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- [00:00]
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- [02:09]
Dan Kennedy
Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. Join the Moth at New Belgium Brewery's Tour de Fat in Washington D.C. for your chance to tell a story at the show. Just submit your one line pitch via email to tourdefattemoth.org and you can check themoth.org for all the event details. Hope to see you there. Dressing freaky and riding bikes and bands and beer are things you like. The most fun fundraiser around the Tour de Fact New Belgium Flat in town. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Every Squarespace website is mobile ready and includes 24. 7 support domain name and now e commerce, all integrated into one easy to use platform. For a free trial and 10% off your first purchase on new accounts, go to squarespace.com them and use the offer code. The Moth 5 this week's story by Lauren Slater was told live in Boston in 2007. The theme of the night was out on a Limb.
- [03:24]
Lauren Slater
When the moth asked me to do it. Those lights are so bright, I can't see anything. When the moth asked me to do it, I thought this was just like normal neurotic writers getting up, telling stories, not really knowing how to tell stories. And now I'm here. I'm trapped here. I've agreed to do it. It's like all professionals and then me. I'm going to tell you the story. I don't really know how to tell stories. I write stories. But anyway, I'm going to try to tell you this one starts off on a serious note. Actually, it's pretty serious the whole time. No, seriously, Four years ago, all right, there's no way of doing this, okay? Four years ago, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, okay? So you can't laugh about that. And we all know, because we've all been blessed or cursed with frontal lobes that we're going to die. That's something that human beings all know about. But there's moments in your life when the plane goes bumpy or, you know, you're choking on a chicken wing or wherever you get a diagnosis of breast cancer, when you realize with a real visceral intensity that your life is going to end and that you're really no more than a series of seconds that are adding up pretty quickly. I also had one young child, two years old at the time, and I did not want to die. It's interesting because when you become a parent, you know, really the most important. Your life is no longer the most important thing, which is a huge relief and probably a really good reason to have kids. But I didn't want to die before my child turned 18 years old and I didn't die. The cancer was cured, so to speak, and life went on. After the diagnosis of breast cancer. Speaking of Freud, actually, I started having. I had always heard that you can't die in your dreams, that that's a psychological impossibility. But after the diagnosis of and the treatment of the breast cancer, really and truly, I started to die in my dreams. And it was quite remarkable. And one dream that I had was that I was in a rocket ship, a small rocket ship. It was just about my size, and I was scrunched up in it. And I was speeding through space, going on and on and on and on and on, past the planets and out into the darkness. And I was awake in the dream, but I also realized in the dream that I was awake, but I was also dead and that this was death. Death was speeding in a rocket ship through space. A kind of infinite insomnia. And then I woke up and the day began. And then the next day and the next day and the next day and the next day. And years went by, our lives returned to normal. And my husband said to me one day, about four years later. My husband, by the way, is like a serious computer geek chemist. Like, once he blew up our house with a series of test tubes. And his idea of nature is like, we live in Somerville, so that should say it all. But his idea of nature is like a waterfall on a screensaver, okay? So he says to me, he says to me one day, I really want to move to Mendocino, California and become an organic farmer. And I said, you know, sweetie, you know, you can't even mow the fucking lawn, okay? So what makes you think you can grow an organic tomato? And he said, no, no, this has been a long term dream of mine. I said, I've never heard that dream before. He said, well, that's because we don't talk. And I said, well, that's because we had kids and blah, blah, blah. He says, no, this really is something I want to do. And I thought he was going to forget about it, but he didn't forget about it. And he kept mentioning it over and over. And I actually started. I can't see anybody. I actually started to become afraid that he was really going to take this, you know, do this, want to do this. And so I said, look, let's compromise. Let's buy land in southern New Hampshire, okay? And if you can mow the lawn and, you know, garden, you know, then we can then consider the larger move to Mendocino. And he said he thought it was a great idea. So we went. This was last year, we went up and we found a gorgeous five and a half acre plot in southern New Hampshire. And we bought it. And we were exhilarated. We were just exhilarated. And we moved up there. Not permanently, but we moved up there for the summer with our kids. And I mean, the land was really gorgeous. There was one. There were two things about the land that worried me a little bit. And one was that we had. I mean, it was very rural, but the few neighbors that we did have all had names that were days of the week, like mister, there was a Mr. Monday, and there was a girl named Sunday. And we lived near the Fridays. And I just thought that was kind of weird, but I don't know, I didn't know what to make of it. The other thing that worried me slightly about this place was there was a pond on it. My husband loved the pond. To me, at night, the pond had a strange kind of glow to it. But I would take my husband out to the pond at night and say, do you see that glow? And he'd be like, no, there's no glow. And so whatever, it either glowed, it didn't glow, I don't know. But anyway, so it was full summer. The land was verdant and lush and beautiful, and we lived up there. And towards the end of the summer, my dog's hair started to fall out. I have two dogs and their hair started to fall out. It wasn't shedding, it was falling out in clumps. And then my children started to get mysterious stomach ailments that would come and go. And one day I went to the edge of the land to remove some debris that had been left by the prior owners. And I cut my hand and I got an infection. I went to the doctor, he gave me antibiotics, but it wouldn't respond to the antibiotics. And the infection kept getting worse and worse. And a red stripe was growing up my arm. Finally the doctor gave me this really like broad spectrum bomb of an antibiotic. And it just blew everything, you know, away inside of me. And the infection went away. And it was as the infection was receding, and again, it's now getting towards fall. I was walking the land and I felt something strange beneath my feet. And I went, for some reason, I just went and I got a hoe from the shed and I to the land. And instead of dirt coming out, this insulation came out. I went to another place in the land and I did it again. Instead of dirt, there was a sound of crashing, cracking, and it was glass. So I got my husband, I pulled at the land and it was like pulling a couch, like stuffing just came out. So I got my husband and we went to the edge of the land and we pulled back the rug kind of as though it was a carpet underneath. There was trash everywhere. And meanwhile the foliage is receding. I mean, the growth is receding more and more. And we discovered that at the periphery of this five and a half acres of gorgeous land that we had bought was what amounted to 10,000 tons, tons of debris that had been hidden because of the growth. There were carcasses of cars, There were car batteries, There were antifreeze bottles, There were torn mattresses, There were commodes, There were potty seats. You name it, it was there beyond what you can imagine. It was everywhere. The state got involved and they came out and they said, you know, this is an indiscriminate, illegal dumping grounds that you have bought, and we're going to have to sue you for $1.5 million, and you need to. Or you got to clean it up. So we called in several experts who came, and each expert came and they said, well, it's going to cost about $1.5 million to clean this place up. And now my husband and I, at night were sitting around, you know, our dream place turned into a nightmare for us. And we were arguing, you know, well, you spent too much money buying furniture. Well, why did you buy that tractor? You know, well, it was your stupid idea to go to Mendocino, and that's what got us here to begin with. And our relationship turned very bitter. It was a very bitter time in our lives. And one day we were out walking amongst the trash, which we did a fair amount, and we found we hadn't yet hired an expert to clean this place up because we didn't have $1.5 million and we had no plans to get it soon. And we were walking amongst the trash, and we found two tombstones. And at first we thought they were part of the trash, like, just tombstones that for some reason have been thrown into the trash. But I was like, you know, ben, can we move them? And we couldn't move them. We were tugging them. We realized they were anchored in the earth, that they were real tombstones, but there was no name on either of them. And it seemed to me that suddenly that those were. Those were tombstones that were waiting for us somehow. They somehow belonged to us. And we, at that point, we got involved in litigation, and we went to see a lawyer, and he told us, well, the only way you're going to be able to get out of this is to, you know, start suing the people who sold you the land. So we instituted a terrible lawsuit. Lawsuits themselves should be outlawed. They're terrible. And it was again, money. We're bleeding money. And I was on Craigslist one day, and I saw that someone was giving away an excavator for free. And I was on Craigslist a lot those days on the free part of it, because it just seemed, like, so awesome that anything could be free. And I thought, you know, why can't I just get that excavator myself and excavate, excavate all the land. Like, why do I have to hire an expert to excavate this place? It turned out that excavator was from like 1960 and it wasn't going to do the trick. But I said to my husband, let's get an excavator. And he was like, oh, that's such a good idea. And suddenly it's like we were totally connected and in love again. And a couple of weeks ago, we bought an excavator, a big excavator with a bucket on one side and a thing on another. And we are in the process of excavating the land ourselves. We told our lawyer that this was our solution, that we were going to do it ourselves. He says, a terrible idea. What are you going to do with all the trash once you excavate it? I had actually spoken with the man who dumped the trash there. I found out who it was and I said his name was Harold Rideau and he had been dumping it there for 20, 22 years. He used to own the land, incidentally. The tombstones he claimed were there ahead of time, though he didn't know who those belonged to. And I had gone to Harold and I said, harold, you have two choices. Either I can sue you, okay, or you can take this trash back. And he said, I'll take the trash back. So I said to our lawyer, well, we're just going to give the trash back to Harold. Lately, weekends, my husband and I and our two kids who are in heaven, okay, I have a two year old and a six year old, we go up to New Hampshire and we get in the excavator and we, bucketful by bucketful, drive this huge hulking machine down to Harold's house and we dump the trash there. And slowly, slowly, okay, we are digging ourselves out of this $1.5 million mess. And we are suing, by the way, for the cost of the excavator, which is 15,000 and we haven't yet had the guts, the time. I don't know what to get to the tombstones yet. I called the state about the tombstones. I said, do we need to like, are we responsible for clothes cleaning up the tombstones too? And they said, yeah, so we're responsible for exhuming those tombstones and haven't yet gotten to that yet. And we don't know what's going to be there when we do. Sometimes we think it's going to be a couple. One in one grave, one in the other, maybe two children, maybe just a poodle and a gerbil. I mean, I don't know what's going to be under there. But here's what I do know. When we dig up those graves, I'm going to get in one, I'm going to get six feet down, and I'm going to lie there. I'm going to lie there for a long time. I'm going to lie there until that rocket trip that I was taking in space in my dreams comes down to earth. Until the extraordinariness of death, that infinite, unbelievable trip that I was taking in my dreams becomes. Gets down to earth and becomes banal. What I want to do is lie there not until I get bored to death, but until I get bored of death. And then when I've done that, I'm going to stand up and I'm going to start my life over and over and over again. Thank you.
- [17:48]
Dan Kennedy
Slater is the author of many books, including the $60,000 My Life with Animals. A 2004 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Knight Science Fellow at mit, Slater lives and writes in Harvard, Massachusetts. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. An easy way to create a website, blog or online store. With modern templates and powerful tools, you can create a professional website in minutes. For a free trial and 10% off your first purchase on new accounts, go to squarespace.com themoth and use the offer code themoth5.
- [18:28]
Mike Birbiglia
Hey Moth listeners, it's Mike Birbiglia and I wanted to tell you about a very special show I'm doing. It's at Carnegie Hall. It's my final performance of my one man show, My girlfriend's Boyfriend. I actually did the title story of this show as my very first story on the Moth. It was the first story I ever told on stage. And so it's a very special night for me. There's gonna be some surprises and our special guest Ira Glass will be there performing as well. And I hope you'll join me. It's gonna be really something. Okay, that's all for me. Now back to Dan.
- [18:59]
Dan Kennedy
Hey, here's a note for our listeners in la. The Moth main stage is returning to Los Angeles. Presented by KCRW on Wednesday, June 19th. For ticketing information and for a list of all our upcoming tour stops, visit themoth.org Our podcast host, Dan Kennedy is.
- [19:18]
Lauren Slater
A writer and performer living in New York and author of the new novel American Spirit, available May 28.
- [19:26]
Dan Kennedy
Thanks to all of you for listening and we hope you have a story worthy week. Podcast audio production by Paul Ruest at the Argo Studios in New York. The Moth Podcast and the Radio Hour are presented by prx, the Public Radio Exchange Change Helping Make Public Radio more public@prx.org.