From KCRW, this is a podcast about love and fear and loss and science and

wondering whether you miss some crucial memo about how the world works.

Those things that make you toss and turn at night the same way you always have.

But this is a podcast about waking up the next morning, sitting bolt upright in bed with

defiance and saying out loud to no one in particular,

Life is wonderful and life is strange and terrifying,

and I will not waste mine on my own exaggerated fears.

This is a podcast about the disgusting and the unknowable and the sublime.

This is, Here Be Monsters, the eighth season.

I'm Jeff Ettman and my co-producer is Bethany Denton,

and for the next nine months we'll share with you another 20 stories,

you know, stuff about bull castration and water witching deep sea exploration and orras

So welcome. We're glad you're here for it. Now I want to tell you something about my my parents house facing due north.

It's a sound that never felt out of place when I grew up, but with a decade of separation in city life I think the sound is

actually pretty wild I find it kind of haunting actually I went out there this

summer while the podcast was on break and I stood on the front deck again and I saw a wide field of hay split in half by a long straight driveway that points do north.

There are hills covered there with peas and lentils and canola and wheat.

In those hills they're everywhere and endless. They look like those little

ripples of silt that form thick and it's rich with nutrients and worms and

and beneath the worms there's quartzite and granite with veins of groundwater

running through them.

And beneath the rocks there are melted rocks.

...