← Snap Judgment
Snap Judgment
Free Reign - Tooth & Claw
00:50:12
An Iranian American professor is on a date in the hills outside Tehran. She hears the thunder of galloping, and what comes over the crest will ignite an unbridled passion in her - defining her future and explaining her past. Plus, an urban legend about a chicken that turns out to be true.
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- [00:03]
A
SNAP Studios we are so grateful to you for your support over the years. We get to make stories year after year because of you, but we really love to know more about you, what makes you love the snap, and if you're willing to tell us a little about yourself and your relationship with the show, I would really appreciate it. We we'd love your honest feedback. The survey should take about 10 minutes to complete. Our first few questions will ask a little bit about you so we can make sure we're talking to people from a wide range of backgrounds. KQED.org snapsurvey that's KQED.org snapsurveY and thank you so much for taking this survey and listening. It means a lot. KQED.org snapsurvey thank you. Snap judgment is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, Monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. It's a new year and if you're like me, wellness goals are front and center. My partner in getting through though is Whole Foods Market because they featured an abundance of high quality multivitamins and probiotics and it's right next to smart meal shortcuts. To stay motivated. I can keep good habits by cooking homemade meals featuring sustainable wild caught sockeye salmon and other lean proteins. Even better, Whole Foods Market selection of non alcoholic beverages makes dry January a breeze. Shop all things wellness at Whole Foods Market. Okay, so I remember I'm reading Harry Potter to my kids. We're all clutched in tight, hanging on every word in the dark place next to Harry and Hermione. We're trapped by the lake and everywhere, all around, dementors screeched through the night, closing in, hungry to feed on our own despair, dying, desperate to leave us hollow. Life gone, soul stolen, exhausted, spent. And Harry tries, tries again to cast his spell. But again and again nothing. Then broken. He realizes we realize that the Calvary is not coming. There'll be no teachers, no hag, no Dumbledore. No nobody is on their way. All Harry has is a memory of himself. And so he reaches and he calls forth that piece of himself, Patronus. Then a full bodied silver stag charges from the darkness, a joining of who he is and the animal spirit and that changes everything thing. But you have to understand this doesn't just happen at Hogwarts because Patrone and I take many forms and today on Snap Judgment, we're gonna meet one of them. Snap Judgment proudly presents Free Reign. Manuscript, Washington Expecto Patron. And you're listening to Snap Judgment. Now, we've had alligators and we've had monkeys on Snap's Tooth and Claw series, exploring the relationships of the creatures we share this world with. But on today's Free Reign episode, we're gonna highlight one of the most magical bonds of all. But first, let me ask you a question. Have you ever been drawn to something that you had no known connection to? Nothing at all. But there you are. You can't look away, you can't turn back. And yes, because this story occurs in real life, in the real world, sensitive listeners should know that we reference both state brutality and sexual situations. But you are not going to want to miss the end of this one, because in the end, it all does make some kind of sense. Snap Judgment.
- [05:22]
B
When Pardiz Madhavi was a little girl, she kept on her bedside table a little wooden horse wrapped in string. It was given to her by her grandmother who lived in Iran, a country she never knew because Pardis had left Iran in her mother's womb on one of the last flights to America when her mother was eight months pregnant. So the little horse from her grandmother was one of the only things she had from the country. And she always felt drawn to the horse somehow, but didn't know why. She'd begin to figure it out on her very first trip to Iran when she was 21.
- [05:59]
C
So it was the summer of 2000, I was in Iran. I had gone there initially to write stories about the Iranian women's movement. So I show up in Iran again, fresh faced reporter, 21 years old. And I become completely inspired by what they keep talking about. Engela Bijentsi.
- [06:21]
B
In Persian, it meant sexual revolution.
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C
And I'm like, what is that? And I was completely inspired by the way in which young people were using their bodies to speak back to a regime that they didn't agree with.
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B
She was living with her aunties and working as a reporter and researcher, interviewing women and young people about sexual freedom. She found the country and the people she was talking to every day completely inspiring. She felt she had found her homeland and her people. She was going to parties and going on dates, despite the fact that it was Iran in the early 2000s, which made parties and dates and things like sexual revolution a little complicated. But it was all totally possible because there was a lot you could could get away with.
- [07:11]
C
I remember at one point being pulled over in Tehran on the way to a party with one of my girlfriends. We're in the car. The morality police pull us over, and we're like, okay, we're done. We're wearing bright red lipstick. She's wearing so much makeup. We have our headscarves that are not black. They are. One of us is wearing a hot pink headscarf, and one of us is wearing a white headscarf, which at the time, very much out of uniform, if you will. We were certain we were gonna get arrested, and these two cute morale police officers come up, and instead of arresting, they ask us out on a date. They ask us for our number. So it's not totally black and white.
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B
Morality police, officially known as guidance patrol, were everywhere in charge of enforcing strict dress codes and social rules. And parties knew they didn't always let you off with a slap on the wrist.
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C
So I was nervous that they would find out the research I had been doing, that people would find my notes.
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B
That she kept her research and her interviews in secret notebooks.
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C
And also, of course, I was fearful for my own safety. I was worried that I would be arrested, I would be taken in, that, you know, any number of things were befalling so many scholars all around me. You know, I would have a professor that I'd be interviewing and working with one day, and then I'd come back to Iran six months later, only to find out that they were in Evin prison, which is Iran's most notorious prison. And, you know, after a certain point of time, people started referencing Evin prison as Evin University because there were so many professors locked up. Yeah.
- [08:51]
B
So Pardis was eager to find places that felt less watchful. She liked going outside of the city where she could be a bit more free, especially if it was for a date. There was one time.
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C
My date had taken me out to the outskirts of Tehran into a sort of mountain, sort of nature area, where a lot of people would go on dates. Because you'd go by the river, you're away from the watchful eyes of the morality police. So we packed a picnic, and off we went.
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B
And it was here on the edge of the river that her journey with horses began.
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C
No sooner had we, you know, parked and gotten out of the car, and suddenly I hear this, like, heart pounding sort of thunder of hoofbeats. And I'm like, what is that? And they're just growing louder and louder and louder. And I stand up and I turn right to left, trying to find where the noise is coming from. And out of the sort of woods clearing comes this group of women, and they are just pounding forward on these most incredible horses I'd ever seen. And I'm seeing these horses and these women, and they're riding the horses, and they're leaning forward, arms are around the neck of the horse, scarves billowing in the wind. They had scarves wrapped around the different parts of the horse. And I thought, you know what? That's freedom.
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B
Again.
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C
This is Iran, where, you know, horseback riding, even at the time, straddling a horse was seen as morally questionable because the regime was obsessed with women's bodies, with hymens and hymens being intact. And I just remember looking at these women and taking them in and being like, there is no way that I am not going to ride a horse. I went home that night, and I couldn't sleep. I just kept thinking about these women. When I did fall asleep, I was dreaming of horses. I couldn't get it out of my head, right? So I got in touch with them. I went back there, and I found the stables and the ranch where they were riding. And I begged them. I begged them to teach me to ride. And they said, you know, do you know how to ride? You're coming from the United States. Do you know how to ride? And I was like, no, I just know that I have to ride.
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B
During the weekdays, she lived in Tehran, interviewing people on fashion choices as an act of dissent and how they were pushing the boundaries of sexual tolerance. And on the weekend, she'd drive out to the country and back to that stable again and again.
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C
There was a long dirt road covered by the shade of olive trees that led all the way up to the stables. And so when I parked my car. I parked my car under the olive.
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B
Tree, and there she approached her first horse. It was a Caspian.
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C
I was both fascinated and fearful of them, so I both wanted to be really, really close to them. But then when I would get really, really close, I was a little bit afraid. It smells like a mixture of hay, freshly watered dirt. Horses have a very distinct scent, but there was also the smell because it was Iran. People were making corn on the kebab just right there outside in the open, or the smell of the water from the creek.
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B
Tell me the names of some of the women that you rode with that were there.
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C
I can't tell you their full names, but. Because there's no way I'm gonna do that. Rana, right? She was tall. You could tell she spent a lot of time in the sun with the horses. Another one, Khadija, she Wore the braid kind of over her shoulder like this. And she had darker skin. And I just remember she had really strong hands. You could tell that she worked with her hands like all the time, all day. And she was probably the one that was most patient with me.
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B
The women at the stable taught parties to ride a horse around the arena where it was safe. But Pardis wanted to ride free out on the open trail and fast.
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C
I was a very excited, you know, 21 year old and I wanted to get there faster. I wanted to be pounding across the field at a full gallop, you know, wind and scarves blowing in the wind behind me. One of the things I hadn't learned at the time is, of course, when your horse is going too fast, your body's instinct is to clench, right? To squeeze your legs tighter, right? Cause you're like, I gotta hold on. But that's the signal to go faster. So when you do that, you're telling them to go faster and faster and faster.
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B
There was one time she thought she was ready to go out to the trail, even though the women told her she wasn't.
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C
I was cantering around the arena and I had decided, it didn't matter what everybody else was saying, I had decided I was going to go. I, my horse and I were going to go. We were going to go, my horse and I, we were going to go out onto the trail. And so I cantered around to the gate where the, which was close in the arena. I opened that gate, I rode right out of that gate and then I started riding down the olive tree shaded road. Started to feel the wind in my hair and I was like, I'm flying. This is amazing. I'm careening through, through nature. It's all the things I've ever wanted. And we're going, and we're going faster, and we're going faster and faster and faster. And then these motorcycles come by and I was, I don't know if I was more terrified or my horse was more terrified or if we were playing off of each other's energy, but I'm like, oh my gosh, they could be morality police. And what that means is you're no longer locked in on your horse, horse. And so when you're not locked in on your horse, you can't be present to them and they aren't going to be present to you. And so before I knew it, I was bucked right off.
- [15:19]
A
After a quick break, we'll be back to Pardis, who's completely surrounded by motorcycles. Stay tuned. Okay, so do you like it when you get to keep your money? Do you want to eliminate overdraft fees? The minimum balance fees, the monthly fees, the fees on the fees? Well, Chime is changing the way people bank Fee free and smarter Banking Built for you Chime makes your everyday spending work harder by delivering real rewards and financial progress. Earn up to 3.5% APY on savings, eight times higher than a traditional bank. Rated 5 stars by USA Today for customer service. Real humans Remember those available 24.7Chime is not just smarter banking. It is the most rewarding way to bank. Join the millions who are already banking fee free today. It just takes a few minutes to sign up. Head to chime.com snap that's chime.com snap Chime is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking Services the secured Chime Visa credit card and MyPay line of credit provided by the Bancorp Bank NA or Stride Bank NA. MyPay eligibility requirements apply and credit limit ranges $20 to $500. Optional services and products may have fees or charges. See chime.com feesinfo advertise annual percentage yield with Chime+ status only. Otherwise 1.00% APY applies. No minimum balance required. Chime Card on time payment history may have a positive impact on your credit score. Results may vary. See chime.com for details and applicable terms. Welcome back to Snap Judgment. The Free Reign episode When last we left, Pardis Madhavi had just been bucked off a horse in the Iranian countryside when her horse was spooked by a bunch of motorcycles. Possibly the morality police. Snap Judgment.
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C
I should have been hurt much more badly than I was. I took a fall from a galloping horse onto pretty rocky ground. Panic. I might have called attention to all of us and put all the women suddenly at risk.
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B
It was the morality police on motorcycles. She recognized the emblem on their uniform as she fell to the ground, but they drove away and seemed not to care. The women from the stable looked her over and gave her concerned smiles. And then Pardis went back to riding in the arena. She rode at the stable for a whole year and then another year and many years passed as she continued her research in Iran.
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C
I wasn't confident in my ability to communicate with horses at that time. I was getting there. Took a lot of years. I remember learning about how horses respond to the absence of pressure. Not to pressure, communicate with the horse. So there would be times when I was on the horse where I both felt imposter syndrome. Like I am not a good enough rider I'm just pretending to be, like, fancy free and all of the things, and yet I do also feel free. So I could sometimes feel both almost at the same time, certainly in the same ride.
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B
There was one horse at the ranch she was drawn to, a black horse named Thunder.
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D
He was.
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C
He was a very spirited horse. White, striped down the front. Very, very spirited. I just remember one time I came early, early morning, and the sun was just rising, so the colors, you know, rays were sort of starting to settle on. On the.
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E
On the.
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C
On the ranch or the barn. And I just remember, like, he was. They were running, the horses were running. And I remember looking at him in particular. He just seemed like he was dancing. I kind of felt his freedom, if that's a thing.
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B
The trainers gave her a Get Thunder to follow your lead, using nothing more than eye contact, arm movements, and the power of your connection. So Pardish led Thunder to the arena and let go of him.
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C
So I stood in the circle. I looked at Thunder. I calmed myself. As soon as I felt that he was locked in on me and that we were locked in on each other. I did what I'd watched these ladies do dozens of times, and I extended my arm. And of course, the first time I did it, nothing happened. He didn't move. He just stared at me. And I realized it was because I lacked the confidence. So I took another deep breath. It took probably three or four tries, but I finally did. And when I did, when I realized that I could just get him to move by locking in on him and extending just one arm, and that he then walked, and then he trotted, and then he had the most beautiful canter. He was going in a perfect circle, and he would switch directions each time I switched arms. And it was breathtakingly beautiful to watch.
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B
Pardis could now take the horses out on the trail and ride free along the river whenever she wanted to. She spent seven years researching first the women's movement and then the youth movement. She moved through the seasons with the horses. Cold mountain winters, long springs. Pardis spent seven years researching first the women's movement and then the youth movement. She came to be known in certain circles as the Sex Doctor. For all of her research on the sexual revolution, she was gaining so much trust that she was invited to underground parties.
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C
There was this one party I went to where they said, okay, you're the sex doctor. Come to a sex party. And I'm like, okay. And remember, this is a country where the stakes of having premarital sex, let alone group sex, right? Premarital sex or extramarital sex is punishable by death. Right? It's. It's at the time, a place where if you're walking in public with red lips, you could get your lips slashed with a razor, right? If you are riding a bicycle, you could get arrested. I'm like, come on, is that real? So I heard they had, you know, bribed the morality police. So I walk into the house. It's kind of quiet, and I'm like, is there a party? Is there not a party? I hear murmuring, but I don't see people. So I'm walking in. I'm walking in. I'm walking in. Finally, I come to, you know, the large swimming pool, and I hear voices from the pool, but the pool's been drained of water, and they've placed elaborate, beautiful carpets on the bottom of the swimming pool. And there was probably, I don't know, two or three dozen naked bodies enjoying themselves at the bottom of the carpeted pool. So that's an example of a day in the life of a medical anthropologist in Iran.
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B
The thing about a day in the life of anyone, but particularly a medical anthropologist in Iran, is that what's typical one day can turn catastrophic the next. This moment of your world in Iran being ripped away from you, which is like a pivotal part of your story in this interview. I don't want to press you on it, but I feel like you haven't gone into that much detail about it.
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C
It's very hard to go into detail about it. I also don't remember everything, and sometimes bits and pieces of it come back.
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B
To me.
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C
And it hurts. I was invited to give a lecture at University of Tehran to Harvard University. I was presenting the findings of my research, and I was on stage giving a lecture. And partway into the lecture, the auditorium, you know, was stormed by the morality police. I was pulled off stage, and I was actually kicked out of Iran and stripped of my citizenship. 33 days later, That final decree was made to me at the airport when I was ushered onto the airplane and told never to return. I mean, I was told never to return. And I was told that I was being put on a list. And I was told that, you know, if I ever came back, I would just be going straight to. To Evine.
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B
Evine Prism.
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C
And it really impacted me and it really frightened me. I felt like I had lost everything. My heart was absolutely shattered.
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B
Pardis came back to America, and it felt distant and cold. She tried to accept the fact that she could never, ever again in her life go Back to Iran or her horses.
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C
No more riding. No more horses in Iran. I said I was fine. Everything's fine, folks. I'm good. I'm strong. I'm a warrior woman, and I'm just gonna keep pushing forward. I locked Iran away. All my field notebooks, all my pictures, all my clippings, all the scrapbooks I had just thrown in boxes and decided I was gonna forget about them. They were treasures, but I was just, you know, depositing maps or little coins or scarves. I, you know, packed away lots of scarves from my time in Iran, but also my time with the horses. Things that smelled like the horses. Everything was in boxes. I was pursuing success and writing and rising up the ranks of academia, but there would be periods of time where I would fall into a deep depression where I wouldn't want to get out of bed. And I remember my brother becoming very worried about me. And it was my birthday coming up, and my brother wanted to gift me something that would help me start to feel like myself again. I honestly had lost all sense of self at this point. My brother gifted me a birthday ride. He had arranged for me to go on a ride at these stables out on the coast in California, where you could actually ride the horse out onto the beach. And I go out there, and it's raining and it's stormy. And so I get to the stables, and the woman who runs the barn, she's like, it's not a great day to ride. And I'm like, oh, are you telling me I can't ride? I decided I was going to ride that day, and so I got out there and it was raining, it was storming. And she's like, here are some rubber boots and a big raincoat. You're going to need all of the above, and good luck to you. I'm not coming out there. You know, I approached this horse, I'm like, all right, we're going to do this. I can still ride. So what, that I can't ride in Iran? Whatever. It's going to be fine. And I get on the horse, and we start riding towards the beach, and the wind is getting, you know, stronger. The rain is pounding harder. But the more the rain came, the more the wind picked up, the more the wind howled in my face, the more determined I was to ride right at the ocean. And so I did. I just kept going, kept going, kept going. The waves were huge.
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E
The waves were big.
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C
They were crashing. I couldn't tell if the wind was roaring louder or the waves or the rain pounding on Top of my helmet. And before I knew it, my horse had thrown me. And I just sat there and really took it all in. I find myself on my tailbone in the midst of a storm. That was my last ride for about 10 years.
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B
No horses, no riding, no way to come close to feeling any of the things she had felt in Iran. And then she was called back to those boxes where she had thrown all of her memories. Her parents were moving out of the house she had lived in as a little girl, and they said, come get your stuff. So on a not so special day, she went to open up the past.
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C
So I go into the storage unit. I'm faced with, like, a wall of boxes on Iran. And I'm like, oh, my goodness. Okay, deep breath.
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B
She was picking through the boxes when she came across one notebook with a picture of a stallion.
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C
And I had never actually really opened it. It was just a brown notebook with a horse on it. I had just thrown it into the box. So I pulled that out, and inside of it was a note telling me that the legacy of these horses. I had fallen in love with these Caspian horses, that it was my legacy.
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B
It was a letter from a woman she'd met in Iran, a woman who'd helped her learn to ride. And she'd tucked this letter into her notebook and never really read it, but it seemed to be telling her now that her family had a connection to those same Caspian horses she'd ridden in Iran. The words it said were the horses were her legacy.
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C
And I'm looking at all these things, and. And I'm like, what does she mean?
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B
What does she mean? From there, she immediately got on a FaceTime call with her aunties in Tehran.
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C
They're in their 90s at this point, so I get them on FaceTime. They're so cute, you know, they could barely figure out the technology, but they got it. And I'm like, hey, these horses look familiar to you? And they're like, what? And then I show them a picture, I show them this notebook, and I tell them about this woman that I'd met. And they're just like, oh, my goodness. Do you not know who your grandmother was? And I'm like, what now? Turned out that my grandmother was an avid horsewoman, and she would help women. Oftentimes. This is. You know, at the time in Iran, many years ago, there were young women in the community in the village who were needing to get away from abusive husbands. They were experiencing domestic violence. And so she would actually help these women escape from their husbands and she would put these women on horses on horseback, and they would ride all the way across the country for many days. They would ride for many, many days across difficult, rugged terraces, rocky terrain.
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B
Her grandmother literally put women on horseback and then hopped on her own horse and led them to freedom.
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C
And she helped carry those women out of Iran and into places like Afghanistan on horseback.
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B
How long would that take?
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C
Oh, weeks sometimes. Yeah, weeks sometimes. You know, the horses were so much about protection. I think she also experienced a level of freedom on horses. That's that same freedom that I felt like I had tasted, right, that when I got on a horse, it was the same freedom that I saw the first time I saw women riding on horses so free. She experienced that freedom, and I think she wanted to pass that freedom on to others, right? And so she wanted to help women who felt unfree to be able to be free. And I just thought, gosh, I can't ignore the call anymore. We're gonna have a good ride today, right? I have this notion that these horses are guardians of ancient traditions in many ways. And I somehow feel like the horses carry some of that. And so it's like a little portal into that every time I ride.
- [32:00]
B
In a tiny valley inside a ring of rocky mountains north of Scottsdale, the sun is setting, but it's still close to 100 degrees.
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C
All the way around this way.
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B
She brushes a huge brown horse from head to feet, throws a saddle up over its back, sweeps the flies from its eyes, and hoists herself up. The horse is towering and silhouetted by the sunset. He stands magically still until she gives him the smallest signal and they're off into the desert. Hardeez is helping to train Caspian horses, the same horses her grandmother rode in Iran.
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C
My grandma, if she were alive, would love it here. She would love the fact that I'm around horses and near mountain.
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B
When she's done with her training, she climbs up the fence and sits on the top rail in the Arizona heat. The horse she loves now is called Adonis. He's a huge black stallion with a white stripe down his nose.
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C
He's so himself. And he represents that to me, like a being that is in perfect alignment with themselves. He's just, like, so unapologetically him, and he doesn't care. It's like I'm like, I have mad respect for that. He is who he is, man.
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E
Bless you. So pretty.
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C
No, no, no. That's not for you.
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B
Adonis presses against her and chews her boot.
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C
Thank you. He's giving me scratches.
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B
Adonis is too young and strong and powerful. So she's never ridden him? Not yet.
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C
Sometimes the best thing we can do is not try to control everything around us because the more we try to control, the more we take. Tighten up, stop forcing, and let that quiet power guide you. Can't wait to ride you, buddy. And you know it's.
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A
Thank you, thank you, thank you to Partis Madhavi for speaking with the Snap. Especially right now. We are sending love to the people of Iran. And don't miss Pardesis book. It is amazing. It's called book of Queens. It's all about her time on horseback in Iran. You can find a link to it on our website, snapjudgment.org the original score for that piece was by Dirk Schwartzhoff. It was produced by Anna Sussman. Now, after the break, a chicken like you would not believe. Stay tuned. Welcome back to Snap Judgment. My name is from Washington. Now, this story does contain imagery that may disturb some vegans. I'm not gonna lie. Everyone else should find it finger licking good. Because sometimes urban legends are true. Snap Judgment.
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E
So this story is brought to us courtesy of Troy.
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D
Troy Waters.
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E
He's a farmer.
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D
Been farming pretty much all my life. Still right here in Fruta.
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E
That's Fruta, Colorado. It's a small town just outside of Grand Junction. And the business runs in the family. He farms. His father farmed, his grandfather farmed. But the family member he learned the most about farming from is Lloyd.
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D
Lloyd was my mom's grandpa, and I spent probably as much or more time with him when I was younger growing up than I did my own dad. And he was a hard man, let me put it that way. Henri had a mean streak, but he taught me how to shoot, taught me how to skin, taught me how to trap. The other thing he taught me is he taught me how to drown the skunk and resuscitate it.
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E
Wait, what does that even mean?
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D
He showed me. He says, well, if any of your buddies ever fall in the canal and drowned, I'm gonna show you how to bring him back to life. And he literally, we caught a skunk in the trap and drug it over there to the ditch and he drowned the dang thing and then showed me how to pump its chest and get it to cough and, you know, get it back to life.
- [37:57]
E
Why a skunk isn't that terribly dangerous? Like, why not a. I don't know, something some other small mammal that won't.
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D
I think that's just what we had to have in the trap. That day when he thought of it.
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E
And as a kid, when he's teaching you this stuff as a kid, are you, like, rolling your eyes or are you, like, freaking out?
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D
One thing you didn't roll your eyes around somebody like him. He'd whack you upside the head for rolling your eyes.
- [38:26]
E
So that was Lloyd. Mean but caring and practical to a fault. If you're a kid growing up on a farm and you want to farm yourself, it'd be hard to find a better mentor. But remember, he wasn't even really Troy's grandfather. He was his great grandfather, an old guy.
- [38:41]
D
And he finally got to the point where, well, he started going blind. He had a minor stroke. Mom moved him in with us. And me and grandpa's bedrooms were downstairs next to each other. And I spent a lot of nights sitting on the edge of his bed listening to him. He'd want to start talking and telling stories. There's several times my mom come down to wake me up for school and she'd find me, I'd be laying in there on the floor in my grandpa's room or on the foot of his bed because that's where I fell asleep listening to him. And it was when we was living with him that I actually found my grandmother's scrapbook that she kept of Mike the headless chicken.
- [39:22]
E
Now, if you don't know about Mike the headless chicken, don't worry. At this point, Troy didn't either. All he knew was that in this scrapbook there were pages of clippings, correspondence, family photos of his grandfather, Lloyd, with what appeared to be a chicken with no head. But in all his late night chats, Lloyd had never mentioned anything about a headless chicken. So Troy went and asked his mom, what's the deal?
- [39:49]
D
She goes, oh, yeah, that's, you know, something that happened right before I was born. And grandpa really don't like talking about it much. And I go, okay. But one of those nights when he was wanting to visit, I got the.
- [40:01]
E
Story out of the story takes place right there in Fruita in 1945. Back then, Lloyd was raising friars fryers.
- [40:10]
D
A chicken that's raised, you know, for slaughter. And the day that it was time to slaughter him, you know, he'd reach down in there and grab one by the legs, throw it on the stump, whack its head off with an axe and flip it over on the ground, let it bleed out. And, you know, he says, you know, you always had one. You cut the head off and they make it back to its feet. That's where the expression come from, you know, run around with a chicken with your head cut off is because they would do that.
- [40:38]
E
Troy says that a good run for a chicken with its head cut off is four, maybe five minutes max, then it dies.
- [40:44]
D
But when he got done a couple hours later, this one last chicken was still standing there without a head.
- [40:53]
E
And the chicken, it looked fine. It wasn't bleeding. For the past two hours, it had just been walking around like normal, headless.
- [41:01]
D
So he figured, what the heck, let's see if it'll live till morning. He put it in an old wooden apple box, set it on the back porch, and the next morning he got up and the thing was still alive. He was amazed. You know, that's been alive for almost a day now. This shouldn't be happening. So he's hitched up the team of horses, loaded up all the dead chickens to take them into town. He took this one with him in the apple box and started betting guys a beer that he had a live chicken spot ahead. And of course, they expected it to, you know, be dead at any time. It wasn't until day three that people started realizing how bizarre it really was.
- [41:45]
E
I'm just curious, like, what. Yeah, what was it? What was the chicken physically like to look at?
- [41:49]
D
He looked normal. Grandpa said he acted normal when he cut it off. Basically, I think he dang near missed. And he cut it high. So when he cut the head off, he left the base of the brain stem and actually one eardrum. So it still could hear it still get startled with a loud noise or something. It still tried walking around. It would still try to prune itself with the stump of its head. Oh, no, you know, it was a rooster, you know, a male chicken. So it would still. Grandpa said it'd still try to crow and it'd make a gurgling sound.
- [42:33]
E
How did Lloyd feed it then?
- [42:35]
D
They fed it right down its gullet with, you know, your old fashioned glass eyedropper.
- [42:40]
E
And that would have been the chicken's life, preening, gurgling, ingesting, were it not.
- [42:45]
D
For what happened next about two weeks later. That's when it caught the attention of a gentleman in the business of promoting sideshows. His name was Hope Wade.
- [42:57]
E
And the sideshow promoter had a proposition for Lloyd.
- [42:59]
D
He told Grandpa, you know, we could travel around the country with this thing and you could make a little money off of it. And, you know, that was right at the end of the Great Depression, and Grandpa was still pretty much farming with horse and mule.
- [43:14]
E
So he took Hope Wade up on his offer. And it was a good thing he did, because it turned out that Hope Wade was. There's no other term for it. He was a marketing genius. Because he didn't just throw this chicken into the sideshow circuit right away. It's more like he rolled him out. Phase one was to give this chicken some credentials, to make it more than just an urban legend. So he took it to a university, a bio lab in Salt Lake, and.
- [43:37]
D
The scientists there surgically removed the heads of several chickens to try to duplicate the chicken's condition and never got any of them to live for any length of time.
- [43:49]
E
Now that the chicken was a bona fide scientific phenomenon, that allowed Wade to initiate phase two. The press. He got Life magazine to come and take pictures.
- [43:59]
D
Hope Wade says, well, we need the head. Well, Lloyd never thought about keeping the head. So the head that's in all the photographs was not his, not his true head. It was donated by another chicken.
- [44:11]
E
And if you look at the Life magazine photos, you can see why Wade was onto something here. There's the body, and right there on the ground next to it, there's its head staring at you, looking almost kind of forlorn.
- [44:23]
D
Hope Wade's also the one that come up with the name Miracle Mike, the headless chicken.
- [44:29]
E
Did he have any name before that?
- [44:33]
D
No.
- [44:34]
E
With phase three completed, Wade declared that Miracle Mike was ready for the big time, or, I guess, the small time, because, you know, it's a sideshow.
- [44:44]
D
They had him in a tent, and they would have callers is what they called them, standing out front. Grandpa said they'd usually take turns, either him or Hope Wade, to try to convince people to pay their two bits, to come inside and actually see. His only problem was when people would come in, most of the time, he'd just sit there in the straw like it was asleep. Because in Mike's world, it was always night. And they'd have to prod it and get it walking around and, you know, try to make it active to prove that it wasn't dead. Some people were amazed. Some people were horrified. But, you know, part of what made Miracle Mike work was Grandpa was there because he was the man that swung the axe.
- [45:32]
E
The man and his chicken proved an irresistible combination. Mike was a hit in Salt Lake, in Phoenix, on the boardwalk in Long Beach. At some point, there was a whole tour of the south.
- [45:44]
D
And at his peak, Mike was probably making several thousand dollars a week.
- [45:50]
E
A year passed a year and a half, and Mike's fame spread far and wide.
- [45:57]
D
There's Letters that are only addressed to the owners of Mike the headless chicken, 200 miles west of Denver. And them letters found their way to my grandparents. Some of them were good. Most of the letters Grandma kept were hate mail. There's one letter that actually compares my grandparents to the Nazis for their cruelty of letting Mike live. You know, and I did ask Grandpa about that. I said, what do you think about that? And he goes, he goes, oh, hell. He goes, you know, that chicken had the best life of any chicken. He says it was nurtured. And his words were, got to see more of the country than any other chicken ever got to see, even though it didn't have a head.
- [46:40]
E
Did Floyd or Wade, did either of them ever develop feelings for Mike?
- [46:47]
D
I'm sure they did. I mean, how could you not? It had to been taken care of like you'd take care of an infant baby, you know, so I'm sure you'd develop feelings for it. Did Grandpa ever admit that to me? No, that wasn't the kind of man he was.
- [47:10]
E
And during this time, was there any sign that Mike was flagging?
- [47:16]
D
No, he was doing good. But one day grandpa came back home from the sideshow and he didn't have Mike with him.
- [47:26]
E
So everyone asked him what happened.
- [47:29]
D
And he'd always claimed that he'd sold it. Just told everybody that he got tired of traveling all around the country and it was fun for the. But he was ready to come back to the farm somewhere around two years after one of the local newspapers asked Grandpa if he'd heard from Mike and if Mike was still doing good. And he goes, oh yeah, he's still doing good and still traveling around the world. But he never did say how much he sold it for. And everybody thought that my grandfather had made millions. And it wasn't until one day, Sometime in the 80s, a lady from the local newspaper called up and she asked him who he sold it to. And he says, I didn't sell it, it died. And I remember my mother was in the kitchen peeking her head around real wild eyed and looking at me. And I looked back at her because that was the first she'd ever heard of it. And you know, that intrigued me. Well, what happened, Grandpa? And he finally broke down and he actually got a tear in his eye. And he says, well, I let it die. It's my fault. What happened is when they had it in Phoenix at a sideshow, they brought it back to the motel room with them. And that night it started choking and they woke him up and they went to get the bulb syringe to clear his throat. And they had forgot it at the sideshow. And before they could find anything to clear its throat, it choked to death on them.
- [49:08]
E
And what did he do with Mike's body?
- [49:14]
D
I would assume that it ended up flipped out in the desert somewhere between here and Phoenix. And I think he always felt that, you know, it was his fault. He's the one that left the bulb syringe at the sideshow and he let the goose that was laying the golden egg die on him.
- [49:34]
E
And as for all the money Lloyd did manage to make before Mike died.
- [49:38]
D
Grandpa's exact words to me is that the government took most of it in taxes. Hope Wade took his cut and he made enough money that he modernized his farm and he bought him a brand new pickup, which I still own today, but that was pretty much it.
- [50:00]
E
After that, there was no money left. Lloyd went back to farming. By all accounts, he was never able to replicate his former success.
- [50:10]
D
But knowing Lloyd, the way I knew him growing up, I'm sure that every time he swung an axe again, I'm sure that was in the back of his mind.
- [50:21]
E
What about you? Have you ever tried?
- [50:23]
D
Have I ever tried? No, I have not. Has the thought crossed my mind? Yeah, just as a laughing thought, but no. I think if I did one today and actually lived, I don't know if I'd let it live. I think I'd finish the job.
- [51:05]
A
Troy Walters. Troy is still working on his family owned farm in Fruta, Colorado. And for more information about Mike and his legacy, Visit our website snapjudgment.org Original score for that piece was by Renzel Goriot with additional instrumentation by Andrew Vickers. That piece was produced by Headless Joe Rosenberg. Now, if you missed even a moment, know that Snap's Tooth and Claw series exploring the blurry line between us and them is available right now on podcast devices everywhere. Snap Judgment and did you know? But Snap has a whole entirely different show that explores the shadowlands. The mystery, the mysterious knocks coming from the dark, dark closet. It's like the Twilight Zone, only for real. It's called Spooked. It drops each and every week. Get spooked on your podcast device. KQD in San Francisco is SNAP's orbiting hall of justice robots. Please note that no Snap studios content may be used for training, testing or developing machine learning or AI systems without prior written permission on Team snap. The union representative, producers, artists, editor, engineers are members of the national association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications works of America, AFL CIO, Local 51 stamp is brought to you by the team that can ride a horse at full gallop. Except of course, for the uber producer, Mr. Mark Ristich, because that wouldn't be very nice to the horse. And there's Nancy Lopez, Pat Mercede Miller, Anna Sussman, Renzo Gorill, John Sheena, Shealy, Teodecat, Flo Wiley, Bo Walsh, Marissa Dodge. And this is not the news. No way is this the news. In fact, you could hear a story about a distant, faraway, gender repressive place and not be entirely sure if it's talking about down the street. And he would still love to be as far away from the news as this is. But this is PRX.