Hearing Voices from NPR®
017 No Place Like Home: Shifts in Time and Towns
Host: Scott Carrier of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2009-07-08 (Originally: 2008-06-25)
The places we live and the people who live there; a desert, a city, two small towns, and another country:
Scott Carrier has a cultural history of the Great Salt Lake’s “West Desert,” a land of polygymists, bombing ranges, and toxic waste incinerators. There’s chlorine gas in the air, anthrax stored underground, and people who call the place home.
Sarah Vowell‘s childhood move from rural Oklahoma to small-town Montana was, for her, a change from the middle ages to a modern metropolis.
And two Stories from the Heart of the Land: NYC native Natalie Edwards hates grass, bugs, dirt, and trees, but attempts a walk thru Brooklyn’s Prospect Park; and Carmen Delzell tells why she moved to and has stayed in Mexico.
Forgot to post this when it aired, 1/1/08 on NPR ATC— A travel writer’s upside-down Australian dilemma of drop bears and hoop snakes, swag and snores, knee-clicks and star clusters, by Jake Warga “Hike Australia” (7:50 mp3):
Trailer for new fish film w/ (my kid) Jess Atkins and some great music— “A new fly fishing documentary, ‘Raising the Ghost,” chronicles 7 epic days of fly fishing in a remote region of British Columbia’s Skeena River system. The Fly Boys team attempts to catch Steelhead eating dead-drift dry flies.”
Hearing Voices from NPR®
016 Bugs and Birds: Sounds of Summer
Host: Jeff Rice of Western Soundscape Archive
Airs week of: 2009-06-24 (Originally: 2008-06-18)
Recordist Lang Elliot‘s CD Prairie Spring captures a “soundscape of prairie meadows and potholes in spring and early summer.”
An extinct woodpecker revives an Arkansas town; it’s “The Lord God Bird” by Long Haul Productions, with an original song composed for ther story by Sufjan Stevens.
Brian Eno’s music mimics some “Flies,” from the 2006 compilation Plague Songs.
Folk are buggin’, gettin bittin, swatting and swearing at “Mosquitos,” by M’Iou Zahner Ollswang (from the 1985 collection Tellus #11: The Sound of Radio.)
Lang Elliot soaks up the sounds of “Sora Dawn” — “a pothole marsh at dawn with bittern, wrens, rails, and more (Prairie Spring).
Dr. Rex Cocroft, of the University of Missouri, attaches a phonograph needle to a blade of grass, plugged it into a tape recorder, to go “acoustic prospecting” for little-known suburban lawn sounds like “Leafhoppers,” rarely hard by humans.
Ken Nordine declares this “A Good Year for Spiders” (A Transparent Mask).
Entomologist Ian Robertson,, of Boise State University, does the “Gnat Dance” with host Jeff Rice and an outdoor chorale performance for insects.
And special thanks to Dr. Hayward Spangler of the Carl Hayden Bee Research Center in Tucson for braving bugs between his teeth while “Listening to Ants.”
Father and son spend a week together traveling and hiking America’s Grand Canyon. Aired on NPR Day to Day; by producer Scott Carrier, “Walking Grand Canyon” (4:07 mp3):
Nuthin’ like a good gas crisis to spurn some excitement for energy conservation— the Aptera electric and hybrid vehicle, 300 miles-per-gallon, extended range models, “composite safety cage similar to Formula-1 cars,” exceeds 85 mph, 0-60 mph in under 10 seconds, “designed from the ground up as an electric vehicle;” that’s just some of its innovations.
Interviews gathered from Mae Sot, Thailand (same town from which all land-transported aid is entering Burma) with medical workers and Burmese migrant laborers who work in Thailand but sleep in Burma. From Jack Chance, aired this week on The World, “Burma Aid Efforts” (3:30 mp3):
Here’s Chance’s more accurate Cyclone report w/ the other story, not being told: the Burmese elections. No one would run this, so we’ll post it, “Irawaddy Delta Blues” (5:10 mp3): More…
Long-time radio producer and Alaskan luminary, Geo Beach is hosting a History channel TV series titled Tougher in Alaska. Makes sense cuz da Beach boy is tough and in AK. Starts this Thurs, May 8- 10pm ET.
Video, photos, and a Geo bio (“logger, firefighter and medic, and commercial fisherman”) at the series site.
This week on NPR ATC, HV’s Jake Warga had a story on the recovering mountain gorilla population in Rwanda. Seems the genocide decimated populations of more than just people. “Mountain Gorillas of Rwanda” (8:19 mp3):
The Thermopolis transmitter of Wyoming Public Radio was off-air. To fix it they needed to get up past three feet of snowdrifts, over three inches of ice, and into 40-mph winds blowing snow sideways across a cloud-covered hilltop. A four-wheel drive wouldn’t make it; a rental Sno-Cat would have taken days to find; and snowmobile travel would have been dangerous with the weight and bulk of the gear and parts needing transport. So how did Chief Engineer Reid Fletcher and Program Director Roger Adams make their mid-winter ascent? Hint: “Giddyup.”
C’mon, bait your line. Let’s go smelt fishin’ on the ice. Ten shacks on a frozen river are filled with ice fishermen for ten weeks each year. Owner Steve Leighton provides the bait; his patrons bring the beer; and the fish take care of the rest. Produced by Grant Fuller of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, premiered on Weekend America, “What Are You Gonna Do with 400 Fish?” (5:13 mp3):
Day 1 of the Iditarod is tomorrow. One of the qualifying races was held a few weeks ago, is the John Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon, named for the son of a Chippewa chief who delivered mail by dog sled along Lake Superior’s rugged North Shore in the late 19th century. Launched in 1981, the Beargrease draws world-class sled dog teams from around the globe. The Beargrease is the longest, and most challenging, of sled dog events in the lower 48: almost 400 miles and 4000 spectators, starting in Duluth, Minnesota on the last weekend of January. Field-recordist Curt Olson gathered the sounds of the dogs, the mushers and the fans, “Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon” (7:00 mp3):
At least monthly friends and I are tromping trails in the Lee Metcalf Wilderness. But I never knew much about its namesake, ‘cept he was once Montana’s US Senator — until now.
Turns out our spectacular wilderness area was well-named. Lee Metcalf’s legislative life is detailed in this Center for the Rocky Mountain West essay by Pat Williams (another fmr US congressman): “Montana’s Metcalf blazed his own trail.”
After Metcalf’s US Army service, including the Normandy invasion and the Battle of the Bulge, he helped design the first free elections in Germany. He introduced Medicare ten years before its passage. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act was originally the Murray-Metcalf Bill. The Peace Corps passed Congress under the leadership of Metcalf and Mike Mansfield — another amazing Montana Senator. Sez Williams:
“However, it was as a conservationist — environmentalist — that Metcalf made seminal change for the West and the nation.… From the initial Wilderness Act to landscape restoration, pesticide control to fish and wildlife refuges, Lee Metcalf moved doggedly and with success to preserve the best of the West and in doing so he not only created a whole body of conservation laws for the nation, but he also changed the way we envisioned ourselves on the land.”
Here’s Lava Lake in the Lee Metcalf Wilderness, site of a 2004 Hearing Voices high-level meeting (elevation 7106 feet):
Photo: Sam Gardner – USDA Forest Service, Aug 13, 2005 Gallatin National Forest
From their site: “The Vegetable Orchestra performs music solely on instruments made of vegetables. Using carrot flutes, pumpkin basses, leek violins, leek-zucchini-vibrators, cucumberophones and celery bongos, the orchestra creates its own extraordinary and vegetabile sound universe. The ensemble overcomes preserved and marinated sound conceptions or tirelessly re-stewed listening habits, putting its focus on expanding the variety of vegetable instruments, developing novel musical ideas and exploring fresh vegetable sound gardens.”
From their automate CD, here’s an excerpt of “cut 2” (1:03 mp3):
“Jill Homer, of Juneau, Alaska, is training to ride her bicycle in the Iditarod Trail Invitational — 350 miles of wintry pedaling over tough terrain. It’s the same course used by the famous sledding race.”
“Jill is an Alaska journalist who likes to bicycle in horrendous conditions and eat goldfish crackers and Pepsi for breakfast. Jill records her daily adventures in pictures and words.”
This scene is a whole world unto itself – I am completely captivated by it.
I especially like the small deer, seemingly ready to fight or play (it’s a fine line between the two).
(photo by a friend of a friend of a friend in Missoula)
Massive Baitoushan stratovolcano, also known as Changbaishan and by the Korean names of Baegdu or P’aektu-san, is a relatively unknown, but volcanologically significant volcano straddling the China/Korea border.
A 5-km-wide, 850-m-deep summit caldera is filled by scenic Lake Tianchi (Sky Lake). A large Korean-speaking population resides near the volcano on both sides of the border. The 60-km-diameter dominantly trachytic and rhyolitic volcano was constructed over the Changbaishan (Laoheidingzi) shield volcano. Satellitic cinder cones are aligned along a NNE trend. One of the world’s largest known Holocene explosive eruptions took place from Baitoushan about 1000 AD, depositing rhyolitic and trachytic tephra as far away as northern Japan and forming in part the present caldera. Four historical eruptions have been recorded since the 15th century.
Hearing Voices from NPR®
Forgot to post this when it aired, 1/1/08 on NPR 
, with music by Paul Wertico and Jim Hines.
Father and son spend a week together traveling and hiking America’s Grand Canyon. Aired on NPR 
Interviews gathered from Mae Sot, Thailand (same town from which all land-transported aid is entering Burma) with medical workers and Burmese migrant laborers who work in Thailand but sleep in Burma. From 
This week on NPR 
At least monthly friends and I are tromping trails in the 
NPR webseries, 