and magicians and stuff like that so what they do is breed them. And the only way that you can breed white tigers in captivity is by breeding two white tigers together and, in reality, that means breeding siblings together and that means breeding a parent with their offspring. As a result of this, most white tigers are severely inbred. They are cross-eyed, they're blind, they have epilepsy, they have club feet, but not Jellybean. Jellybean was perfect and he loved me.
So a couple of years ago, I went down. I had just bought a new camera and I wanted to take some pictures of jellybean. As I approached the enclosure, he came running up to greet me. I love Jellybean. There was only one problem with visiting him, which was his enclosure-mate Tex.
Tex was one of the more difficult tigers at Carolina Tiger. The rumor I heard was that Tex was taken off of the main tour after charging an entire class, a kindergarten class of five-year-olds creating a mass panic. Twenty kindergarteners wet their pants at the same time. It was chaos. Tex is, what we say in tiger parlance, an asshole.
And this particular time I went down to take pictures of Jellybean and Tex, thankfully, was nowhere to be found. So I just stepped over the rope that keeps you away from the enclosure. It’s fine. My mother works there. I walked up to the face of the cage and the way these enclosures work it’s a chain link fence but it’s real floppy, and they keep it really floppy because there's no top. If they're stiff the tigers could crawl over and they would get out. So they keep it floppy and the tigers can’t get out.
So I leaned against the fence, really lean in and Jellybean was so happy to see me. He was chuffling and making noises. Chuffling is sort of like what tigers do. It’s like a tiger version of purring.
Adam Selbst shares hi story with the Story Collider audience at Caveat in New York City in July 2019. Photo by Zhen Qin.
So I’m taking pictures and he's posing and everything is going great. Then, out of the corner of my eye, my peripheral vision, I see some flashes of movement. So I look up but I don't see anything. There's nothing. So I turn my attention back to Jellybean and now he's rolled over and his paws are going and he's making all these noises. We’re having a great time but again I start seeing movement out of the corner of my eye. I look up and, again, there's nothing.
And I peer really hard into the distance and it takes a moment but finally I see it. There in the green undergrowth all the way back in the enclosure, a little patch of orange. It’s completely motionless except for every once in a while I see the flicker of a tail, like when you see a housecat stalking a bird and he can’t quite contain himself. That was Tex. Tex was hunting me. What an asshole.
So I turned around to say to my father, “Hey, Dad, look. Tex is stalking me.”
And this is when I learned two really important things about tigers. One, about Tex individually and another thing about tigers in general. What I learned about Tex was how he got his name. Tex is from Texas. Tex’s previous owner kept him chained 24 hours a day by a short five-foot chain to a tree and he made his money by charging people to come over and take pictures of Tex. Tex only hated one thing more than cameras and that was photographers.
The other thing that I learned about tigers in general is that they're really smart. They will never attack you if you're looking right at them. They'll wait until you turn your gaze away to say something like, “Hey, Dad, look. Tex is stalking me.”
Now, I know that tigers are fast. I knew that beforehand. David Attenborough taught me that when I was like ten years old. But believe me, you have no idea.
I turned back and Tex had closed the distance and was already in the air. It was like being hit by the world’s softest locomotive. I flew backwards several feet and landed in the dust and my whole family came running over to see if I was okay and help me up and dust me off. Everybody, except my mother who blamed me.
She stalked over to me with anger flashing in her eyes and she said, “This wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t acting so much like prey.”
And everybody burst out laughing. They thought it was the funniest thing. Everybody called me prey for the whole rest of the weekend. I forgot my glasses in a restaurant and I went to go run to get them and my father called out, “Look out, it’s a tiger!”
And they all laughed when I spun around and tripped over my feet. And it would have been funny had I not just been attacked by an actual tiger in a state that has a very legitimate tiger problem. I didn’t think it was funny at all.
I got really angry and I said, “What are you talking about, Mom? No, no. How are you taking his side? This is unfair. Listen. In this family we have rules, goddammit. I was here first this time. Tex? He's some asshole you just met. I was here first. How dare you!”
But it didn’t work at all. Everyone thought it was hysterical and all weekend I was furious and they were having the time of their lives.
A few years passed and going on the website of Carolina Tiger I saw that Tex had passed away. Naturally, I called up my mother to gloat.
And while we were talking, I took the opportunity to tell her, “You know, that really hurt my feelings because it’s not just Tex. It’s every animal we've ever had. You never defended me. You always took their side.”
And I heard her sigh really deeply and she said to me, “You know what, Adam? I’m not always going to be here to fight your battles for you. At a certain point, you're just going to have to learn to stop acting so much like prey.”
Thank you.
Part 2: Erika Hamden
By mid-afternoon, the falcon wanted to eat me, and it was shaping up to be the best day ever in the worst place I've ever been. Now, the fact that the falcon was six inches tall, a baby and didn't even know how to fly yet meant that the odds of getting eaten were actually pretty low, although I think if you asked the falcon he would definitely disagree.
So why was I in a staring contest with a baby falcon in June 2018? Because, as you just heard, my job is to build telescopes. Technically, my title is ‘professor’ but I spend most of my time either building telescopes, coming up with new telescopes to build, or inventing things to make the telescopes better. It's a great job and it's taken me all over the world but sometimes I end up in places that are best characterized as the ends of the earth.
And that is the reason why I was in the middle of nowhere New Mexico in this tiny town that is really trying its best called, it really is, called Fort Sumner. The telescope that I was there to build is called the Faint Intergalactic Medium Redshifted Emission Balloon, which we call FIREBALL for short, which is a great name for whiskey and a telescope.
FIREBALL is designed to observe huge clouds of hydrogen gas that we think surround most galaxies. And it does those observations from the very top of the stratosphere on these giant balloons that it just hangs from. My job there was to lead the team of about thirty people who built FIREBALL. And NASA does these balloon launches from a few places on earth. Antarctica is one of them, but they're all really remote because the last thing that you want is for one of these telescopes to land on your house.
Erika Hamden shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Lyric Hyperion in Los Angeles. Photo by Mari Provencher.
Fort Sumner is a very remote place in Eastern New Mexico. It's a town of about 800 people. I say it's the worst place ever but it's really my job that's there that's the worst place.
The town itself is strange. The closest reasonable grocery store is about an hour-and-a-half drive. It's two-and-a-half hours to Albuquerque. A couple of years ago, there were four restaurants and now there are only two.
And there's not much to do. There's a bowling alley but it's closed unless you pay to open it, and you have to rent every lane for the entire night. But there are only six lanes and so it costs you 80 bucks but it's giving you a sense of the bar that you have to cross to have a fun time in this town.
The bowling alley is owned by the pharmacist who also owns one of the two planes that are parked at this tiny municipal airport where we do most of the work. The work itself is hard and it takes a lot of my mental capacity. And my job there is mostly doing day-to-day operations, so I figure out all the tests that we need to run, I come up with the schedule for them, I make sure that everybody is doing the things that they're supposed to do, and I try to anticipate all of the problems that they might have and then solve any of their problems.
I also have to deal with the balloon people, which is not people made of balloons but the NASA people whose job it is to actually get these giant balloons off the ground.
The work is stressful and I want to do a great job at it so I spend a lot of time trying to control everything and making sure that any problem that happens, I can solve it. And I'm pretty good at solving problems. Some of the problems are the things that you might expect. A component breaks and we need a new copy to make sure we can do the work the next day. So I call a company and I can talk them into making an exception for us and overnighting something at 5:00 p.m. so we can get it and keep going.
Some of the problems are very silly. We work with a number of French guys and one of them was complaining to me that he was so tired of eating white bread and cheddar cheese. And so I had French cheese overnighted in from New York City so he didn't have that problem anymore.
And some of the problems are with the balloon people. I need to make sure that they prioritize our tests over the other telescopes that are also there waiting for a launch opportunity. My preferred method for getting people to do what I want is bribery with food or with telescope-themed t-shirts, or just generally being amazing and fun to be around. But sometimes that doesn't get you the things that you want and so the alternative is you have to be able to bring the hammer down on people.
So I've had conversations where I tell them that I will burn the building to the ground if they don't do the thing that I need them to do. And when you tell somebody that, you really have to mean it.
It's a funny story to relay now but it's actually not a great experience to go through to be in that state where you tell someone that you are going to burn it all down. That actually, I think, encapsulates my experience in Fort Sumner running this project that I'm under so much stress to get everything right the first time, I'm trying to control so many things and it makes me into a person that I don't really love. And so it's into this environment that the baby falcon arrives.
So one morning at the airport, there was all this commotion around the hangar where we work. I had been in a meeting previously so I didn't see the stuff that happened before, but for days beforehand we had been hearing these little bird noises, like chirp, chirp, chirp up in the rafters of the building. We figured some birds had made a nest maybe above one of the doors but we didn't have the time or really the inclination to go figure it out.
One morning, the team had opened up the hangar doors to bring some equipment in and, all of a sudden, this baby falcon swoops down and lands on the spectrograph tank. The French guys caught it.
Well, first, they spent a while calling each other and the falcon idiots, in French. They caught the bird before it could scratch any mirrors or pull any wires out or anything and they put it in this white NASA baseball cap that one of the grad students happened to be wearing. They brought it outside and they were arguing over what to do with it and this is when I showed up from my meeting and I am the person who solves every problem so my list of things to do just got one item longer - figure out what to do with this baby falcon.
The falcon was obviously very stressed out. It was occasionally screaming at us and its claws were all clenched and so I figured the first thing we need to do is to make it more comfortable and get it out of this very on-brand NASA hat.
So we get a cardboard box and we fill it up with lab wipes, because that's the closest thing that we have to comfy towels, and we give it a little Petri dish of water and we lay the falcon down in the box.
This is the first time I've ever seen an animal like a falcon up close and it was incredible. The falcon was truly gorgeous. The feathers had this beautiful pattern on it. It was an American kestrel, if you've ever seen one of those. And it was light, so light and it was fluffy and just perfect. It was obviously also very upset so we moved it to a part of the airport away from where we were working so it could be in like quiet.
About once an hour I would go out to check on it and see how it was doing, and for the first few hours it was still on its side, like still really upset. Then in the early afternoon, I go out and it is no longer on its side. It is standing up in the box.
Erika Hamden shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Lyric Hyperion in Los Angeles. Photo by Mari Provencher.
And I'm starting to approach and it is staring at me over the top of the box. And it is so angry. I've never seen a creature that wanted to eat me so badly. And I think if it were bigger and could have flown, it would have definitely given it a try.
The intensity of its stare was unlike anything I've ever seen before. It was like stop-you-in-your-tracks-and-make-you-reconsider-all-of-your-life-choices breathtaking.
I pause here to say that I really like the project and I am not much of a crier but I cry almost every day that I am in Fort Sumner. And I put so much pressure on myself to be perfect and to walk this tightrope of getting everything right the first time, and looking at the falcon and its incredible wildness made me think about why I do that to myself.
The falcon doesn't give a shit about planning. The falcon didn't decide that today was the day he was going to learn to fly and then come up with a multi-pronged strategy to make sure that it did it right the first time. The falcon just jumped out of its nest, it crashed, it got super mad at some humans and then it tried again and eventually figured it out.
Seeing the falcon and its wildness and ferociousness, it made me want to be like that, it made me want to be wild. And so while I stand there and look at it, I thought to myself, “Well, maybe I could take this falcon and keep it with me. And I can tame it and I can become wild while I tame it and take some of its wildness for myself. And people tame falcons and I am good at a lot of things, so I think I could do it. And I could just add one more item to my incredible list of things to do, tame the baby falcon that I've stolen.”
But then I think a little more about that and if I tame the falcon, I'm going to make it more like me and I don't want it to be like me. I love it because it is wild and crazy. And if I make it like me, I am flawed and anxious and I don't even know how to fly. And I love it because it is wild and I want it to stay that way. So even though it makes me sad, I turn around and I go back inside and get on with my day.
The next time I go out to look for it, the box is empty. Later that evening when we're leaving, I see the falcon jumping around and trying to take off. Then the next morning, it's swooping around the parking lot. And then for days afterwards, every time I would go outside, I would look up into the sky to see if I could see my falcon. Months later when we went back again to launch the telescope, some days I would see three falcons soaring above the airport and I would know that one of them was my baby falcon.
We did eventually launch the telescope. After a lot of years of work and a lot of things that I tried to control and things that I did control but, in the end, the balloon had a hole in it and we didn't get the data we wanted and we have to try again. Before the falcon, I think I would have spent a lot of time thinking about everything that I did wrong and what things should I have controlled that I didn't control, and how did I fail. But after the falcon, I know that I did the best that I could. We had to let the telescope fly away and see what happened.
And, to quote Apollo 13, it was a successful failure in that we learned a lot and nobody died but we didn't do the one thing that we were really trying to do. But when I think back on it, I learned a lot. I learned that I can get through anything and I can do it with or without a plan with or without a strategy. And I also learned that I can be fearless if I want to be. I can do things even though they scare me because that's being brave. And I can do things like this right now.
I can actually learn to fly in a plane. I don't have any wings yet. I can come up with an idea for my own space telescope even though it's probably not going to happen, but I can try anyway. I can move to a new place for a new job and try to build a new life there even though doing that scares me. And I can be wild and fearless like the falcon. I can fall from a great height and know that I can come back from it.
Next year when we go back to launch that telescope again, I will be like the falcon and I
know that it will be easier. Thank you very much.