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- [00:01]
A
There's a sled dog grunt in my soup. Lower your voice or everyone will want some. Welcome to Wrong About. I'm Sarah Marshall, and this week we are joined by our wonderful survival correspondent, Blair Braverman. Except this time I'm telling her a story about what happened aboard the Bluebell and. And why an 11 year old girl was its sole survivor. It's a survival story and it's also a true crime story and a story involving suicide. So please listen with care. And now let's go talk to our friend Blair Braverman and learn about survival in many different senses of the word. Welcome to youo Wrong about the podcast where we're surviving. And with me today is Blair Braverman, noted survivalist. And everyone listening today is surviving things right now. And we are going to talk about another survival story and make a beautiful survival parfait. Blair.
- [01:15]
B
Hello, Sarah Marshall.
- [01:21]
A
I love using the term survival parfait with you.
- [01:25]
B
I'm trying to think of a. I don't have one. I'm not fast enough.
- [01:27]
A
But it's okay. You'll think of a trauma dessert later.
- [01:30]
B
I will, I will.
- [01:31]
A
This was actually. This was. Have we talked about how I loved the TikTok trend a while ago of trauma candy salad, where it would be like, my name's Mandy, and when I was at Children's Hospital when I was 18 months old, my dad gambled away all of our savings and I brought Nerds ropes.
- [01:50]
B
What would your trauma salad entry be, Sarah?
- [01:54]
A
All right, this is a funny one, but a trauma candy salad. And to be clear, I don't. This is like more funny than anything. So it's a cop out, but When I was 11, my dad got drunk with a guy who ran the Wicker Story down the street and dyed his hair black. And then when he woke me up for school, I thought he was a burglar.
- [02:17]
B
Okay, but what kind of candy did you bring?
- [02:20]
A
Oh, and I brought peanut butter and jelly. M and M's and jelly. Yeah, I got some on discount the other day. They might be on their way out.
- [02:30]
B
Have you tried them yet?
- [02:31]
A
No. Yeah, I ate them all immediately. They were great.
- [02:34]
B
Oh, my gosh.
- [02:35]
A
Okay.
- [02:36]
B
My name's Blair and I was buried alive and I brought Swedish fish.
- [02:41]
A
Incredible. See? And then that's like a great icebreaker. Pardon the pun, because then people have so many great questions to ask. So. And you and I have known each other for. This is actually our 10th year of friendship, which I think is very exciting. And we should celebrate by erecting a maypole or something. Probably and you've done many wonderful episodes with us and like, many episodes that are people's absolute favorites and have gotten people through some hard times. And you're in luck because the hard times keep coming. And so we're gonna keep doing shows together.
- [03:17]
B
Okay. And Sarah today, Sarah has brought a story to me, and I don't know anything about it. I have no ide what she's going to tell me. In fact, I came to this recording session today thinking we were going to do something completely different. So I'm going to be as surprised as the listeners are.
- [03:35]
A
Yeah. Which you'd think would be me being really strategic, but it wasn't. I just forgot to text her. Okay. And so I think the clues I gave you when we talked about this last is that this one is a survival at sea story, much like your last episode with us, the Aurellyn. Okay. And that it involves an 11 year old girl. Yes.
- [03:55]
B
Oh, this is going to be hard for me. Okay.
- [03:57]
A
Ooh, Tell me why hard? I mean, I can imagine just since
- [04:01]
B
having kids, any sort of like, kid suffering or in pain or like, wanting to get to their mom but being unable to, like, I cannot handle those stories. And I remember when I was a kid, my mom couldn't handle shows where kids got hurt, and I was like, I'm a kid and I can't handle it. Why are you.
- [04:22]
A
Why are you so weak? I did that exact thing. Yeah.
- [04:26]
B
But now I am completely the same way. So I'm braced and I'm ready.
- [04:30]
A
I love it. I think that is like a very important thing as a child, to be able to be like, all these adults are drips, you know, because that confidence, I'm sure, helps a lot. But I will say that this is a story about a child surviving a lot of different things and growing up into a woman who survives a lot of different things and doing so with a lot of grace. And that my joy at this story involving a tween girl is about just the fact that I love adolescence and I think that they're capable of anything. And to me, this is kind of a story that demonstrates that. And also this is a story about luck, and we're inevitably going to talk about that.
- [05:09]
B
I think a lot of survival stories are about luck.
- [05:11]
A
Yeah, it would be hard, I'm sure. I mean, what would be one that wouldn't involve luck, theoretically? Is that possible? I guess that's kind of a philosophical thought.
- [05:19]
B
I don't think that's possible. I think. I think everything in our life is defined by Luck to a large degree. Like, there isn't anyone who's gotten out of anything without luck.
- [05:28]
A
A real man makes his own luck. Luck. Billy Zane, Titanic.
- [05:32]
B
Yeah, yeah, Jump in. I'm worried. I'm worried. Let's go for it.
- [05:36]
A
Yeah, we're gonna go for it. And I am gonna do this to try and have a bare minimum of moms crying happening is my goal.
- [05:45]
B
Okay.
- [05:46]
A
But, you know, I'll be your test subject. There might be some inevitable tears. Okay, so we are starting off with a family that lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The parents, Arthur and Jean. Yes. A tween girl, and she's from Green Bay, a town where you and I have spent many very happy hours, especially
- [06:04]
B
at the Target and the Eat all you want.
- [06:08]
A
Wait, what is it?
- [06:08]
B
All you can eat? Sushi buffet.
- [06:10]
A
Eat all you want. Feels like a very Green Bay way to put it. They're like, look, you don't have to make yourself uncomfortable because, you know, seriously, lay off.
- [06:19]
B
Okay? We love Green Bay. People from Green Bay are competent. So I'm already getting a sense of who these people are.
- [06:26]
A
Exactly. And so In November of 1961, we have Arthur and Jean Duperrault, whose name. I'm sorry if I'm saying wrong in any way. Arthur is a World War II vet, and he fell in love with the sea during the war. And one of his dreams is to get back there and one day to live on a sailboat with his family for a year. And they have three children. So there's Brian, who's 14. There's Terry Jo, who's 11, and there's Renee, who's 4. And Arth is an optometrist in Green Bay. And also, I'm taking almost all of the information that we're talking about today from a book called Orphaned on the ocean, which is by Richard Logan and Terry Duperalt Fassbender. So it's done with the authorization of Terry. And also after surviving this experience, Terry, she had been Terry Jo, T E R R Y, space, J O. And afterwards, she changed her name to. It's still Terri, but the spelling is T E R E. And I find that, you know, very sad because there was something that she had to maybe distance herself from or feel reborn from. And also gets really funny and cute that she was like, my name isn't Terry anymore. My name is Terry. Because you don't want to lose everything. You know, you got to. Because it's like, just give it a refres. Change the spelling.
- [07:58]
B
T E R E. Seems like A very beautiful spelling to me, though. So I'm here for it.
- [08:02]
A
Although at some point, someone is going to call you, hey, Tia. Tia, come over here.
- [08:07]
B
My aunt is named Terry Lee, and she also changed the spelling of her name as an adult. Fun fact. So I'm already thinking of someone in
- [08:16]
A
my family if you're a Terry and you want to stay a Terry, but maybe, you know, get. Get a little distance, like. Yeah, that's an option. So, yeah, this is the book that I read to prepare for this episode. And we're also going to look at a news article, article or two. But this is done with Terry Jo now, Terry's authorization, and through extensive interviews with her. And so from what we know from this, the family life was really, like, pretty idyllic. And, you know, they weren't worried about money. There just aren't a lot of rough edges that come up in this telling of it. And another thing about Terry Cho that I felt might possibly resonate with you is that she loved being outdoors as a kid. And something that she did a lot growing up was pretending to be Tarzan based on the old Johnny Weissmuller movies, and would just spend a lot of time outdoors just on her own doing her Tarzan thing.
- [09:11]
B
Okay, excellent. Green Bay childhood.
- [09:14]
A
Yeah, Green Bay childhood, playing Tarzan, which I also. I liked being alone as a kid, too. And there's something about that, especially if you have access to nature and your parents let you roam, that like, you kind of learn how to be observant in a way, which I'm sure also, I mean, I don't really know what it's like to be a young kid growing up in a city, because there's a lot to observe there, but you're able to observe maybe nature in a more direct way, in a way that could serve you in later situations. So In November of 1961, the family goes down to Florida because Arthur's idea is they're going to charter a boat for a little excursion. They're going to go to the Bahamas. Just. Yeah, a fun little trip as a family. And the idea, which is very smart and which I think more people who have big ideas and want to these days live out of an RV or something could kind of road test something and be like, well, let's do it for like a week or two and see if everybody likes it, and then maybe we can think about committing to it in a bigger way. And so they charter a boat called the Bluebell, whose skipper is named Julian Harvey, and he's also a World War II vet he was a test pilot and he has just a handsome face, which is often an ominous sign in a man because it means he's been able to get away with too much. And that's the case with Julian Harvey.
- [10:41]
B
Oh my.
- [10:42]
A
Okay, sorry. If you're handsome and you're listening, I'm sure you're a great person, but you understand.
- [10:48]
B
And if you're not handsome, we trust you more.
- [10:50]
A
That's true. Yeah. And now let me get some, let me get some bluebell specs up here because I don't want to leave the boat enthusiasts hanging. Okay? So here's an excerpt from the Bluebell was a catch, a two masted sailboat with a 60 foot tall mainmast toward the bow and a shorter 45 foot mizzen mast toward the stern. Originally built as a racing yacht, the boat was long, low and narrow. The combination of its simple linear design, its low profile and white color made it elegant and sleek. The boat was 60ft long overall or about 45ft at the waterline and 15ft wide at its broadest point. In front of the 11 foot long cockpit was the 21 foot long cabin RO roof covering most of the interior of the boat and rising two feet above the deck. Normally, the ship's white wooden dinghy and black rubber life raft were stowed along the left side of the cabin roof and a white five man cork life float was lashed to the right forward cabin roof. On either side of the cabin were walkways that were not quite two feet wide and were bordered at the deck edge by stanchions that held a cable safety line about 30 inches above the deck. The largest area inside the boat was the 13 foot long main cabin. And then we have additional rooms. There's a smaller sleeping cabin underneath the cockpit. So just kind of a fairly substantial living space it seems like. So that's kind of what the boat is like. And Julian Harvey also brings along his wife Mary Dean and she's cooking meals for the family. And it seems, according to Terriko's memory of it and also people who encounter them along the way, that everybody's having a great time. Something that the family doesn't know about him is that he was actually hired for a position that he's not quite qualified for or whatever the right noun is. Exactly. He's too handsome and b that he has been married quite a few times and that a handful of years ago he was driving with his wife and his mother in law and suddenly the car somehow ended up in a ditch and and his wife and mother in law died and he collected insurance money. And then later on with another wife, he had a boat and the boat mysteriously sank and he collected more insurance money. And so basically he's practicing elements of a larger crime. He's doing insurance fraud and he's escalating the size of the thing he's willing to destroy and perhaps the number of people with it.
- [13:18]
B
Wait, sorry, are you saying that sinking a boat is worse than killing his wife and mother in law?
- [13:25]
A
No, I'm thinking of going from car to boat. But if there's ambiguity there for you, then, yeah, let's not freak people out.
- [13:32]
B
Okay, I didn't think you thought that. I mean, I want to, like, I hear this and I want to give the guy the benefit of the doubt.
- [13:38]
A
I mean, people's souls are infinitely valuable. But then there's boats I wanted.
- [13:44]
B
I mean, do we know that he crashed it on purpose? Like this could be a horrible tragedy that crashing a car that he's in. He didn't know he was gonna live. Right? Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to sort of.
- [13:57]
A
It's a very good point.
- [13:58]
B
My first thought when I hear that is not necessarily that he tried to kill them.
- [14:02]
A
Right.
- [14:03]
B
Although I feel like that's what you're setting up.
- [14:05]
A
Well, and there is, I mean, I get. But at this point, there is enough ambiguity in those events that it's like, wow, what, what an unlucky guy who keeps getting insurance money. But if you're, if you're of a mind that a pattern is emerging, which if you have 2020 hindsight, you can see then he's also his most recent wife, Mary. When they met, he gave her the impression, and this feels like a very common story in human history, that he was doing so well and had lots of money and then they got married and he was like, psych, I am in so much debt, you wouldn't even believe how much debt I'm in.
- [14:40]
B
Shocking how that happens.
- [14:41]
A
And he's learned that insurance money will come through for him. So even if he's just been through some very unfortunate accidents in the past, he's in a position of knowing that he can get perhaps a good insurance payout on a boat because for whatever reason, he's gotten it before, and needing that at the moment.
- [14:59]
B
Okay, I'm worried, I'm worried.
- [15:01]
A
It's a little worrying. And so on Saturday, November 11, they go to Gorda Key, which is, and I'm quoting from the book again, a tiny island with a small settlement and a beautiful white horseshoe beach and a picturesque harbor off the island. The bluebell party was observed trolling for game fish, the catch moving steadily under power. And Dr. Duperalt goes on shore and he gets to talking to a local fisherman, Jimmy Wells. And Jimmy ends up coming on board for dinner. And later on, he's telling the family about the jungle that's on shore where there's wild boars and there's feral horses that are descended from the domesticated ones that escaped.
- [15:42]
B
This sounds incredible. I mean, apart from all the red flags and the fact that we know
- [15:47]
A
something terrible is going to happen.
- [15:48]
B
I want to go on this trip.
- [15:50]
A
Yeah, exactly like you're going to little
- [15:53]
B
deserted islands with wild horses and seeing sharks and fish.
- [15:59]
A
Okay, I want to do it. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like just a really lovely trip. And I should say also that, like, everybody in this family, really, they're pretty outdoorsy, as you can kind of see from their choice of leisure. They like fishing. Terry Jo also enjoys water skiing when she's growing up. They enjoy sailing. They haven't really done anything on the ocean as a family, but there's a lot of water around Green Bay, as the name sort of gives away. And growing up on a great lake is not that different from growing up on an ocean. As Blair, you can testify to.
- [16:35]
B
I can testify sort of to that I have lived along the Great Lakes for quite a while.
- [16:40]
A
That's true. Yeah. You didn't grow up on one.
- [16:43]
B
I like the ocean, but I have no experience. But I do want to say also, the water ski teams around Green Bay are iconic.
- [16:50]
A
Yeah. Say more about that.
- [16:52]
B
They are multi generational. So you have, like, little kids, you have people who are in their 50s and 60s. They like, stay on the same team for their entire life, and they just have these amazing costumes and do these amazing shows. And every lake traditionally had their own team. So Terry Jo would have been an icon. I can already picture it.
- [17:16]
A
Yeah. Yeah. And also the water is a place where she feels comfortable and where she has a lot of happy memories. And I think that's gonna maybe serve her really well, too. And so, yeah, what Jimmy says, you know, he's visiting, he stays for dinner, and Mary de Harvey makes chicken cacciatore and salad. And he says it was a happy ship and everyone was nice and having a wonderful time. So then the ship goes back out on the water, and then we're going to skip ahead to the next day when there's a tanker called the Gulf lion and they see Julie and Harvey in the Dinghy which is the emergency lifeboat that was on the bluebell, and the dinghies towing the life raft. And they pick up Julian Harvey, and he says, the ship sank, and I tried to save them. But based on the story he tells, it seems like he did not try super hard.
- [18:14]
B
So he's saying that both parents, all three kids, and his wife, whatever number wife, are all gone with the ship.
- [18:22]
A
Yes. Yeah. And he also. And this is one of the saddest details in this, he has the body of the youngest child in the dinghy with him. Yeah.
- [18:34]
B
Oh, my God. Oh. Somehow I thought he would have just, like, dumped them on an island somewhere.
- [18:39]
A
What?
- [18:40]
B
Oh, my God.
- [18:41]
A
Yeah. I don't. I don't. And it's. There's kind of different ways that, you know, people have put the story together over time. Yeah. Yeah.
- [18:49]
B
I hope they arrested him on the spot. Well, I don't. Now I see what you mean about pattern recognition. This guy's.
- [18:55]
A
Yeah, this guy is tr. Well, but that's the thing, right, Is that it's. How do you kind of spot something before it escalates to that point? And that is the thing that I think we as a society have to put maybe a lot more resources into recognizing patterns and showing people how to recognize patterns to the extent possible. I don't know. But no. So the tanker calls the Coast Guard. The Coast Guard picks him up. He's acting a little bit weird under the circumstances. And I know. And I'm also often the first person to say that if you've just been through a giant tragedy, then you're kind of bound to be acting weird. But there's specific weird things that do feel, again, kind of like of a pattern with potential guilt. And one of them that I've seen in other stories, and that becomes funny in a macabre way when you've been thinking about something sad for a really long time is they're like, wow, do you think that anyone could possibly have survived? And he's like. Like, no. And how. Just not thinking of how a normal person would be like, gosh, I hope so. I really. It would be amazing if someone lived. He's like, no, they for sure know. I wouldn't worry about it. Probably shouldn't look for them.
- [20:09]
B
But also, he lived, so apparently somebody could, Right?
- [20:12]
A
But he's like, yeah, I wouldn't look into that. I don't even. Don't even hesitate. Don't even worry about it. And that's a little bit worrying. I'm thinking specifically, there's a case In Colorado about. Coming up on. Ten years ago, this man named Chris Watts killed his family. And I have spent a lot of time thinking about it and have never felt less confused than when I started thinking about it. And there's something comforting about not understanding what it is in someone's brain that allows them to do that type of thing. But there's these absurd TV interviews with him where he's just like, yeah, I'm worried. I miss them. Normally they'd be here and they're not. And you're like, hmm, yeah, you do seem very upset.
- [20:56]
B
I mean, you never want to judge someone for how they respond in the wake of a tragedy. It's not the kind of thing we can predict exactly. But.
- [21:05]
A
Right. And we have to have humility about it. But. And then it's like. And in that case, I think also of kind of his and his wife friends being like, should we drive around? Should we look for her? What should we do? Should we be calling hospitals? And he's like, no, it's fine. Yeah.
- [21:21]
B
I mean, at the very least with the ship that sinks, to be like, go look for the bodies. Even if he doesn't think someone survived.
- [21:27]
A
Right, exactly. And he's just kind of, like, not feeling super curious about it. And so the Coast Guard picks him up, and they're kind of like, okay, some things are starting to feel a little bit weird. But look, we're going to question him. We're going to get the full story. And so there's a Coast Guard inquest. And so there's actually a very good record of him being questioned and telling his story of the boat sinking. And it's kind of an amazing story, and you feel like he could have come up with a better one. And then the more I kind of learn about how this all probably transpired or how there's a good chance it transpired, it makes sense that he didn't come up with something better, which is he says, well, you know, we were sailing, and then it was windy, and then the mizzen mast just simply fell down out of nowhere. And I don't know anything about boats, but I do know that, like, having a structural element of an otherwise sound and, you know, street legal, seaworthy, whatever, vehicle of some kind, saying that it just simply suddenly stopped doing its one job for kind of no reason.
- [22:33]
B
I don't know.
- [22:33]
A
It's not super convincing. And the Coast Guard feels the same way I do about that one.
- [22:38]
B
Okay, so the Coast Guard obviously does know about boats, and they're like, no, no, no, this does not.
- [22:43]
A
Well, yeah, exactly. I mean, yeah, it's really a huge part of what they do and they're having some concerns, but at the same time, there's no one out there to contradict him and there's no one to say that they saw anything happen differently. The boat has also unfortunately just been inspected and is in great shape. So again, it's like, it's not convincing.
- [23:06]
B
I bet he like hid the boat somewhere. He didn't even want to sink it because he also wanted the money for the boat. Now I'm just totally speculating.
- [23:13]
A
Right, yeah, that would be very clever, but. Right, so we don't know. We just have this one man in his story. So he's rescued on the 13th, and the ship, according to him, sank on the night of the 12th, the early morning of the 13th. Root of shipwrecks to happen at night, as with the Titanic. I feel like that would have been slightly less scary in the daytime. I mean, equally lethal. But I don't know. I'm scared of the dark.
- [23:39]
B
Yeah, dark water is even scarier than non dark water.
- [23:43]
A
Exactly. And non dark water is still pretty scary. So, you know, so. Yeah. So this is the night of Sunday, November 12th is the last time anybody sees the ship, aside from the party that is sailing it. It sinks sometime overnight, according to Julian Harvey. And also, I want to be fun and have suspense, but to end your speculation, the ship really did sink. At least that's what all evidence points to. So the ship sinks and then November 13 passes, November 14 passes, November 15 passes and the Coast Guard is doing its inquest. And on the day of November 16th, three and a half days after the ship has sunk, Julian Harvey is being questioned by the Coast Guard and the news reaches him. And he is informed that Terry Jo has been found floating on a cork raft and has been rescued by a Greek tuna boat.
- [24:41]
B
My God. Okay, the 11 year old, how does he respond when he finds that out? Also, I have a sled dog next to me and she's grunting.
- [24:50]
A
I mean, that's just a bonus.
- [24:51]
B
So that's the ambiance. If you hear that, that's Pepe. She says hi.
- [24:55]
A
That's like there's a sled dog grunt in my soup. Lower your voice or everyone will want some.
- [25:02]
B
Well, it's here for all of us.
- [25:04]
A
If you hear that in the background.
- [25:06]
B
Okay, Terry Jo, what state is she in? What happened and how does he respond?
- [25:11]
A
All right, let me answer your two questions simultaneously because I love this. Okay, so we know what he said again, because this is all on the record, and I'll read to you from the book. Oh, my God, Harvey said when he heard the news of Terry Jo's miraculous rescue. Echoing words of surprise uttered by the others in the room. He pushed his chair back and looked down for a moment. Then he raised his head, looked around, and said, isn't that wonderful? Others nodded, then went back to shaking their heads as they, too, processed the extraordinary news. Harvey got up, walked to a window overlooking busy Flagler Street. This is in Miami, by the way. I'm sorry if I said that wrong. And stood there for some seconds, staring out. When Harvey turned back from the window, he headed toward the door without a word, seeming preoccupied. And someone says, captain Harvey, don't you want to remain for the rest of the testimony? You have that privilege. Harvey shook his head, smiled briefly, nodded to the room, and departed. And then, within a few minutes, the Coast Guard authorities call the Miami Police
- [26:12]
B
Department because he was acting suspicious.
- [26:16]
A
Yeah. And so he goes back to his hotel room and goes into his bathroom and basically does not come back out. He dies by suicide.
- [26:26]
B
Good fucking riddance.
- [26:27]
A
Yeah. I feel like we're in a moment where. And hopefully an era that lasts forever where we're very sensitive about suicide and suicidality. But also, yeah, he did kill an entire family. I feel like we're not being too controversial here.
- [26:44]
B
And presumably at least one prior wife. Okay.
- [26:46]
A
All right.
- [26:47]
B
So he knows that she's gonna say something that's going to puncture his story and presumably all the other stories he's told.
- [26:53]
A
Yeah, yeah. And so he leaves our story as a character in that way. And. And now we're going to go to Terry Jo, because she. And I want you to talk a little bit about your knowledge base on this. But she has now survived for about three and a half days without food or water or shelter, for that matter. Oh, my God. Yeah, let's talk about that.
- [27:19]
B
I mean. And she's floating in saltwater.
- [27:23]
A
Yeah, she's. Okay, so here's the thing, too. She's floating in salt water, and she's not unlike a life raft like you would imagine, that's, like, rubberized or that has a floor. She's in basically a ring of cork that has a net of ropes strung on the underside of it. And the ropes are pretty weathered, and so they keep breaking when she sits on them. So she's on this tiny, unstable, rapidly disintegrating, barely a life raft.
- [27:51]
B
Oh, my God.
- [27:53]
A
This.
- [27:53]
B
11 years. So sixth grade, right? 11 is sixth grade. By herself, without her family.
- [27:58]
A
Yeah.
- [27:59]
B
Okay. I mean, the ocean is absolutely not my expertise. My expertise is cold.
- [28:04]
A
But cold, not salt.
- [28:07]
B
Cold, not salt. I have only crossed the sea by mushing over the sea ice, not by spending much time in boats.
- [28:14]
A
There you go. That is like a beautiful sentence that you just said. That is a poem.
- [28:20]
B
I mean, my understanding, my conception of this is that, I mean, salt is going to make everything harder. It eats away at your skin. It eats away at materials. I mean, the fact that she doesn't have anything to protect her from the sun, just the exposure if the water's cold, even if it's not. I mean, I assume she's in water.
- [28:39]
A
Yeah, no, she's in the water.
- [28:42]
B
Her skin is probably in terrible condition. I mean, psychologically. I wonder if she was. Was even conscious when they found her. That's not psychology necessarily.
- [28:51]
A
Well. But brain related.
- [28:53]
B
Yeah. I mean, I'm just thinking, like, okay, the amount of shock she must be in.
- [28:57]
A
Yeah. And she is. She's like barely conscious when they pick her up. And she's suffering kidney damage. I'll say that she gets treated for immediately at the hospital.
- [29:07]
B
Is that because she was drinking salt water?
- [29:08]
A
I think just from severe dehydration. Because I don't think she tried to drink salt water at all. Because, again, she's an outdoorsy kid and I think she knows these things. Yeah.
- [29:19]
B
And then the body just rejects salt water. It doesn't take much of an experiment to learn that.
- [29:23]
A
And there's a little bit of rain occasionally, and she's able to kind of basically just moisten her lips with that. And there's a little bit of cloud cover.
- [29:33]
B
Right. Cause she doesn't have any materials. We're not talking about her having a cup with her or a knife or anything.
- [29:40]
A
She's just, just.
- [29:41]
B
It's just pure, like, how long can her body hold on? And I imagine she was at the edge of that limit when they found her.
- [29:48]
A
Yeah. Because, I mean, the thing everybody says, and that doesn't seem like an oversimplification, is that three days without water and you're dead, basically. Is there anything to mitigate that?
- [29:59]
B
Not really. I mean, conditions affect things. You know, if you're at hot or
- [30:05]
A
cold temperatures, maybe that's why millennials are so obsessed with hydrating, because the world is trying to kill us. And we're like, like, joke's on you. You can't kill me. I ate. I drank four quarts of water today. I'm on my third Nalgene.
- [30:22]
B
The rule of thumb, I'VE heard is that the order of necessities in terms of immediacy are water, shelter, and food. Like, you can go the longest without food, but that really depends, because if you're in an extreme environment, you need shelter before you need water. So without knowing the exact conditions, I mean, I'd just be guessing here, but I'm shocked she's alive.
- [30:44]
A
Yeah. Yeah. And everyone else is too, because she's barely conscious when she's pulled aboard this freighter, the captain Theo. And she also has seen other freighters passing by because she has ended up in a shipping lane, luckily. But unluckily, she is in a white raft and she is a pale blonde child, and so she is invisible unless you're like, basically. Basically right on top of her, which is where the captain Theo ended up. But, like, other ships passed her by, you know? Yeah.
- [31:17]
B
As we learned from the Orelan. Right. A shipping lane can be pretty wide, and it can be really hard to spot something small in the water and know that it's someone who needs rescue.
- [31:26]
A
Yeah. So she is rushed to the hospital. She's severely dehydrated. They set about dealing with that, and she starts. Bounces back pretty quickly. She's 11, she's healthy. So she's lucky in her body's ability to be able to recover from that type of thing, among other things. And she's also privately at this time worrying about where she's gonna live and who will take care of her. Oh, God, this poor kid.
- [31:59]
B
Cause is her whole family gone?
- [32:02]
A
Well, okay, so, yeah, let's talk about when Terry Jo tells her story, because once she's recovered for a few days, she is questioned, the Coast Guard as well, and she tells a very detailed account of what she remembered and what happened on that night. And actually, let me send you a picture of her recuperating in the hospital.
- [32:26]
B
Okay.
- [32:26]
A
And when that comes through, you can tell me what you see.
- [32:29]
B
Oh, my gosh, she looks so sweet. Okay, so here's this black and white picture of this little girl with blonde bangs and blonde hair that's like shoulder length. And she's lying in bed and wearing a white tank top. It looks like she's wearing a headband that's pushing her hair back. And it looks like someone has really brushed her hair and sort of cleaned her up. And she's slightly creepily, holding a doll with the same hairstyle who's exactly the same size as her and wearing the exact, like, looks exactly the same. The same color hair and the same hairstyle.
- [33:04]
A
Yeah, it is a little bit Mulholland Drive.
- [33:06]
B
It's a little bit, you know, out of context. I would be alarmed by this photo, but I'm alarmed in a different way from the context.
- [33:13]
A
Dolls get a bad rap.
- [33:14]
B
Yeah, well, life size ones, I don't know.
- [33:17]
A
Sorry.
- [33:17]
B
That's a distraction.
- [33:18]
A
No, if they're life size, they can come for you. But there's actually, there's a story behind the doll, which is that when Terry Jo and her sister were back home in Green Bay, they had life sized dolls and they brought them on the bluebell. And apparently one of the things that she talked about and that the men from the captain Theo who rescued her heard about, I'm not sure if it was directly from her, was that their dolls had gone down with the ship and so they got her a replacement doll.
- [33:45]
B
Oh my God. I thought you were gonna say the doll was gonna be on the cork raft with her and I was gonna cry.
- [33:52]
A
Oh, that would have been so nice. Now that's a play. That's our. That's our play. Oh my gosh. Okay. Yeah.
- [33:59]
B
Oh, she's so sweet. She looks so young and she's thin. Yeah, I imagine more so after. After having been on this raft.
- [34:07]
A
Yeah.
- [34:07]
B
And then there's a caption under it, so that says, Terry Jo said porpoises swam alongside her as she was stranded.
- [34:14]
A
Yeah, they did. Yeah. I love her so much. There's something about the spirit of the eternal 11 year old girl that you can survive longer than doctors imagine possible alone at sea. And then you really want your doll, you know.
- [34:36]
B
Oh, man. So what did she say?
- [34:39]
A
So at about 9 o' clock after dinner, Terry Kell went to bed. She went to the littler sleeping cabin and she goes to sleep by herself. The rest of her family is in different rooms or still up on the deck. And her dad is helping the captain to. I feel like steer the boat is the wrong verb, but you know, do the boat thing. And so she wakes up at some point later in the night. She doesn't know, she's very disoriented and she can hear that there is like some wind and some rough weather. But she also hears screaming inside the boat and it turns out to be her brother. And so she wakes up, she hears that screaming and then somebody running around. And then she doesn't hear anything. She just hears the ambient sounds of the boat creaking in the water. And she lies there terrified, not knowing what to do. And then after what she thinks is about five or ten minutes, she leaves her cabin to try and see what's going on. And she sees her mother and brother, and as far as she can tell, they're dead. She sees. She's lying there, and she sees blood.
- [35:52]
B
Holy shit.
- [35:53]
A
And later on in her life, she is gonna have a hard time with blood and with dark water. But she's also a lifelong animal lover, and so she will deal with blood if she's taking care of animals later on in her life. Oh, my God.
- [36:06]
B
So the ship has not gone down or any. He just murdered them.
- [36:11]
A
So this is what's hard to understand is kind of like the order of things and some of the motive. Right. Because he has. Apparently, based on interpreting the pattern based on kind of what we see when the pieces come together. He has this fondness for insurance fraud and. And killing a wife because of it. But this degree of escalation is curious. And what the author of this book eventually theorizes, and which is persuasive to me, is that his original plan, perhaps was to kill his wife in their own cabin and basically throw her overboard and then go spend the night with the family, thereby establishing an alibi, and in the morning, be like, oh, my God, my wife is missing. She must have drowned mysteriously, like women. Women do. Especially when there's an insurance policy taken out with a double indemnity clause in case of accidents.
- [37:05]
B
God, I feel sick.
- [37:07]
A
Because he stood to make $40,000. Yeah, it's extremely sickening. And so, again, what this author theorizes, which I again find persuasive, is that this was his plan, and then she put up more of a fight than he anticipated because there were deep scratch marks on his body that, in the opinion of one witness, looked like they could have come from a woman fighting for her life. And so perhaps his wife put up too much of a fight. The family who was still awake on deck intervened, and having not planned for any of this, he killed them and then attempted to sink the boat and basically forgot about Terry Jones or assume that she would drown if he just left her sleeping downstairs.
- [37:55]
B
This monster.
- [37:56]
A
You could also theorize that he just planned to kill everyone and sink the boat to begin with. I do kind of lean toward the first idea because I think that there are still scales at which people do terrible things and that escalating to killing an entire family is. I don't know. I have a worldview that maybe that takes a longer time to escalate to. But is that too optimistic, perhaps? It's hard to know.
- [38:27]
B
Well, presumably also anyone alive would have tried to stop him from sinking the ship.
- [38:32]
A
Well, exactly. Right. And so, yeah, the question also then is, like, did he just plan to kill his wife and get insurance money from her dying? Which he very easily could have just done that and then used this family as witnesses. And that's kind of the smarter plan. And then there's the insane person plan, which is just to kill everyone and then sink the boat and then be found by the Coast Guard. And they both feel possible. You know, people do all sorts of things. And the point is that he seems to have not anticipated Terry Jo seeing him doing any of this or perhaps even waking up, perhaps even kind of forgot about her. But she comes out on the deck, and he is basically actively sinking the boat. At that time, he's turned on the sea valves, which are basically pumping water into the boat, in my understanding. And the water is oily.
- [39:22]
B
Wait, that's a thing boats can do. They just have plugs that you can unplug. Like the opposite of emptying out a bathtub.
- [39:29]
A
I can see two options. Someone's going to be like, no, it's much more sophisticated than that. Or someone's going to be like, yeah, they have plugs, but they call them something else to be nautical about it.
- [39:38]
B
There must be a reason for this that we're missing.
- [39:41]
A
That's like, okay, I'm gonna. We're gonna see if we can determine it in the next 90 seconds. Let's see. Sea valves. Why? I'm googling sea valves. Why? Sea valves or seacocks, naturally. Pardon? Et moi. I'm reading the Wikipedia page for seacocks. Oh, the adventures we go on. A seacock is a valve on the hull of a boat or a ship, permitting water to flow into the vessel, such as for cooling an engine or for a saltwater faucet or for sinking the ship on purpose and killing everyone. Doesn't say that, right? No. So, yeah, he is basically flooding the ship with salt water in an attempt to scuttle it. And one of the amazing things about the story is that. So Terry Jo comes out. She sees her family dead. She retreats to her cabin. She sees Julian Harvey in silhouette at the door with what looks like a rifle to her. He leaves, and her cabin starts filling with water with, like, this oily water, which is what drives her back up on deck and back toward the man who's killed her family.
- [40:49]
B
And she under. It sounds like she understands that he's killed her family. She's not like, oh, it's an emergency. I have to go to the nearest adult she understands that this man is someone to hide from.
- [40:59]
A
I think so. But she also. She doesn't kind of. She refers to it as an accident after the fact. She doesn't refer to it as a murder. And she doesn't express anger about him until many years later. And I don't know what to take from that except that that's how she treats it after the fact. But. So two crucial things, and these are two pieces of luck, in a way. She doesn't see her father's body. And so later on, she's able to hold on to hope that her father is still alive. And the water that Gillian Harvey is pumping into the ship is oily, and it gets on her skin. And possibly when she's on the life raft, predators leave her alone. And don't try and nibble on her because she's protected by this little oil slick.
- [41:44]
B
I wonder if that also sort of. Sorry. Dogs groaning next to me.
- [41:51]
A
Grunting that's okay. It's good stuff.
- [41:54]
B
That means she's very relaxed. I mean, I wonder if it sort of helped keep moisture in her body, too.
- [42:02]
A
Why not?
- [42:03]
B
I'm just guessing about that, but I could sort of see that working.
- [42:07]
A
Yeah. So I guess this. I mean, and what it ends up being is this combination of horrifying events that just get more and more horrifying, and yet at a certain point, there are so many horrifying things trying to happen to her at once that they kind of cancel each other out in a weird way, or not cancel each other out, but mitigate each other in ways that you wouldn't expect. And part of what this book talks about or argues as a possible reason for her survival or thing that aided in her survival is that she's been through this massive emotional trauma and shock, and that perhaps this is based on interviews with her. So I'm not sure if this is something that she's theorized about herself or not, because we only hear from her directly in an afterword, which is a great afterword. But. But the book argues, at least, that maybe the emotional shock and kind of dissociation, maybe that she was in, allowed her to remain calm about the survival situation she was then in, because she already had maybe a little bit of a sense of unreality about what she'd just been through. Yeah. And maybe that helped her to not panic.
- [43:11]
B
I hope so. I hope her brain protected her from that. So she wasn't also facing that incredible grief.
- [43:20]
A
Yeah.
- [43:21]
B
While she was in that situation.
- [43:23]
A
Yeah. Well, and then another thing that she says is that she never doubted that she would survive.
- [43:31]
B
Interesting.
- [43:32]
A
Yeah.
- [43:32]
B
I mean, that's something I've heard from people who have survived other extraordinary things like this. But also, we don't know how many people never doubted they'd survive and then still didn't make it.
- [43:44]
A
Exactly right. A lot of those people are dead, and we don't know that that happened because they can't tell us about it on daytime TV because. Because their bodies are in a cave on Mount Everest. So it's so many things. And. Yeah, there's. Okay, this is such a silly comparison, but in the extended Titanic soundtrack, there's a. Shut up. I did a really. I know. You giggled. There's a really lovely fiddle piece called Jack Dawson's Luck, which is based on this idea of, like, wow, he's so lucky cause he won a ticket on Titanic. But he's unlucky because it sang. But he's lucky because he met Rose, but he's unlucky because he died. And I keep thinking of the luck of Terry Jo, where it's like the worst thing you can imagine becomes something that helps you through the next worst thing you can imagine.
- [44:35]
B
I mean, if she were actually lucky, none of this would have happened to her at all.
- [44:40]
A
Exactly. The luckiest thing would be to not be there.
- [44:45]
B
What she had was, like a tiny, tiny break in the extraordinarily terrible luck she was dealing with.
- [44:52]
A
Yeah, exactly. And also, you know, there's luck. And she also. She keeps a cool head through this, and who knows where that comes from or why, but I think spending time alone pretending to be Tarzan really helps. And she also, you know, she, as a kid, will go play in the wood and pretend in the wood. Oh, my God, who am I? And she, as a kid, will go play in the Pooh. And she, as a kid, also would go play in the woods and do kind of pretend survival stuff, you know? Yeah. And it's like. Not to say that that's practice, but, like, it can hurt.
- [45:28]
B
I mean, even the fact that the family was doing this trip.
- [45:31]
A
Yeah.
- [45:32]
B
She wasn't someone for whom the outdoors were a foreign or a terrifying environment.
- [45:37]
A
Right.
- [45:37]
B
They were a place that she felt comfortable enough that she was doing these things recreationally with the people she loved.
- [45:44]
A
Right. Yeah. And that she is in a place where she has not the open ocean, but the water. The time that she spent to this point, this experience is being built on a base of what she's experienced and what her family has given her in terms of stability and love.
- [46:04]
B
So how did she get from the cabin into the cork raft.
- [46:09]
A
Okay, well, here, let me read you this scene from the book. So she comes up on deck, she says, is the ship sinking and there's waist deep water on the deck? And Harvey says yes. He write quote, and I'm reading now. He rushed at her again and handed her a line, shouting frantically, here, hold this, like men are always doing. Terry Jo, already numb from shock, stiffened in terror and the line slipped through her finger fingers. Harvey hurried forward. Terry Joe could not see what he went to get since the boat was already well down in the water and it was the line to the dinghy that Harvey had hurriedly handed to her. Clearly, Terry Jo had interrupted him at the very instant he was getting off the bluebell. When he rushed back seconds later, he cried, the dinghy's gone. The dinghy was now slowly drifting away in the dark from the sinking bluebell. With no further sound, he dived overboard, abandoning her on a now wave washed deck. She saw him swimming after the dinghy but couldn't see if he caught up with it after he disappeared into the night. And so she's alone on the dark ocean and she just has barely enough time to get to this little life raft, this little circle of cork, or oval of cork, I guess. It's five foot long by two and a half feet wide.
- [47:24]
B
This is the kind of thing that like lifeguards throw to someone. I'm imagining, right?
- [47:29]
A
Yeah. I mean, I have never lifeguarded or been thrown that kind of thing, but that feels right or, you know, that it's just like, I think it's designed for people to cling on to while in the water. It's not designed to be saddened by somebody, basically. And so she unties four half hitch knots which. Go learn your knots, kids. I will never give you parenting advice except one thing. Teach your children knots. And it's kind of the last possible second that she can get this cork raft free before the ship completely sinks from under her. And then it's just her in the water. And she drifts over the next three and a half days for about 18 miles and she ends up in the shipping lane where she's eventually found. But she's out on the ocean. The Coast Guard now knows to search for her because despite Gillian Harvey being like, no, it's fine, they're still looking for survivors, but the search area is 5,000 square miles. And so she sees planes, she takes off her blouse and waves it to one to try and signal it, but she's just invisible. Against the ocean, especially because she's surrounded by whitecaps. So she looks just like another little wave breaking. And so like you said, the salt that's on her skin is making her burn faster. There's salt on her lips all the time. It's also extremely hot, and she gets a little bit of cloud cover occasionally, but mostly it's just the sun beating down on her. And so she's getting extremely sunburned. She's also getting nibbled on. Not by predators, but she gets nibbled on by parrotfish.
- [49:09]
B
I mean, they're predators if they're trying to eat her.
- [49:11]
A
Fair point.
- [49:12]
B
Well, they might not have a lot of teeth.
- [49:14]
A
I think they think she's coral. So I guess intent is 3/10 of the law or something. Yes, predator, coralfish. And so she's able to, you know, to get a tiny little bit of water when it rains, it must be
- [49:28]
B
just like three drops, like almost nothing.
- [49:31]
A
Or I guess that, you know, she can't catch it. Right. Because she's just wearing like a little like a blouse and petal pushers, by the way. And she's wondering about her father and wondering if maybe he survives somehow and talking to God, asking him to protect herself and her father and also her little sister, who she doesn't know what happened to her yet either. And let me read you this quote from the book. Sometime later during the night, the skies cleared and she finally raised her head to see a great bowl of millions of bright stars overhead. They increased her feeling of the unreal vastness of this world of water and sky. She felt like she was in some kind of strange cosmic dream, Drifting alone through a dark infinity with nothing to hold on to. Drifting alone through a dark infinity with nothing to hold on to but herself.
- [50:25]
B
That's such an evocative description, too.
- [50:27]
A
Yeah. And I mean, it's almost like she's floating through space, you know, and then the day comes and it's really hot. It's about 85 degrees during the daytime, which again, is not that bad if you're in the shade and. And not on an open ocean and covered in salt and starving and everything. But when all that's happening, I think
- [50:46]
B
85 degrees is hot.
- [50:48]
A
Yeah. No, well, you have reasonable perspectives on temperature. Yeah.
- [50:53]
B
I mean, a lot of that is what people are acclimated to. But she's from Green Bay, so I feel like.
- [50:57]
A
Exactly.
- [50:59]
B
I feel like she's a cold weather girl.
- [51:01]
A
What is your signature temperature? Is it a perfect 10 degrees?
- [51:04]
B
10 below is the quote from Gary 10 below perfect.
- [51:07]
A
10 below.
- [51:07]
B
Oh, my gosh.
- [51:08]
A
Okay.
- [51:09]
B
I don't know. Like, in the summer, 70 in the winter, 20 are sort of my perfect temperatures.
- [51:17]
A
I think Sunny in 20 is very nice. Yeah, but only if you're walking. If you're sitting still. I don't know. What? I don't know. Sunny. Well, my favorite weather in Southern California is sunny 60 and bone dry. I think that's very nice.
- [51:35]
B
20 degrees in the winter can actually go. Can it can get a little bit warm if it's sunny. Like, sled dogs can potentially overheat. Especially like a black dog on a sunny day. But I digress.
- [51:46]
A
Just pretend. I mean, really, whenever times are tough, just pretend you're a sled dog. And it is from sled dogs that I learned that if your phone is dying because it is cold, you can put it in your armpit, which is if you don't have a sled dog armpit, which is, of course, ideal. Which you taught me many years ago.
- [52:01]
B
Sarah, I never taught you that. This is the first I've heard of that.
- [52:04]
A
I swear to God. You taught me that.
- [52:06]
B
No, I didn't.
- [52:07]
A
Did I?
- [52:07]
B
That you put your phone in a sled dog's armpit.
- [52:10]
A
I think you knew it and then you forgot it. Yeah. Or maybe it was a joke you told that I took literally for the past decade, but I've done it and it works.
- [52:18]
B
Well, no, it makes sense. It's not a joke because.
- [52:22]
A
Because that's the hottest part of the sled dog. Right. Because that's their. Where their skin is.
- [52:26]
B
I put my hands in my dog's armpits when I'm cold.
- [52:29]
A
Right.
- [52:30]
B
And you have to warm up your phone when it's cold. Well, I think you put those two things together, but that's inspired.
- [52:37]
A
Well, I innovated. Yeah. I've definitely never done that. I have definitely put my phone in some sleddog.
- [52:48]
B
I have never done that.
- [52:50]
A
And I have had a very wonderful life. And that is proof of why. Well, great. So now we all learned a skill. And that is my. That's my big survival tip. If you're having a. To build a fire situation, stick your cell phone in your dog's armpit. That's how that story should have ended. Okay. Yeah. And she also. Let's talk about her dolphin encounter. Yeah. So she sees some seagulls, which makes me think of a movie I made you watch, the Shallows, where we also have a survival seagull. Some seagulls come by, but Terry moves and they fly away. And Then here's another passage from this. Just as the seagull flew away, Terry Jo saw some large dark shapes just breaking the surface some yards from her raft. Her heart caught in her throat. They came closer and she thought they might be porpoises, but they were too large and dark and had great bulbous heads. They swam placidly near her some 20 to 30ft away, staring at her with large, impassive dark eyes that barely broke above the surface of the water, spouting regularly as they breathed. The great whooshing sounds of their breasts spoke to Terry Jo and seemed to say, we are life. You are not alone. We are here with you. Terry Jo was immensely comforted by the presence of these gentle giants. She said a little prayer of thanks to God for sending them. They remained nearby for hours.
- [54:17]
B
It sounds like her religion was a comfort to her too, during this.
- [54:22]
A
Yeah, I think, I mean really pretty unequivocally based on her description of it. It was. Because it seems like she was really talking to God this entire time and holding out hope for her father to be alive. But I don't know, it makes me think about. Because when we talk about the mental game that survival is, it feels like maybe so much of that comes to self talk and sort of what reality do you create for yourself in your mind and not talking to yourself in a way that causes you to ignore the stakes of your situation or to lie to yourself, but to be able to kind of believe in a reality where you are loved and protected, even if the people whose job it is to do that were murdered very recently and that some of that survival is carrying the love that she received from her family forward into that experience and also her faith as well. And I think just sort of believing that you're. Your safety matters deeply, that you are being protected, if not by people who are there with you, but in some way that is there with you spiritually or inside of you that feels like part of it. Am I making sense?
- [55:34]
B
Yeah, you're absolutely making sense. And you had sort of warned you were going to try not to make moms cry with this.
- [55:41]
A
Yeah, sorry.
- [55:42]
B
But I mean, it just makes me think, and I wish her mom could have known this about how, you know, obviously I hope I'm around for my kids long past when they're 11, and I hope they never have to endure anything remotely like this. But I do hope that at some point, if I'm lucky and they're lucky, they will be in this world after I am out of it. And you Know what? What you're trying to do as a parent is set them up so that they can carry on the things that they need from you even when you're not there. And Terry Jo lost her parents so early and in such a horrible way, but they had still managed to succeed as parents in that sense that they gave her these gifts that were able to get her through this horrific thing.
- [56:35]
A
Yeah. Yeah. I think that is such a beautiful description of what you try and do as a parent, where it feels like maybe one of the goals is to love your child, just to build off what you're saying, to love your child in a way where when you're not there, even when they're just in a different state or something or just not in the room with you, just as they go through life, as they grow up, that they can feel that love that you gave to them, no matter where they are or what's happening, you know, and that you can be the first person to show them who they are with the way that you love them. Sorry, moms. I love you guys. I'm sorry. It's good to cry. I love crying personally.
- [57:24]
B
She's rescued. Wait, where are we now? She's rescued.
- [57:27]
A
Yeah. Well, please bring us. Yep, we're getting to that. Yes. I mean, she's. She just keeps enduring. She keeps floating. She's in the currents of the ocean now, and she's not expending energy trying to paddle or anything like that. And she's in the Northwest Providence Channel. That's the shipping lane where she gets picked up. And it's, as this book also beautifully points out, this vast underwater canyon that she's sort of in this tiny little vessel floating above. And she's out of spit. She can't swallow. On the third night, she starts to hallucinate. She sees her father. And then the next day, she's basically in and out of consciousness. She's so dehydrated that her blood has thickened and her blood flow has slowed down. Her legs are cramping, and she's able to put less and less weight on the ropes at the bottom of the boat because of just how much they're disintegrating. And her body temperature is around 105 degrees, according to the book.
- [58:27]
B
Oh, my God.
- [58:29]
A
And this is how she remembers being rescued. And again, I'm reading from alone. Through her stupor, she had sensed something. And through the mist of half consciousness and dim eyes, a huge, shadowy shape loomed before her like some great rumbling, dark beast. Its rumble was so deep that she could feel its pounding rhythm in her chest as she watched. It seemed to metamorphose from an unworldly vessel floating above the sea to a great whale and then into a solid black wall suspended in the air above her. She could dimly make out voices shouting. She sensed that they were telling her to stay put, digging deeper than she ever had in her life. With a supreme effort, she struggled into a half sitting position. She lifted an arm and managed a feeble wave, then toppled back into the float. Somewhere she found the strength to pull herself upright again and make a piteous effort to paddle with her hands. She fell back again, too spent to hold herself up any longer. Finally, the strong arms of strange, powerful beings speaking in alien tongue were picking her up. And she felt herself limply in space, being lifted slowly up and up as she slid back into oblivion. My God.
- [59:35]
B
Imagine being that ship and seeing that kid and just not knowing if she's alive or dead. And then she moves.
- [59:44]
A
Yeah. And seeing something that, like, only kind of by sheer luck do you happen to see still because of how. How high up you are compared to her and, and how. How camouflaged she is.
- [59:58]
B
I hate it. Okay.
- [60:00]
A
I know the man who spots her is second officer of the Captain Theo Nicolaus Spakudakis. So, you know, thank you.
- [60:13]
B
I hope they stay in touch.
- [60:14]
A
Physically, she doesn't seem to have permanent damage. She bounces right back. And she also. This is a big story, especially in Green Bay and also in Miami and nationally too, but like, you know, even more so in these places that are connected to it. And of course, you know, Green Bay is a small city, probably even more so then. And you can imagine this is a family that so many people would have been connected to in one way or another. And so when she's better, she goes to live with her aunt and uncle in Green Bay. And she's gotten letters from well wishers all over the world. People are sending her gifts. She becomes pen pals with some of these people, at least one in the very, very long term. And she sets about trying to get back to normalcy. But one of the problems, as you might imagine, is that it's 1961, and as this book points out, there's one therapist who sees children in all of Green Bay at this time.
- [61:15]
B
Well, hopefully she's bumped to the top of the list.
- [61:18]
A
Well, unfortunately, no. Yeah. And so the thing is that we make fun of millennials and gen zers for talking too much about trauma, but you know what? It's better than not talking about it at all. And that's really, I think, the norm that culturely we're still trying to correct. Because her aunt and uncle, out of the best of intentions, decide that the best and the healthiest thing for her is for nobody to talk to her about it ever again. And it's not just her family. It's people in town, it's people at school. And so there's this sense that she seems to grow up with that everybody knows about this horrible thing that she's been through, and yet she can't ever talk about it with anybody because she's supposed to be forgetting about it.
- [62:06]
B
You mentioned when you brought up the book that she wanted her story told, is that sort of the correction she makes as an adult that she chooses to come forward with what had happened?
- [62:15]
A
Yeah, yeah. And then, I mean, the rest of this book, which is really just as compelling as everything leading up to it, is Terry growing up. She changes the spelling of her name. And then, you know, figuring out what you do after you survive, which I guess is to figure out how to. Not to be too rhymey, but figuring out how to thrive in life and how to build the life that you need. And this is, again, this is something that I just love and feels so relatable to me that she goes away to boarding school. At one point, she gets her first serious boyfriend and they break up. And she is more upset than she has ever been and kind of is able to cry for the first time, like, in including going through the survival experience, because it's like there's something about just like. I mean, in one way, I'm like, it's all of the trauma she'd been through finally allowed to surface. But also, I'm like. But also. Sometimes having a stupid boyfriend who stops calling you is the worst thing that has ever happened.
- [63:17]
B
It absolutely is.
- [63:19]
A
And I just love that you can shock science by the things that you can survive, and then a boy can still hurt your feelings. And so. So she grows up, she goes to college. One of the jobs that she eventually has and which she's apparently fantastic at, is as a water management specialist in Oshkosh, which, if you're wondering, where do I find someone who has survived something that I can't even possibly imagine, where do those people hang out? And it's like they're just there. They're just water management specialists in Oshkosh. Like, just look around. Women have collectively survived everything you can possibly think of. Of.
- [64:00]
B
I often think that the people around us have survived things we can't possibly imagine.
- [64:05]
A
Right. If everyone around you in the grocery store had to tell you or if you could somehow psychically pick up what was kind of one of the worst things that they had survived in their life, you would. It would be hard to get it together to drive home emotionally, I think. So, yeah. She does not really talk about what happened to her and surviving on the raft, you know, after this initial inquest is over. For 19 years. Wow.
- [64:35]
B
Until she's 30.
- [64:37]
A
Yeah, until 1980. And by then, you know, she has been living her life.
- [64:43]
B
She.
- [64:44]
A
Her last kind of thing that she was able to get back from her family home in Green Bay was her Tarzan outfit from when she would play Tarzan. And. And she marries her first husband, who's a guy named John, who she says in the afterword is like a perfectly great guy. They just kind of weren't a good fit. But they have her first daughter, Brooke, in 1974. And this is another very endearing fact that after she and John break up and get divorced or start the divorce proceedings, she goes and lives with John's four brothers in Florida because she just bonded with his family so much. They just kind of remained post divorce in laws. She meets her next husband, Spencer, in 1975. They're living in a tent in Naples, Florida. And in 1976, they have her second daughter, whose name is Blair. Oh, good name.
- [65:35]
B
Wait, are they living in a tent by choice?
- [65:38]
A
Just to clarify, I think they're kind of doing a hippie thing.
- [65:41]
B
Okay, that's what I assumed, but good to know for sure.
- [65:45]
A
I would love more details on her tent era, but, you know, she's. I think she's kind of maybe doing like a little bit of a Julia Roberts and Runaway Bride, where kind of of your relationships kind of take you to the next place that you're going to live or what interests you're going to maybe try out. That's a total guess. So that's her second marriage. And after having her third child, Brian, named for her brother.
- [66:09]
B
Brian, named for her brother, yeah.
- [66:11]
A
She goes with her second husband, Spencer, to Germany, and that's where she's living in 1980, when she takes her kids to see the pediatrician and she fills out a form and one of the questions she has to answer is, are your parents still living? And she writes, no. And when the pediatrician asks how they died, she says how. And this is the first time that she's talked about this since it happened or, you know, since the immediate aftermath. And so she just talks about it all she starts talking about it. It sort of gradually enters her reality. And then she divorces her second husband, Spencer. She goes back to the United States with her kids and lives with her friend Pam in Kansas. And then her third husband. Her third marriage is her worst because she marries someone who turns out, and this is her description in the book, to be a pedophile. And so that is kind of her next survival situation, in a way, aside from surviving the ongoing aftermath, because I think that sort of that never ends in this period of people not talking about it. But now she's in a situation where she has three children who she has living in a marriage in a house with someone who is dangerous to them. And so she has to, you know, once she has accepted this reality, take her kids and leave. And she gets out of that situation and just keeps on surviving and keeps on meeting men who she has to survive.
- [67:45]
B
Oh, girl.
- [67:46]
A
Yeah. And then finally working in Oshkosh and her water management specialist job, she meets this guy she really likes named Ron, and he says that he had a voice you could cut wood with. And they fall in love and get married. And that is her ending to the book of her life that she. She ends up in these relationships in her adult life that seem to get, in many ways, more and more dangerous, and that she, in the end, finds herself surviving a relationship and then ends up in the place that she wanted to be. And she also pretty much always lives near the water. She's in Green Bay. She's in Oshkosh. She's in Wilmington, North Carolina, for a time, which is a very beach town. And she writes just like when I was a kid, I loved being outdoors on my own, sometimes even in risky conditions.
- [68:42]
B
Wow. Oh, man.
- [68:44]
A
And so this book ends with her afterward just talking about, you know, surviving this unimaginable thing as a child and then surviving something as an adult woman in a way that people, you know, you don't see fanfare about, but which is just as meaningful and just as odds defying.
- [69:03]
B
I mean, survival isn't something you're ever done with, I guess.
- [69:06]
A
Yeah, yeah, that's the thing. And that's why we all have to help each other do it. And let me just read you her conclusion to her afterward to this book and give her the final word. So she writes. What I want to stress to all who read this book is never give up, Always have hope, and try to look on the bright side of things. Be positive, be trusting, and try to go with the flow. Have compassion, give of yourself to Those in need and be loving and kind. I believe that what you give comes back to you. And then we have an editor's note which says Terry Fassbender was named Employee of the Year for the State of Wisconsin DNR in 1993. It was but one reflection of the kind of person that she had managed to become and of the kind of person she always was. So if you're feeling. I just love that it's like this profoundly emotional moment. You're kind of wiping away a tear and it's like. And she's the Employee of the Year for the State of Wisconsin dnr. That's a big deal. It is a big. It's a huge deal. It's for Derry Jo. You're right.
- [70:08]
B
I mean, it's a change in tone, but, like, good for her.
- [70:11]
A
Yeah. Yes. Yes. Well. And I think. I feel like that's also a very, very Wisconsin coded editor's note, because she wouldn't ever tell you, but Terry was Employee of the Year, so bring it up if you see her. She won't mention it and she'll get shy if you say it, but she did.
- [70:31]
B
Oh, Terry. Is she still alive?
- [70:33]
A
As far as I know, she is. And she has, you know, a beautiful family. She's, you know, she's got kids and grandkids. Yeah, I just, I. I did a. Just a little light check to see if I could see if she'd been interviewed recently, because this book came out in 2010 and so she went on TV to promote it then and kind of. And did, I don't know, something that I think. I wonder if that was a meaningful experience for her too. Kind of returning to that story in the public eye in a way that she hadn't on that scale since she was a kid.
- [71:02]
B
I can't imagine how powerful it must have been if she went 19 years without anyone around her speaking of this or without her being able to speak of it and then to be able to claim that story, claim what had happened to her. I mean, silence is destructive for some people. It's protective. But to have it forced on you is destructive. And so for her to be able to do that. Well, thank you for. Thank you also for telling her story, Sarah.
- [71:31]
A
Thank you for being here and hearing it and just sharing it with me. And. Yeah, I'm so glad that we have so much of her own words about this. And I hope that she's just, I don't know, having a really nice walk along the water at this moment. Perhaps a nice smoked whitefish Dip. And. Yeah, I don't know. I've been thinking about this story for a while because I happened across it a few years ago and just kind of could not stop thinking about it from that moment. Because I think at the end of the day, there's this question of what is it that can exist within a child or anyone, really, but especially someone who's so young and so vulnerable to just be able to endure. And I think. I don't know that. Maybe the most useful answer I've come to is that we don't know, but that you don't know what's inside of you until you find out. And I believe that you who are listening now are not even aware of how strong that you can be until you need it.
- [72:31]
B
I also hope that you never have to dig so deep that you're at capacity for your strength. May we all never have to find out our limits.
- [72:39]
A
Limits, yeah. I will also say that I think there's no perfect way to deal with trauma. There's so much we still don't know. And it's also individual and human relationships are complicated and difficult, and that's one of the great things about them. But I think, Blair, you have done so much amazing work in writing about trauma and helping, I think, so many people to feel that there is a place in the world for them to be heard and seen and what they've experienced and have modeled, finding ways to talk about it and showing people that struggling to survive on a daily basis shows your strength and not your weakness. And so thank you for. Thank you for helping to keep making that culture that we live in a place where we can do that surviving work more easily.
- [73:32]
B
Well, my hope for all of us is that we won't need to.
- [73:34]
A
Yeah, I love that. Oh, I do. Oh, wait. I have one last thing. This is great. Let me read this to you from the book, because one of the problems, as we discussed a couple times, is that nobody can see her out on the open ocean. She's in a white raft, she has very pale blonde hair. She's practically invisible. And so after the Coast Guard inquest, the one where Terry Jo is able to give a very detailed account of. Of what she experienced, and also to contradict beyond pretty much a shadow of a doubt, Gillian Harvey's claims that the boat sank all by itself because she's able to describe exactly what she saw him doing, the Coast Guard makes a recommendation based on the fact that no one could see Terry Jo. And they write, basically, they're going to amend the Vessel inspection regulations quote, to require that the body of buoyant apparatus, life rafts and life floats used onboard vessels, vessels or artificial islands and fixed structures on the outer continental shelf be painted or otherwise colored international orange. The above recommendations appear at the very end of the Coast Guard report on the Bluebell case. They were duly adopted by the Coast Guard and have been enforced now for decades. It is not generally known that the widespread use of international orange that we now take for granted is due to the ordeal of a brave young girl from Green Green Bay, alone and almost invisible on the high seas in a tiny white raft. Since that change was made, untold numbers of others who would have been lost at sea have been found. Man so also, yeah, may you never have to survive. And when you do, your survival may make someone else's survival easier in a way that you can never possibly anticipate.
- [75:13]
B
That's a perfect note to end on.
- [75:14]
A
Sarah. That's beautiful. Thank you. And also, Blair, may we talk about survival while lying in great comfort on loungers by a pool with all you want to eat? Sushi? Oh, yeah. With all you care to eat. No pressure. Sushi. That was her episode. Thank you so much. Much for listening. Thank you for being here. Thank you to Miranda Zickler, who is our editor and producer, and Nicole Ortiz, who is our administrative assistant. Thank you, of course, to our wonderful guest and our survival correspondent, Blair Braverman. You can find out more about her in our show notes. She's the author of some wonderful books, including one of my personal favorites, the novel Small Game, which is about a survival reality show gone terribly wrong. We also have a new bonus episode that you can listen to about all things dolls, creepy dolls, haunted dolls, dolls with dolls, and a doll survey for our listeners with our guest, Chelsea Weber Smith of American Hysteria. You can find that on Patreon and Apple, plus subscriptions. Thank you again for being here for surviving for all that you do. We'll see you next time. Sam.