Host: Catherine Burns

[Uncanny Valley theme music by The Drift playing]

Catherine: [00:01:07] From PRX, this is The Moth Radio Hour. I'm Catherine Burns. In this hour, we'll hear stories about a little girl growing up in newly liberated Zimbabwe, a chaplain called to the scene of a tragedy, a 12-year-old boy slacking on a 14-day Outward Bound hike. And our first story, told in front of a sold-out crowd on the Mainstage of the Sydney Opera House as part of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. Here's David Crabb, live from Australia.

[cheers and applause] 

David: [00:01:38] In San Antonio, Texas, in 1991, I was a goth kid. I had a very specific group of friends. We wore a lot of dog collars as fashion accessories. There was a lot of torn fishnet and misty black eyes. We changed our names to things like Raven and Salem and Epiphany. [audience laughter] We made facial piercings out of office supplies, [audience chuckles] and we wrote poetry that was really way too dark for any of you to understand. [audience chuckles] And I love this group of people so much because I spent most of middle school as a closeted outsider, and when I met these kids, I finally felt like I found my crew, like being gay was the least interesting thing about me. They were like, "That's all you got?" And we're so happy being so sad together. [audience laughter] 

And then a few years into high school, my mom told me that she was getting remarried and we're moving to a very small town called Seguin, Texas. Now, Seguin, you might think of Texas as all the same, like Dallas, the TV show. But San Antonio is a quite large city. I think it's like the eighth largest city in America but Seguin was super tiny. Like, there was nowhere to buy clove cigarettes. I was so pissed. [audience chuckles] I started high school in Seguin, and I felt more like an outsider than I ever had before. I would wander the halls with my black fingernails and my rubber band bracelets, and I was surrounded by girls with spiral perms and Daisy Duke shorts and guys who wore flannel and loved Pearl Jam.

I felt like Jane Goodall. [audience laughter] I was creeping through the jungle, hoping they don't realize I'm not a monkey. [audience chuckles]. A few months after going to school in Seguin, I heard that there was going to be this party in New Braunfels. It was going to be a freak party, like a bunch of misfits and weirdos, and I was so excited. New Braunfels was a little town about 20 minutes away, so I got all done up in my all-teen gothy. I put on my favorite Siouxsie and the Banshees shirt, which was torn in just the right places. I put a light powder on my face, which I always did, but I never blended it at the jaw. So, when you look at photos of me, I look like an albino that just got a sunburnt neck somehow. [audience laughter] 

And then I gelled my hair back into this little vampire Lestat ponytail, and it was so tight that when the gel dried, it kind of raised my eyebrows in a look of surprise. [audience laughter] I drove to New Braunfels, and the party was in a trailer park. I went into the trailer and it was very dark and very loud, and I couldn't make out much at first. It was clear that these people were freaks, but these freaks were not my kind of freaks. These freaks were mostly male. They seemed super aggressive, and they were almost all bald. I had inadvertently come to a skinhead party. [audience laughter]

I suddenly felt like the gayest person that was ever born. [audience chuckles] Like in the psychological movie that experience in my head, I was dressed like a [screams] Las Vegas showgirl and I was voguing. I saw this door on the side of the trailer, and I ran out to this deck on the side of it, and there was one of those blue buzzing bug zapper lights and I tried to de-gay myself as quickly as possible. I wiped off the makeup. I shook out my little ponytail but then I just had a weird voluminous bob. [audience laughter] It was worse. And then I thought, I know, I'll smoke, because smoking is really tough. Smoking is butch. I'll have one of my Benson and Hedges Menthol Lite 120s. [audience laughter] 

So I take these sweat-logged matches out of my pocket and I'm trying over and over again to light this match when this flaming Zippo gracefully rises from the darkness and it lights my cigarette. And I look up, and towering above me is the largest human being I had seen up to that point in my life. He was a massive skinhead with little suspenders and these oxblood Doc Martens boots. He introduced himself. He told me his name was Max. And I said, "Hi, I'm David." And we made some very awkward small talk for about two minutes, and then there was a lull. And he looked at me and he said, "Hey, has anyone ever told you that you look like someone?" And I said, "Probably the lead singer of Depeche Mode. I get that all the time." [audience chuckles] And he said, "No, dude, I think you look like that girl that sings in that band Deee-Lite."

And I thought, “Oh, this is when it happens. This is when I get pushed to the ground and kicked to death with those Doc Martens boots.” [audience chuckles] But I started laughing. I'm not sure if it was my nerves or the cough syrup that I recreationally drank to get high on the way to the party, [audience chuckles] but I thought this was the funniest thing that I'd ever heard in my life. And I started aggressively cackling like a hyena. [imitating hyena laugh] [audience chuckles] I couldn't stop.

And I looked up, and all of a sudden, this huge skinhead, he's laughing, too. And he has these little happy Buddha eyes and these dimples and these chubby cheeks I just want to pinch. He's like a big, overgrown toddler skinhead. [audience chuckles] And we stand out there on that deck and talk for hours. And when we do, every single person from this party comes out to greet Max. All sorts of people, skinheads, guys with Mohawks, these two patchouli-stinking girls in these 10,000 Maniacs T-shirts. It’s like they all know him like he's the mayor of freaks in this little town.

At one point, I mentioned something to him. I'm like, "Oh, you know the skinhead over there?" And he's like, "Dude, dude we're not skinheads. We're not bigots. We're SHARPs, Skin Heads Against Racial Prejudice." [audience laughter] I had not heard of that ever. And then he proceeds to break down their manifesto, which he gets very excited about. He explains to me that what they want to do is take the aesthetic of the enemy and subvert it. He tells me that where skinheads wear white laces for white power, SHARPs wear multicolored laces for unity. [audience chuckles] He tells me that while skinheads are straight-edged, they don't smoke weed, take drugs, drink, whatever that they do it all. That he huffed a bunch of Scotchgard half an hour ago.

Max and I became super-fast friends. And in a few months, summer came. And it was so exciting because as opposed to waiting for the weekends to hang out, I could basically hang out all the time in New Braunfels. My mom was just so happy that I had a friend at all. She was like, "Go be with your friend." And it was really fun because we're both only sons, and I think we sort of felt like brothers. His house was my summer house. His mom was my summer mom. He was my summer brother.

But there was a weird thing about hanging out with Max in that I wasn't used to being around his friends. They were super machismo. We would go to these parties and the same thing kept happening. We would walk in and then he would go to get me a drink. And within 30 seconds, there would be some giant guy with a septum ring being like, "Why are you here?" [audience chuckles] And just when I would think I was going to die, he would reappear with my beer, towering over everyone and ask, "Is there a problem here?"

I felt like Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard. [audience laughter] Hanging out with him was really, really great. We really enjoyed each other's company and we loved talking to each other. Increasingly, we would go to these parties and we wouldn't even really interface with his friends. We would just find some little nook or a corner or go in the backyard and we would talk. We would smoke a joint and have these long existential conversations. We'd talk about it. “Most people suck. Music was cool. The government was ruining everything.” And it was cool because it didn't matter what was happening nearby. In the living room, there could have been a bunch of SHARPs powerlifting cinder blocks while screaming, "Oi, oi, oi."

But it didn't matter because when I talked to Max, he looked at me like what I was saying was the most important thing he'd ever heard in his life. And no one had ever made me feel like that before. And when Max talked to me, it was the same. It was like everything else just sort of turned down and faded away. And there was just Max. A few weeks before my senior year was going to start, we're going to this party and we're pre-gaming at his house. We pre-gamed the same way every time we went to a party. I would be in his room, in the mirror, getting all of my little brooches and things I needed for my look together. And he would be in the kitchen, raiding the liquor cabinet. He had these two gas-station-to-go koozies, and he would make our drinks, him a Jameson and Coke, and me a Bacardi and Diet Coke. [audience chuckles].

We got in the car and we started driving to this party. And on the way, he told me that we had to make a pitstop. So, in a few minutes, we pulled off the highway, and we drove through this grove of trees, and we ended up by this riverbed. And there were these four cars already parked there in a circle with their hazard lights on. And Max told me to wait in the car, and he'd be right back. And he joined this huddle of SHARPs in the middle of all these cars. There were maybe six or seven of them and I watched as they started walking very slowly in a circle.

And then they started marching in a circle, kind of like angry roosters kicking up all this dust. And then I looked, and in the middle of this circle was this little baby SHARP, this kid that was a year or two younger than us. He had red hair and freckles. He was in this oversized bomber jacket. I'd seen him at parties before. And then one of the guys spit on the kid's face. And then they all just started punching the hell out of this kid, and he fell on the ground immediately. And when he fell, they kept punching and screaming and kicking. And as I'm watching this through the windshield, I'm looking for Max, thinking, “Where did he go? Did he go to pee or something? Can he come back and stop all of this?”

But then I see Max's face, and his eyes are bulging out of his skull, and his teeth are stripped and spit is flying out of his mouth. And he is kicking and punching this kid just as hard as any of those other guys. And as I watch this, I do realize what it is. I know that it's a beaten. It's this sort of ritual to welcome a new SHARP. But that doesn't make it any less terrifying as the kid screams. And even when I roll up the window, I can still hear the kid just screaming and screaming and screaming.

Finally, they stop, and the kid stands up. And when he stands up, he has this swollen eye. His bottom lip is split in the middle, and there's this crimson ribbon just going down his chin and his neck and his chest. And then Max takes a step forward, and he shakes the kid's hand. And then another SHARP shakes the kid's hand. And then they start hugging him and patting his back and rubbing his head. And it's this big machismo lovin' all of a sudden. One of the guys looks and he notices me for the first time sitting in the car. And he points and he says, "Max, why did you bring him here? Why did you bring this faggot here?" And all the SHARPs turn and look at me, and they take a few steps forward. And even the little one that just got beat up, he's looking at me with this glimmer in his eyes. And it occurs to me that what they're about to do to me isn't a ritual. They won't necessarily stop, and they definitely won't hug me after.

One of the guys goes to open the door and Max stops him, and he says, "David's off limits." And everyone sort of freezes for a moment. The hierarchy is very confusing. No one knows what to do. And Max reaches in his pocket and he takes out the car keys and he gets in the driver's seat and we drive away. In the car, on the way home, I don't know what to say to Max, which really is upsetting to me, because the reason I love Max and the reason he's my summer brother is because I always know what to say to Max. He's my best friend. And I don't think Max knows what to say either, because he just turns up the stereo as loud as he can, and he grips the steering wheel and he looks at the road.

We got home that night and we went to bed. And early the next morning, I woke up before anyone was up and I left without saying goodbye. And the next day we didn't talk. And the next week we didn't talk and we didn't call each other again. It was like we just disagreed without words. It was like we both knew that what had happened had changed something in our friendship. That senior year of high school in Seguin, I actually did really well, which was shocking. I had been doing really bad in high school because of all the acid previously [audience chuckles] and not going to high school. But I pulled it together my senior year. I made no grade less than a C. My mother was so excited, she threw me a No Grade Less Than a C party for David. [audience chuckles] 

At the end of my senior year, I get an envelope in the mail, and it tells me that I've been accepted into college, which is crazy to me. I'm like, "There's something wrong with their automated system. What college would have me?" But I'm really excited to go to college. It's in this little town, San Marcos, about 30 minutes away. And a few days before I'm going to start, I go to this house party in that town. And when I open the door, the first person I see and hear from the back of the room is Max. And he screams, "Dude." And he comes at me like a linebacker. And I can tell everyone at the party is terrified. They're like, "What is this giant going to do to this tiny boy?"

But what Max does is he wraps his arms around me and he hugs me so hard that I have to say, "Please, dude, you're crushing my rib cage." [audience chuckles] We sit down on the couch and we start talking, and it's like no time had passed. It's just so good to see him. We're catching each other up about our friends and our families. And we realize in our conversation that Max has also been accepted to the same college as me in San Marcos. And this is mind blowing to me, the idea that now we're both adults and we're going to experience this new part of our life together in this new town, away from our crappy little towns. And at the end of the night, we hug goodbye, and no one has to apologize or talk about the past. It's just like that horrible night kind of evaporates.

A few days after that, Max was driving down this Highway Loop 1604 outside of San Antonio, and he lost control of his car and he flipped it, and he ended upside down in the emergency lane, and he was suspended by his seatbelt. And when he came to, he started to barge his way out of the door. And when he finally did, he fell right in front of an oncoming truck, and he was killed instantly. A few days later, I went to his funeral in New Braunfels and I hadn't been back to New Braunfels since that night of the beaten. And I looked around, there were hundreds and hundreds of his friends there because he was the mayor of freaks. And I wanted to talk to them, but it seemed as strange to talk to them without Max there as it had been when he was alive. And I got in this line of all these people waiting to greet his family. And I could see up ahead that I was getting close to his mom, my summer mom. And I was telling myself, “I'm going to say such profound, awesome things to her. I'm going to make sure she knows how cool her son was and how important it was to him that people felt like they belonged and how he made me feel like I had a friend.” But instead, when I get there, the minute I look into her eyes, I just collapse into her arms and I whisper in her ear, "Your hair smells so pretty." [audience laughter]

That was 20 years ago and for the last 20 years, every time I go back to San Antonio, I will drive to New Braunfels and I'll go to the cemetery where Max is. And I will go and I will sit and I will talk to him. I talk to him about the same stuff I always did. I talk to him about how most people still suck, but music's still pretty cool and the government is still ruining everything. And I'm not a particularly devout or religious person, but every time I'm sitting there talking to him, there will be this moment, and sometimes it's imperceptible, where the construction on the other side of the fence or the highway right by the cemetery, it sort of disappears. And in just that moment, there's just me and there's just Max. Thank you.

[cheers and applause]

[La Mer by Nine Inch Nails playing]

Catherine: [00:17:56] That was David Crabb. David is a performer, writer, teacher, and storyteller based in New York City. His memoir, Bad Kid, was a New York Times critics' pick. To see a picture of David dressed in his gothy best back in the day, go to themoth.org. Coming up, a young African girl tries desperately to fit in with her mostly white classmates in a brand-new country called Zimbabwe.

Jay: [00:18:38] The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by PRX.

Catherine: [00:19:17] [crowd murmuring] This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Catherine Burns. Our next story is from Petina Gappah. Petina told her story at an evening we produced with the PEN World Voices Festival. This week-long annual event was founded by Salman Rushdie in the aftermath of 9/11 and is the only international literary festival in the world with a focus on human rights. The theme of the night was “You Say You Want a Revolution: Stories About Change.” [applause] Here's Petina Gappah, recorded live at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn.

Petina: [00:19:51] I'm from a very small African country called Zimbabwe. It's a country that's been in the news very recently for very many bad reasons. The one thing you might not know about Zimbabwe is that it's one of the youngest democracies in the world. Well, democracy is perhaps not the right word. [audience chuckle] So let me say [laughs] it's one of the youngest countries in the world. It's only 29 years old. And the big year of change in my country, the big year of change in my family, and the big year of change for me was 1980, when my country finally became independent.

Those of you, and I'm sure there are many of you here who are experts in African history, will know that in the late '50s and the early '60s, Britain, France, and the other colonial powers were giving up their colonies for a number of reasons. So, countries like Nigeria became independent, Ghana became independent, but not Rhodesia. The white minority government in Rhodesia, led by somebody called Ian Smith, had other ideas for the kind of country they wanted to live in. And one of the very firm ideas they had was that they didn't want to live in a country ruled by black people.

So they declared a unilateral declaration of independence from Britain, the colonial power and the result of this was that the country was isolated from the outside. On the inside, there was a civil war between the white minority on the one side and the black majority, led by black freedom fighters. And after about 14 years of war and negotiations in England, we finally became an independent republic called Zimbabwe.

I have very vivid memories of that time. We lived in the township, which were these African areas. Rhodesia was segregated along the same lines as South Africa, but on a smaller scale. So, we lived in the township where, I remember around the time of independence, there was so much music. Everybody was singing, everybody was dancing. It was almost like you could actually touch the joy in the air. And the song that everybody was singing, if you'll allow me to sing it, is a song by Bob Marley called Zimbabwe. Do you know it? Then join in. [giggles] [sings] Africa shall liberate Zimbabwe. Africa shall liberate Zimbabwe. It was a song that was on everybody's lips. Then the biggest thing that happened that year for a lot of people in Harare was that Bob Marley himself came to Salisbury to give a concert, an independence concert. He came all the way from Kingston with his Wailers.

But that was not the biggest thing that happened to me, because the biggest thing that happened to me was that the white areas, the formerly white areas, the suburbs, began to open up and my father finally achieved the dream of a lifetime. He moved us out of the township into the suburbs to live with the white people, the good area. So, imagine what it meant for a family from the township, where the only road that was tarred was the road to town. And all the other little roads were dusty, full of mud, full of dust. There was no electricity at night in some parts of the township. So, imagine us in this new environment where the roads are lined with beautiful trees. In the morning, the milkman deposits two bottles of milk outside your door. One silver, one gold, depending on the amount of cream you want in your milk. The breadman rings the bell in the morning to tell you that your fresh Lobel's bread is ready for you outside. And the newspaper boy throws his newspaper over the wall for you to read in the morning.

I went to a school called Alfred Beit, where I found myself as one of 24 children in the classroom. Twenty of them were white. Now, I had been at a school in the township where we had something called hot seating, which meant that 48 of us came to school in the morning and then went home to make room for another 48 people who came in the afternoon. So, this was absolute paradise to me. A class of only 24 children. 

But the very first thing I did in my new classroom was the wrong thing. My teacher, Ms. Callan, called me to her desk and as a well-trained little African girl who had been brought up well by her teachers, I knelt before her. "What are you, a goat?" she said. I still remember the surprised laughter of the whole class. And it was a sound that I became very familiar with as the year went on. Because it seemed everything about me was wrong. Everything I did was wrong. My hair, for instance. Not this hair. Well, this is my hair in the sense that I paid for it [laughs]. [audience laughter] But my hair was too curly. It was too close to my head. My English, when it came, was too slow, and the accent was very strange. And then there was the small matter of the sandwiches.

You see, my mother made us egg sandwiches every morning for school. So, she fried eggs, put them between buttered slices of bread. But that was the wrong food to take to school, because what the white children ate was something called Polony, which really stank. [audience laughter] And then they had something else called Marmite, which is a yeast extract, and it's the foulest tasting substance known to man. [audience chuckles] And I really wanted this stinky, horrible food [audience chuckles] because I thought that if I ate the same food that the other people ate, if I had the same kind of hair, then I would fit in somehow. But of course, that didn't happen.

So every day I had Russell Webb laughing at my hair. I had Carrie Treloar laughing at my hair. I had Natasha Russell refusing to share her Smarties with me that she bought on holiday in South Africa. The only time that I really felt I belonged to Alfred Beit, my new school, was in the mornings at assembly. We would sit cross-legged on the floor and Ms. Roberts, our headmistress, would play the piano and lead us in the school song. It was a song about valor, about duty, about honor. It was a song about commitment and dedication. And I sang it at the top of my voice because it was the one moment when I knew peace at my school, when there was no laughter, when there was no mockery on the playground. It was a song about the pioneer column who colonized my country and turned it into Rhodesia.

So there I was, a 10-year-old African child in a newly independent country called Zimbabwe, singing this song in which God regarded the conquest of my country as an act of honor [chuckles]. This was a song celebrating the conquest of a kingdom in Zimbabwe. It was a song celebrating the fact that many thousands of people had been made landless. The song was called Thou who didst Guide Our Father's feet. And the last sentence was, “As thou has done, do once again.” I love that song. [audience laughter]

As you can imagine, we didn't sing it for very long. My friend Jessie Majome, who has gone on to greater things and is now actually the Deputy Minister of Justice in my country, told her father about the song that we were made to sing every morning. And her father called The Herald, which was the state newspaper. And I remember the Herald journalist coming to the school and Ms. Roberts rushing across the quadrangle. And she was quite baffled by the whole thing. "I'm not a racialist," she insisted. "I have black children in my school. What do you mean I'm a racist? That's not it at all. It's just a tradition. It's like the school motto. It's like the recorder lessons. It's just a tradition. It doesn't mean anything."

I think that this was the moment that the teachers at my school and Ms. Roberts finally had to confront what it meant to live in an independent African country. It wasn't just about changing the name of the country from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, changing the name of the capital from Salisbury to Harare. It meant that not only did we have to start relating to each other differently across the racial divide, but we also had to start re-evaluating our history.

And for some of the teachers, I think that was a step too far, because about a year later came the Great White Flight when a lot of teachers left the school and a lot of children left the school as well. I'm not really sure that I can relate the white flight to this particular incident, but what I know is that after about a year at my new school, it finally began to resemble the kind of school you'd expect to find in an independent African country. So, I finally found myself being part of a school that had all the amenities that my old township lacked, but that truly looked like a Zimbabwean school. And this is how independence came to me. Thank you.

[cheers and applause]

[Zimbabwe by Bob Marley playing]

Catherine: [00:29:11] That was Petina Gappah. Petina is a Cambridge University-educated lawyer and writer. Her first book, the critically acclaimed short story collection An Elegy for Easterly, won the Guardian First Book Award in 2009.

[Zimbabwe by Bob Marley continues]

[crowd murmuring]

Our next story comes from Liz Allen. She told this at one of our open-mic StorySLAM competitions in Seattle, Washington, [cheers and applause] which are presented by our partner station KUOW. Here's Liz Allen live at The Moth StorySLAM.

Liz: [00:29:53] All right. Well, before I used to have to dress like this, I led trips in the backcountry and the outdoors. And my summer in between my junior and senior year of college, like rewind ten years ago, I was a lot younger looking, a lot stronger looking [chuckles]. [audience chuckles] I led two-week backpacking trips in Jackson Hole and this is for middle school students, which was great. I got paid $0, essentially, to take middle school 12-year-olds out into the woods and teach them leadership skills. And so, the first part of the week we would spend teaching them how to lead a group, kind of different styles like dictator or delegator or consensus, [whispers] which never works [audience chuckles] with the 12-year-olds.

And so one particular trip we got a whole bunch of kids in, and one of the kids' names was Seth. And on every trip you have a Seth. And this kid is a kid [laughs] who got sent by his parents, who has no idea what he's doing. He tries to get his Game Boy into his backpack and take it with him, [audience chuckles] who thinks maybe there's going to be an outlet somewhere. And he spends the entire time where I'm like, "Seth, you can't bring your jeans," just flirting with the girl next to him. Seth, true to form, brought his jeans, his towel, and his stuffed animal on this two-week trip with him. So, the first day we're headed out into the backcountry and Seth is in the very back of the line of kids headed up this mountain into the Tetons and he's bawling because he doesn't know what he's doing and he is in pain.

And there's some sort of weird gender dynamic where the girls feel like they must be strong and they cannot cry even if their heels are bleeding and their shoulders are rubbed raw. And then there's kids like Seth who just cry the entire eight-hour day. [audience laughter] And so he did, and at one point [laughs] took off his backpack and got out his stuffed animal. And I was like, "How did you get this on course?" And he was like, "Simba doesn't want to hike anymore." [audience laughter] Okay, I was like, "I hate Simba." And Simba stayed with us for the next five days. Well, the entire time. The entire 14 days. And Simba spoke for Seth for the five days. And it was like, "Simba doesn't want to do dishes." I was like, "Everybody does dishes, including Simba." Simba and Seth did very little in the entire course. He would not set up his tent. Seth would not participate in creating breakfast and he was just a drain on everybody's society. [audience chuckles] And so when the time came at the end, we had taught them all the leadership skills. And it's time to turn the course over to the kids and they all get to be leader of the day for a day.

And for Seth's day, he decided his only leadership style would be delegation. [audience laughter] He's 12, he’s 12. So, he delegates everything. He delegates wake up, he delegates breakfast, he delegates dishes, he delegates break, he delegates everything. But by the end of the day, that's really grating on the kids who have spent seven days with him where he's done nothing. And so, they're really frustrated. Honestly, very frustrated. And when he delegates his dinner dishes to some other student, the kid's like, "Seth, you and Simba never do anything." And I'm like, [whispers] “It's the come to Jesus’ moment.”

So we sit in a circle and we have a fire and the kids really kind of take it out on Seth and they're like don’t want to get, but they’re giving him a lot of constructive feedback [audience laughter] on what he's not doing and how hard it is on the group to pick up after him. How, if he gets out a snack, he doesn't put it away and how he doesn't do any dishes and how he doesn't help with the tent and all this stuff. By the end of three hours, he finally is taking it seriously and he starts to cry and he's like, "I'm sorry," [audience laughter] in that voice. And I'm like, "Wow, I think we kind of made some progress." So, we go to bed and we're camped in this little ravine. And I'm like, "Yes, that's what course is for. That's how leaders are made. This is why parents send their kids on these courses. So, they get this truth tells."

And in the morning at 6:00 AM, I awake to screaming. And I'm the instructor. So, I rip open my tent and I look out. I'm trying to figure out what's going on. I'm in a lot of adrenaline. And I look out and I see our bear bags, which we had hung in a tree, had already been taken down and all. There's food everywhere and I'm trying to figure out what's going on. I realize breakfast is out, but usually as the instructor, I wake up first and make myself coffee before 12-year-olds. But my coffee is made and breakfast is out, but I'm still hearing this kind of screaming. And so, I'm looking around and I realize all the other tents, kids are starting to pop their heads out. Everyone's trying to figure out what's going on.

And [laughs] so for real, we're down here. And 150 feet above my tent, there is a cliff. On the top of the cliff, the sun is coming down the cliff, but right where we are, it's still shady. And there is Seth on the top of this cliff and the sun is starting to crest over his face. [audience reaction] And he has got Simba and he's holding it out. [audience laughter] It's no joke. He's going, " Nants' ingonyama, bakithi" [laughs] Over and over and over again. [audience laughter] I'm crying, I'm laughing so hard. And I realized he had actually literally gotten up an hour early. He had taken down the food, he had made breakfast, he had made me my coffee. And then he had decided to wake up everyone [audience laughter] with a song for the new day. Thank you.

[cheers and applause] 

Catherine: [00:35:44] That was Liz Allen.

[Circle of Life from The Lion King Ensemble plays]

Liz is a former 6th grade teacher and current special education attorney in Seattle. She says she's learning how to cook and how to bike in the rain. We asked Liz if she has any idea what happened to Seth. She wrote, "I have no idea where Seth ended up, but I'm sure wherever he is, he's successful." Coming up, a member of the clergy gets a disturbing call.

Jay: [00:36:14] The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by the Public Radio Exchange, prx.org.

Catherine: [00:37:00] This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Catherine Burns. Our last story is told by chaplain Kate Braestrup. Here's one of my favorite Kate Braestrup quotes. "If you want to know where God is in anything, look for love." I often think of this during dark times. Kate's taught me that you find the love in tragedy by focusing on those who show up to help. [applause] Here's Kate Braestrup live at The Players Club in New York City.

Kate: [00:37:24] I was in a truck with a warden and we're called to the scene of a crime. I'm the chaplain to the wardens in Maine, that's game wardens, not prison wardens. Game wardens are law enforcement officers who enforce fish and wildlife law. But in Maine, they also respond to a variety of wildland calamities. So, snowmobile accidents, all-terrain vehicle accidents, hunting accidents, drownings, wilderness search and rescue. And as their chaplain, I have a dual role. I, like other law enforcement chaplains, take care of pastoral care for the wardens themselves, and I also am called to the scenes of outdoor tragedies to be with family members to comfort and assist them as they wait for their loved one to be brought in from the forest or as they find out that they have been bereaved.

Game wardens in Maine have jurisdiction, just like state troopers statewide, any crime, anytime. But when it comes to violent crime, they really only deal with violence against like trout [audience chuckles] or moose. They really don't do violence against people. So, although if there is a violent incident, let's say murder, and it takes place in the woods, the game wardens may help with that or if the weapon has been thrown into the river, the game wardens will help the troopers find and interpret the evidence.

And in Maine, law enforcement officers are kind of thin on the ground. So, if there's an urgent call for service, the closest available sworn unit will respond, regardless of what department they're part of. But still, it's the state police chaplain, not the warden service chaplain, who has to confront the theological issues raised by human cruelty. Most of the tragedies I respond to are really the result of foolishness or frailty, not malice. But I get involved more often than you might think. And I've been doing this job long enough, 15 years almost, that I know more about murder than it's comfortable to know.

Now on television or in books, killers come in two varieties. There's the serial killer, of course, which is always shown as coldly intelligent and fiendish, not just sort of pathetically bonkers the way they are in real life. And there's the self-interested murderer motivated by greed, who bumps off Uncle Gregory in the parlor to inherit his fortune or whatever. In real life, the most common real-life motivation for violence, whether it's a bar room brawl or genocide, is moral indignation. Like “Their ancestors murdered our ancestors or he disrespected me or she's a whore, she abandoned me. What else could I do?”

Well, a few days before the scene we're called to, a man had supper with his friend and over the meal he announced that he believed that he and his ex-wife and their children would all be reunited soon. And the friend took this to mean that they were going to reconcile. And considering that his family members had made it very clear that they considered themselves not so much estranged as escaped from him, like protection from abuse orders and restraining orders and stuff. So, the friend didn't think that it was likely, but he didn't say so. He just let it go by.

And a day or two after that, the man brought a shotgun to his ex-wife's house and he shot her and he shot his daughter and he shot his son and then he turned the weapon on himself. And the local police officer arrived just in time to hear that final shot. When the first urgent cry for help went out over the police radio, the closest available sworn units were game wardens. So, game wardens arrived on the scene and game wardens helped to secure the perimeter and secure the crime scene and all of that and the warden I was with brought me to the scene not long after.

When I arrived, there was already crime scene tape up around the yard of this little red house. One end of the yellow tape was tied around the pole that held the basketball hoop above the driveway. And there were state police crime scene investigators in blue jumpsuits going in and out of the house. The medical examiner was with them and they were in the house. I stayed outside the house. There were wardens and there were police officers around and paramedics. And in Maine, everyone knows everyone. So, everybody there seemed to have some piece of information about the victims, but none of their information really made it any better. The murdered woman was the kindergarten teacher at the local elementary school and one of the paramedic's kids was in seventh grade with the murdered daughter, and the warden's kid had been in kindergarten the year before. That was the teacher that taught his kid to tie her shoes. "She was wicked nice," he said. "She was a sweetheart."

The funeral van came bumping down the driveway and stopped, and two guys in suits and shiny shoes got out and the medical examiner came out to meet them. I intercepted him and I said, "Dr. David, would it be all right with you if I said a blessing for each of the bodies as we bring them out before we load them for transport?" I was prepared to explain this. I was prepared to say, "Dr. David, I'm here to assist and comfort the family,” and there is no family. The family is gone. Or I'm here to provide pastoral care to all these guys in uniform, all these guys who are holding their faces so carefully blank as their gloved hands turn and lift, and as their skilled eyes evaluate and measure, they are forestalling their own rage and grief that they might bring justice. But what justice are we going to bring to this? The murderer murdered himself, too. "Dr. David, I want to retrieve this moment from evil. I want to redeem it. I want to grab hold of it and pull it back here for all of us, for you and for the guys and for the kindergarteners and for the community and for God." As it turned out, I didn't have to explain any of this to Dr. David because Maine is small and we had worked together before, and he was used to me. So, he said, "Absolutely. Absolutely"

And the first body bag was brought out and put on the gurney. And Dr. David said, "All right, everybody, Kate's going to pray." [audience chuckles] And the wardens and the paramedics and the troopers folded their gloved, bloody hands across their stomachs and bowed their heads. I stepped up to the gurney and I said, "This is the head end, right?" They said, "Yes." And I raised my hand, preparing to place it on the head end of the body bag and my hand was actually making its descent, coming down like this, when Dr. David said, without particular emphasis, very calmly, he said, "You know, that's the shooter."

And one of the wardens afterwards told me he saw my hand stop in the air above the body bag. And he said, "You know, I did wonder what you were going to pray for this guy." Because all I could think of was, "Sorry, you bastard. You're on your own." And I had to admit to him that it was all I could do not to snatch my hand away. So, had we found it? Had we found the threshold at which love stops? God's love, but translated as it must be through our hands and our voices. And if not at this, then at what moment can we honestly say that love no longer makes its absolute, implacable, and holy demand? Love one another.

It was easy to pray for the mom and the kids. One at a time, they brought them out. One at a time, I approached the gurney and laid my hands on them and commended them peacefully to God, saying, "Loving and beloved, from human hands to God's embrace. From human life to human memory. From love to love. It's a short step, a brief and blessed journey.” But I didn't know what to say for the shooter. He was dead. He was cooling in his bag. His life was over, and his memory had now been irremediably contaminated with pain and rage and grief. The destination of his immortal soul was very much in question as far as everyone at that scene was concerned. He needed a blessing more than anyone but that blessing was going to have to come from God. I did lower my hand eventually all the way and laid it on the head end of his body bag. All I could do for him was lay my hands on him and say, "Oh, God, I am sorry."  Thank you.

[cheers and applause]

Catherine: [00:50:36] That was Kate Braestrup.

[Death Bed from Dan Romer and Benh Zeitlin plays]

She's the author of the books Here If You Need Me, Marriage and Other Acts of Charity, and Anchor and Flares. She lives with her husband, Simon, in a beautiful cottage in the woods of central Maine. When Kate first told me this story, we were talking about how all the men at the scene were putting off their own grief so they could bring justice. Kate said to me, "And God knows, bringing justice is always an act of love." That's it for this episode of The Moth Radio Hour. We hope you'll join us next time.

[Uncanny Valley theme music by The Drift playing]

Jay: [00:51:31] Your host this hour was The Moth's artistic director, Catherine Burns. Catherine also directed the stories in the show along with Maggie Cino. The rest of The Moth's directorial staff includes Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin Jenness, Jenifer Hixson, and Meg Bowles. Production support from Whitney Jones and Jenelle Pifer. Special thanks to Krista Tippett and Trent Gillis at the radio show On Being.

Moth stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Moth events are recorded by Argot Studios in New York City, supervised by Paul Ruest. David Crabb's story was recorded live in Sydney, Australia, by Aseem Jha and produced in partnership with the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Nine Inch Nails, Bob Marley, The Lion King, and Dan Romer and Benh Zeitlin.

The Moth is produced for radio by me, Jay Allison, with Viki Merrick at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. This hour was produced with funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. The Moth Radio Hour is presented by PRX. For more about our podcast, for information on how to pitch your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.