HBM131: A Cure for Carsickness

Here Be Monsters

Here Be Monsters Podcast

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

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 19 February 2020

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Bethany Denton has a long history of carsickness. Ever since she was a little girl, long car rides made her nauseous and gave her stomachaches. Once, when she was four years old, her carsickness was so bad that she made her dad take a detour to look for a cure at the grocery store.

At the time, they were driving through Central Idaho, visiting all her dad’s favorite places from childhood. They drove to Kooskia and Kamiah, two small neighboring towns where Bethany’s dad lived for some time with his cousins. He used to love playing outside with his cousins, and hear stories about the land around them. One of his favorite places to go was The Heart of the Monster, a landmark that is sacred to the Nez Perce people. They also made the trip to the Denton family plot at the Pine Grove Cemetery in Kooskia, so that Bethany and her brother could visit their Grandpa Bill’s grave. Bethany’s grandpa was Bill Denton, a sportscaster for KREM-TV in Spokane. She never met him, he died years before she was born.

Audio from the Heart of the Monster site courtesy of Nez Perce National Historical Park, used with permission.

Producer: Bethany Denton

Editor: Jeff Emtman

Music: The Black Spot

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	From KCRW, the first moments of consciousness.
0:26.4	I like hearing about people's earliest memories because they're usually tactile,
0:30.4	almost bewildering. Mine are being asked how to spell my name and not knowing what that meant.
0:37.0	Trying to see myself blink in the reflective handle of the dishwasher, which was at my eye line, jumping on a miniature
0:44.3	trampoline in Grandma's Attic, not realizing it was miniature because it was
0:48.5	just the right size for me. All these little moments when the world seems so big and out of reach, where everything
0:58.1	makes perfect sense even though you don't know what or why anything is anything.
1:04.0	What would people be like if we could remember becoming people?
1:08.0	Maybe it's too overwhelming, to be nothing and then to suddenly be someone.
1:14.0	Maybe that's why we forget.
1:18.0	When you're little, you don't know that things can be another way
1:20.0	because you only know what you know.
1:22.0	And part of the pain of getting older is
1:24.7	realizing that things could have been a lot different. I don't remember my parents being married. They divorced when I was two and a half, and apparently they each knew the marriage had to end before I was even born.
1:46.4	And they agreed that my sister and brother would be better off with divorced parents than they would
1:50.4	be with angry parents.
1:52.8	They had no plans to have another child,
1:55.1	until I disrupted that.
1:57.6	They both tell me that after my mom got pregnant
1:59.9	with an unexpected third baby,
2:02.2	it got better for a few months. Dad was less impatient, mom was
2:06.5	less resentful. They both thought that they'd cleared a rough patch and it would be okay.
	...

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