HBM113: The Last Ones

Here Be Monsters

Here Be Monsters Podcast

Science, Society & Culture, Social Sciences, Personal Journals, Documentary

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 27 February 2019

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Bethany Denton’s been thinking about grief a lot lately. In 2017, two of her friends, a mother and a daughter, died unexpectedly just two months apart. Since then, Bethany’s started seeing grief in just about everything, including a caribou at Woodland Park Zoo that dropped her antlers after a miscarriage.

Content Note:
Death and Language

Bethany’s good friend, Jesse Brenneman has also been thinking a lot about grief. It was his mother and sister who died in 2017. And shortly after that, his grandfather and father died too. So over the span of a year and two months, Jesse lost his entire immediate family.

When Bethany told Jesse about the grieving caribou mother who’d dropped her antlers after miscarriage, Jesse suggested contacting his next door neighbor Ben Long. Ben is a writer and conservationist with an affinity for caribou.

On a snowy January morning, the three of them drove out to the Flathead National Forest outside of Kalispell, Montana for a walk in the woods. They hoped to find caribou tracks in the snow. Caribou used to be plentiful in northwestern Montana and throughout the continental United States. These days, due to deforestation and destruction of their habitat, the caribou population in the lower 48 could be as low as three animals.

You may recognize Jesse’s voice from his time as a producer for WNYC’s On The Media. Today he is a freelancer of many disciplines living and working in Missoula, Montana.

Further Listening: HBM064: A Shinking Shadow, in which Bethany talks to Jesse’s sister Erin about her eating disorder.

Producers: Jesse Brenneman and Bethany Denton
Editor: Bethany Denton
Music: Jesse Brenneman and The Black Spot

Transcript

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0:00.0	From KCRW, this is Here Be Monsters. We are in the Leboe research natural area on the Flathead National Forest and it's
0:21.6	special because it's got all this great wildlife that's been lost
0:24.8	in much of the rest of the country that we'll talk about more. Good deal. This winter I was back in my hometown, Kalisbel, Montana. It's probably been a decade since I had spent New Year's Eve there.
0:54.4	I was craving snow. My friend Jesse had just moved back home. He's a radio producer too, and he helped
1:00.9	me make this episode. Jesse's also the older brother of my friend Aaron,
1:05.0	who I interviewed for episode 64.
1:08.0	focused on the thinness as an inherently attractive quality, even though I knew my skin looked sunk in my hair
1:15.4	looked horrible I looked awful people everyone who encountered me who had known me of a
1:21.6	larger person said you look amazing.
1:24.0	In 2017 Aaron died after being hit by a car. I was at the hospital with her
1:31.4	family the night she died.
1:32.8	I haven't really been sure how to talk about her and her death on this show,
1:36.9	but I think about her all the time.
1:38.7	I think about Jesse all the time too, because Aaron was just one of many of his immediate family members who all died within a year and two months of each other.
1:47.0	And recently I've been talking to Jesse a lot about grief.
1:51.0	Callispell's a small town, and Jesse suggested I contact his next... G about conservation. He has an affinity for Caribou. They used to be plentiful across the continental
2:06.8	United States, but now they've mostly disappeared.
2:11.6	We chose a sunny day in January, and Jesse and I drove Ben out to the Flathead National Forest to look for caribou tracks.
2:18.0	It had snowed a lot in previous days, but the morning sun warmed up enough that the trees were dripping melt onto the wet snow.
2:24.4	It almost sounds like a campfire in the recordings we made.
2:27.4	You'll hear that really delicate crackling sound.
2:30.6	We parked near a trailhead, grabbed our sack lunches, and headed out to talk about
	...

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