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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where every so often we get to share something brand new and very exciting with you. And that means that today you will be listening to the world premiere of survival correspondent Blair Braverman's new podcast, What to Carry, What to Burn. I'm so excited about this. I got to be the guest on this inaugural episode.
It is about the friendly Arctic and the survival of Ada Blackjack. If you've been listening to the show for a while, then there's a very good chance that Blair has guested in some of your favorite episodes, as well as mine, including Survival in the Andes, Chris McCandless, Erin Walston, The Aural Inn, and my personal favorite, Balto.
Blair is an amazing writer and journalist and my favorite storyteller in the world. And now we get to listen to a whole podcast where she will tell us stories and bring us to that campfire that we go to whenever we get to hear from her. And I'm so happy to be around this crackling fire, listening to the story with you. This episode was edited by Blair Braverman.
And if you want to hear the second half of Ada's story, which I also recorded with Blair, and to subscribe to the rest of the series, you can visit the links in our show notes. I'm so happy you're here. I'm so happy to get to share this brand new, amazing show with you. And now here is the very first episode of What to Carry, What to Burn.
I'm going to hire this untrained 20 year old as the captain of my expedition. What could possibly go wrong? Welcome to a brand new podcast, What to Carry, What to Burn. I'm your host, Blair Braverman, and I'm a writer, an adventurer, and a long-distance dog sledder. This is a podcast of stories about the ways we stay alive.
Today, my guest is Sarah Marshall, host of the podcast You're Wrong About and also my very good friend. And I will be telling her the true story of Ada Blackjack. This story does have some difficult topics, including abuse and attempted suicide.
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Chapter 2: Who is Ada Blackjack and what challenges does she face?
So please look out for yourself and only listen if you're up for it. There are also some really beautiful elements of this story because people find beauty and they make beauty in the most impossible situations. Let's jump right in. Here we are, Sarah. Are you ready? Okay, I'm ready. Settle in by the fire. It's crackling.
It's 1898, and we're about halfway up Alaska on the west coast in a village up against the Bering Sea called Nome. And until now, there have just been a few small native communities around there. This year, a couple of Swedish dudes find gold on a beach, and it sets off a massive international gold rush. The place explodes to 20,000 people.
Man.
And there are lines of tents that stretch along the beach for 30 miles straight. People are getting shot in the street. There's sled dogs everywhere. All of a sudden, there are 100 saloons where there used to not be saloons at all.
The sled dog part sounds good.
This same year, the same year all of this begins, a little girl is born about 40 miles away. She's Inupiaq, and her name is Ada Deluktuk.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And I can tell you, it is a tough trail. It's very windswept. So you have wind just coming off the Norton Sound and it's sweeping up into the hills and you have to fight not to be blown away. The sled just wants to like flip over and roll and blow off the trail. There's no trees. There's no protection. There's no shelter.
There's probably some huts belonging to prospectors, but it's very, very barren and very unprotected. Ada and her sister are fighting their way along this trail, helping the dogs. And partway through, they look in the sled and they see that their father has died. Oh, my God. At this point, the girls don't know what to do. They turn their dogs around and they mush their father's body home. Hmm.
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Chapter 3: How does Ada's mental state change during the expedition?
It's because they were dumb that they did that, actually, is what I imagine in his head.
That's exactly what he did. I can't swear to it, but... He blamed them. He said that they had made mistakes. Uh-huh. His career took a hit, but not as much of a hit as it should have taken, considering all of the people he basically killed on this expedition. He's still writing best-selling books. He's traveling around giving talks.
Great.
He decides to launch another expedition now that's going to be his redemption. And by launch, I mean, he's putting his name on it, but he's not going to be there.
He's getting other people to do it for him. He's like, it's easy to survive in this harsh environment. I'm going to force even more people to do it. I would not risk myself because it is too easy for me. It's too easy for me. Yes.
You're totally in his mind. And he's been going around giving these talks about how easy it is. And there are these young men who have been helping like with his projector and taking tickets and just sort of like being ushers for his talks. And they listen to his talk every night and they're like, oh, my God, this guy's the coolest. I want to be just like him. They idolize him.
And Stevenson's like, hey, hey, kids, you want to be like me? Guess what? It's your lucky day. I have picked you to go on this redemption trip. You're going to be famous. You're going to have the time of your lives.
Oh, no. You know, I look I'd heard of this story before you told me you were going to tell it to me. But I didn't know that this was so regrettable and silly from the beginning, you know, because there are so many polar expeditions where you're like. Yeah, that was like a reasonable premise to start with, and then things went horribly wrong.
But with this, you're like, why would you do any of that?
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Chapter 4: What led Ada to join the secret expedition?
Stephenson says, the polar regions are just as commonplace as Ohio. Lightning may strike you next summer, but from that, Fred is safe. Then there are all the multiplied dangers of civilization, railroad accidents, panics, fires, and falling down stairs.
If you can once divest yourself of these beliefs about the North that are untrue, you will see that the few dangers of the North are paralleled by the same sort of dangers down here. Sarah, I'm going to share something with you that I am distraught about. Yeah, please. When I first moved to the Norwegian Arctic when I was 18, I was 200 miles above the Arctic Circle. I was sleeping outside.
I was dog sledding. My mom was worried, and I sent her a letter. I sent her a letter and I tracked it down just for this. And I'm going to read you a paragraph from the letter I wrote when I was 18. Dear mom. I don't think of this place as being dangerous at all. Imagine if I'd grown up here and moved to an American city.
Then I would probably call home and talk about how there are car crashes that people die in, and you can't walk around alone at night without the risk of being mugged or kidnapped or killed. I think that idea is a lot scarier than here, when all you have to do is watch the weather and keep an eye out for muskox.
girl i sound like stevenson yeah but you know what you're writing that letter on your own behalf which makes all the difference in my opinion that's true that's true like and i also i see my point and i i i still kind of agree with it yeah i see i completely see it's just like every place has rules right and it's like maybe one of the questions is like are they learnable rules and they're not if you're being lied to by the person who's sending you up there yeah and also like
If you go on a camping trip in Ohio, you presumably have a way out of the woods. If these guys get into trouble, they have no communication, no way out.
Yeah.
Absolutely nothing.
Although the lack of tornadoes, you know, that, I mean, at least they have that going for them. They really do. And DuPont isn't operating on Wrangell Island. So that's, you know, yeah. But anyway, yes. This is like more cult-like than I had ever imagined. Yeah. You see cults everywhere once you know what to look for. Yeah, exactly. It's like, I don't know, color theory. It's culture theory.
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Chapter 5: How does the expedition team prepare for their journey?
There's birds, there's scree fields, there's polar bears just wandering along the beach, kind of at all times. It's just stark and big. And they get off the ship, they stand on the beach, and the first thing they do is raise the British flag, which really pisses off the ship captain who dropped them off because he's American and he's like, oh, these dudes tricked me.
I would not have helped them colonize the island for Canada.
Okay, so Canada is still using the British flag. Okay, good for them. Hadn't come up with the maple leaf yet, in which you can see the outline of two guys shouting. But anyway.
The ship, now pissed off, leaves, goes off into the distance, and now it's just them on the beach. The first thing they do is take stock of all their supplies. They need to build a shelter. They need to figure out a plan for food.
The supply situation, once they're looking at all these boxes, once they're left on the island, they're discovering it's not as good as they thought it was when they left Nome. A bunch of the food is rotten. The potatoes are moldy. Their prunes have maggots in them. The dogs are skinny. The dogs are not in good shape, but they try not to let this get them down. Their spirits are high.
They're here. They made it and they're immediately getting to work. Man. First things first, they build shelter. There's no trees, of course, but there's a ton of driftwood and they gather it from all over the beach and they use it to build frames for these tents and like the skeleton of a house.
The house has open sides, but their plan is that once it snows, they can use snow blocks to build up the walls.
Hmm.
This actually works really well if you haven't slept in an igloo. It's really surprisingly cozy. Snow is a good insulator because it has air in it. So their snow house, it's not going to get warm even with a fire inside. But if it's 40 below outside and they have a little stove going, it might get up to like 30 degrees, 30 above inside the house.
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Chapter 6: What hardships does Ada encounter on Wrangell Island?
And I'm very happy about that. Find links to What to Carry, What to Burn and all the other links your little heart could desire in this episode's description. And thank you to you for listening and for being here. We'll see you in two weeks.