The best ‘Think Out Loud’ stories of 2024

As 2024 comes to a close, the staff of OPB’s “Think Out Loud” look back on some of their favorite conversations from the past year. Producers Sage Van Wing, Elizabeth Castillo, Gemma DiCarlo, Rolie Hernandez and Sheraz Sadiq join host Dave Miller in conversation.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller.

Rolie Hernandez: I’m Rolie Hernandez.

Elizabeth Castillo: I’m Elizabeth Castillo.

Gemma DiCarlo: I’m Gemma DeCarlo.

Sheraz Sadiq: I’m Sheraz Sadiq.

Sage Van Wing: And I’m Sage Van Wing.

Miller: It is time for one of my very favorite shows of the whole year. We call it Producer’s Choice.

If my back-of-the-crumpled-up-piece-of-paper-that-I-took-out-of-a-trash-can math is right, our team has made more than 12,000 minutes of radio this year. Over the next hour, we’re gonna listen to just a few of those minutes from segments we have each chosen because they stayed with us for one reason or another. They stood out among hundreds of hours.

Let’s get right to it. Gemma, you’re up first.

DiCarlo: Yeah, so this spring we talked about Barbie’s Village, which is a planned tiny home village in Portland run by the nonprofit Future Generations Collaborative. The idea is to serve Indigenous families experiencing homelessness. All of this is going to take place at the former Presbyterian Church of Laurelhurst. The regional Presbyterian leaders in the Pacific Northwest sold that building to Future Generations Collaborative for $1 earlier this year. Chris Dela Cruz is the former associate pastor at Westminster Presbyterian Church, which helped sponsor this project, and he explains the thinking behind that decision.

[Recorded clip from an interview with Chris Dela Cruz playing]

Chris Dela Cruz: I personally hold, as an ordained pastor, in many ways, a conflicted call. A call where the church has this call to do much good in the world but has this long history of partnering with tools of empire, including the American government and how it did awful things – genocide and land displacement of Native folks. So we thought, what could we do? What could be something tangible? So we brought to the Presbytery of the Cascades, which is the regional body of Presbyterian churches, what if the land could be given to Future Generations Collaborative as a tangible act of repair?

[Clip ends]

DiCarlo: I think he articulated the nuances there really nicely. I think a lot of congregations are thinking about what to do with declining congregation numbers and what to do with maybe those buildings, at the same time as reckoning with some social issues out there, social justice issues. And as they’re thinking about all this, I think Westminster Presbyterian Church actually did something about it. Indigenous people have had to push for their rights and the redress to some of those harms for so long. I just thought it was really interesting to hear about an institution that large, thinking about their role in the Land Back Movement and what they may need to do moving forward.

Miller: Sheraz, what do you have for us?

Sadiq: Back in August, we had a conversation about this amazing program called K-8 Create. It’s a monthly arts education program by Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. And since its launch in 2020, it has grown to provide monthly arts lessons to 5,000 students on the Oregon coast at 17 schools. These are schools in rural school districts, from Astoria in the north to Waldport on the Central Coast. For many of these students, it’s the only arts instruction that they’re gonna get at school and it’s amazing. I mean, they come from underserved communities, 95% of them qualify for free or reduced lunches, 1 in 5 of them is experiencing housing insecurity or homelessness.

So we talked to two people from Sitka, including Leeauna Perry. She’s the youth arts program director, and here she is talking about the impact of one of these lessons on a group of 3rd graders. It started with a slideshow presentation of artwork from an artist by the name of Betty LaDuke who’s in Ashland. Here’s what happened.

[Recorded clip from an interview with Leeauna Perry playing]

Leeauna Perry: So I put this slide up, opened it up for a communication of, “What do you guys see? What do you think the symbolism represents?” And that little boy who had rolled in, raised his hand kind of timidly and he said, “When I look at that, I think about why I was late today. I came in late because I was selecting what items from home I get to keep, because next week I will be living in my car.” He said, “When I look at that, the circle with the lines in the center at the bottom that look kind of like a cross to me, that looks like a window of a house that maybe someday I’ll have.”

And this little girl next to him had been sitting there. This was a lesson we did in January. So she’d been sitting next to him for four or five months. She turned and as he was speaking, her mouth dropped and she just hung on every single word, like she saw him for the very first time. And throughout the rest of the lesson, she scooted closer and closer. You could see empathy developing. She didn’t ask him about what was going on. She was engaged in the art that he was making. She was having a conversation as if she was talking to somebody who was now her best friend that she really truly wanted to know.

[Clip ends]

Sadiq: It’s so powerful to me. I’ve got two small kids, a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old. And just yesterday I was helping my son with some artwork, and I just thought to myself – and this is one of the things that’s so beautiful about doing this tradition on Think Out Loud, it just makes me appreciate the gifts that we have during the year that we take for granted. And for me, I think I’ve taken for granted the fact that my son, that we have the resources to provide to him and to my daughter. Arts, arts education, arts instruction, the love for art. So I’m just so impressed with what they’re doing through this program and I just hope it continues to grow.

Van Wing: Yeah, and you can hear the guest there sort of breaking up a little bit, almost tearing up, almost crying as she’s talking. And it’s not an official goal of ours to make people cry, but it is always, I think … our goal really is to increase empathy in the world, right? And to give people the ability to explain what they’re feeling and what they’re experiencing in the world, and you can hear that emotion in her voice. I think it brings all of us closer to understanding what’s happening in the world.

And then I’m gonna switch gears and introduce my clip. So Portland listeners will remember that the election this year in the city was extraordinarily complicated. The city introduced ranked choice voting and changed the system of government all at once, so that suddenly there are four different districts, each represented by three city council members. And you had to vote for all of them. There were so many people running on the ballot. It was complicated from a voting perspective.

It was also very complicated from a journalism perspective, just trying to figure out what can we do that will serve our audience the best? What can we do to help folks understand the ballot and what voting is like? So we all sat around and put our heads together. And in the end, we decided to do live events in each district, with 12 candidates at each one. It was chaos a little bit, planning it, but everyone in this room just put their heart and soul into it, and made it all come together.

We wanted the events to be both fun and informative. And the fun part came from the lightning round questions that we did, where some of the questions were serious and some were silly. And so I just wanted to give us a taste of that. This is one lightning round question from the District 1 event. Dave asked what the candidates would want as a final meal.

[Recorded clip from the District 1 candidates forum playing]

Miller: Timur?

Timur Ender: Ben and Jerry’s vegan chocolate chip cookie dough.

Miller: OK. Doug Clove?

Doug Clove: Prime rib.

Miller: David Linn?

David Linn: Spicy Thai fried rice.

Miller: Steph Routh?

Steph Routh: Ice cream.

Miller: Just any ice cream. OK. Cayle Tern?

Cayle Tern: A bowl of pho.

Miller: OK. Jamie Dunphy?

Jamie Dunphy: Yeah. Like a chocolate cream pie.

Miller: Noah Ernst, last meal?

Noah Ernst: Pepperoni pizza.

Miller: Terrence Hayes?

Terrence Hayes: (laughing) German chocolate cake.

Miller: Yeah, that’s all right.

Hayes: I still … German chocolate cake. I’m gonna stick there.

Miller: Candace Avalos?

Candace Avalos: Huevos Rancheros.

Miller: Thomas Shervey?

Thomas Shervey: The rarest truffle in the world to extend my lifetime while they search for it.

Miller: Loretta Smith?

Loretta Smith: I’d like to have my mother’s macaroni and cheese, and ribs, and collard greens.

[Clip ends]

Van Wing: I love this. It gives you such a good sense of who these candidates are as people. This was the first event we did. It was notable because the venue where we were originally going to hold it had a pipe leak the night before.

Miller: I totally forgot about that,

Van Wing: And Rolie had to scramble to find somewhere else nearby that would host us, and he did.

Miller: In one day. It’ll change our whole production – from now on, we’ll just do everything in one day and not spend months planning ahead.

Van Wing: And I just wanna say real quick, we had no idea how these events would turn out. They were packed, every single one of them. I felt bad because they were at capacity, but I also felt so proud of everyone for engaging civically in that way. And I just loved these events. So thank you all for showing up and being in the audience.

Miller: My turn, for one. We talked to David Grann at the Adrian C. Nelson High School in Happy Valley in January. Grann is one of the most celebrated nonfiction writers working in this country today. He’s written a bunch of books that have been turned into major movies, including “The Lost City of Z” and “The Killers of the Flower Moon.” As we always do for these shows, we really encourage the audience, high schoolers, to ask questions of these famous authors. Sometimes you have a sense for what students might ask, but often it’s just a total surprise.

[Recorded clip from David Grann interview playing]

Chye Noble [audience member]: Hi, I’m Chye Noble. I was wondering, do you ever have to change or make up facts to make a story more compelling?

Grann: No. Never, for what I do know, because I am always bound by the facts to an obsessive level … And I think we live in an age – we always have, but it’s exacerbated today by disinformation and misinformation – of people choosing their own truths just because they prefer them. But they are completely detached from facticity. I think we have an obligation, a moral obligation when we are talking about history or real lives, to get the facts right as best we can and stick to them. We can then argue about those facts. We can form different judgments about what people did and that’s healthy. But if a society can’t agree on the facts and we don’t believe in them, then we are in, I think, very morally dangerous terrain.

[Clip ends]

Miller: I think about this segment and that exchange so often because I never would have asked David Grann if he makes up facts for his nonfiction. Because to me, I took it as a given that he didn’t. And it was so good to have somebody, a student, ask that question so we could get that answer that we never would have gotten, because it never would have occurred to me to ask that question.

Elizabeth, what’s next?

Castillo: OK, so kind of recently – this was last month – we spoke to Erika Abdelatif and Kristen Myers. They live in the Portland area. They have this podcast called “Dinky.” It’s inspired by the term Dink, which means dual income, no kids. Their podcast is generally fun and lighthearted, kind of goofy, but they also tackle a lot of different topics like news and pop culture. I think being a childless person has really been in politics this year.

Dave asked Erika what it’s been like to have a public platform at this time.

[Recorded clip from the “Dinky” podcast interview playing]

Erika Abdelatif: We have a funny podcast, but we’re genuinely afraid to have this platform. When you look at what’s happening around the world – Russia just banned childfree propaganda. And I think that there’s a push towards authoritarianism happening in our world. We see what’s happening here with a potential national abortion ban in play. Roe v. Wade has been overturned. And so we have these very serious rights that have already been kind of taken off the table, and who knows where that’s gonna go. To have somebody, a lot of people … I mean, Elon Musk, who’s very close with the administration, is also very into pro-natalist perspectives.

Miller: Even joking in ways that are the epitome of rape culture, jokes about baby making.

Abdelatif: Right. Yeah, I mean, there was a YouTube influencer who recently said, “Your body, my choice.” So it’s scary to have a platform right now, where you’re encouraging women to think for themselves and to have a choice in what their life looks like, when so many men want to use physical force or laws to enforce what you do with your life.

So, yeah, we are afraid. But I think, at the end of the day, we recognize that this is such an important conversation. Women have fought so hard, for so long for their rights. So, in a lot of ways, it feels like our work, even though we’re kind of two silly billies [laughter]. It’s really important. It’s important for women to be having these conversations, especially in a place where you have joy and fun.

[Clip ends]

Castillo: This moment stuck out to me as well because our podcast conversations are often very fun, very lighthearted, and I totally went into this one thinking it was going to be. And it was in a lot of ways, but this really pushed it further in my mind. There is a lot going on in that space and some of it is pretty chilling. So I was impressed with this conversation because it went deeper than we expected it to and, I think, really brought something important to the table.

Miller: Let’s get on with the show. Rolie, what do you have for us?

Hernandez: Yeah, so in early October, we heard from Rich Patterson and Kerby Strom. There are these two local Portlanders who are also amateur historians and archivists. Their niche and what they’re really focusing on is Portland wrestling – specifically, a bygone era from the ‘60s and ‘90s.

I will be honest, I am someone that changed the channel pretty immediately when WWE came on, on the USA network. But there’s something about these two that I thought were really great and so this next clip is Dave asking Rich about what started his kind of lifelong love affair with Portland wrestling.

[Recorded clip from an interview with Rich Patterson and Kerby Strom playing]

Miller: What’s your first memory of Portland wrestling?

Rich Patterson: I was over at my aunt and uncle’s house. My folks were playing cards and Portland wrestling was on. Tony Borne and Lonnie Mayne were up in the interview area, the crow’s nest, and Lonnie’s dad was up there yelling at Tony Borne about how he’s treating his son and everything. And Tony Borne goes and beats up Lonnie Mayne’s dad, makes him all bloody and everything. And I’m probably 7 years old at the time and I think, “Oh, boy, this is horrible. He just beat up his dad.” That was probably around 1969 or so.

Miller: What was it about wrestling that you loved?

Patterson: I think just the action, it was fun. It was something that was, I don’t know, exciting. It wasn’t cartoons which I was watching at the time. It was in Portland and something that my family watched. So it was something that we also did together.

[Clip ends]

Hernandez: Yeah, for me, it’s that last bit that really stood with me, the family bit. It made me start thinking about the shows that I watched growing up – “The Simpsons” with my dad, “Law and Order” with my mom. It creates these little love affairs that you have with these shows, even though maybe sometimes they didn’t age as well. But that sense of nostalgia is still there. And so I think that bit just really stuck with me: family.

Miller: And that reminds me of a lot of the voicemails that we got, in response to this, were about the same thing: “I remember watching this with my dad or my uncle.” That’s what people emphasized when they called in to talk about it as well.

Gemma, what’s next?

DiCarlo: So way back in January, we talked about the Red Cross declaring an emergency blood shortage. This was when blood drives were being delayed by the ice storm, if anyone remembers that. And this conversation, I think, had the biggest impact on me this year in that it actually altered my behavior. I’ve thought about it a lot, even though it was almost a year ago at this point.

One of the guests we had on to talk about this was Claire Murphy. She’s the medical director of Transfusion Services at Riverbend Hospital in Bend. She spent probably more than a decade in medicine, and Dave asked her if she had seen anything close to the levels of blood shortages we’re seeing now.

[Clip from an interview with Claire Murphy playing]

Claire Murphy: When I was a resident, I remember walking into a Bloodworks Northwest in Seattle. And essentially they used flagging systems, red, yellow, and green for the status of what components they had. And I remember so many days it was green. And the levels that we’re getting used to now are essentially in the red.

Miller: So basically, what would have been seen as an alarming circumstance in the past is now just every day?

Murphy: Correct. Blood shortage has become the new normal. And sometimes during the critical times of the shortages, Bloodworks will call us and say “You’re only getting ten O negatives today. Use them wisely.”

[Clip ends]

DiCarlo: I found that very startling, and I just can’t imagine what it’s like to make those choices in a medical setting. So pretty much immediately, I signed up for a Red Cross Blood Drive and I’ve gone three times this year. I have a goal to go four times next year. Blood donation has made me feel really connected to my community in a new way. I feel like I’m looking out for people that I might not know and, I don’t know, I found it very fulfilling. I just found this to be a profound change for me this year, and it’s all thanks to Rolie for producing this conversation.

Hernandez: I will say I am someone who’s been donating blood since high school. Really, it was to get out of my second period of geometry class, but we’ll ignore that bit. But yeah, hearing this segment, or producing the segment really made me kind of realize the scope of the problem we’re having and really pushed me to donate more. I’m O-negative, so I’m kind of like a Spider-Man – always needed. With great power comes great responsibility, so I’m glad we’re donating.

Miller: Sheraz, I will not ask your blood type, but I do want to know the next clip that you brought for us.

Sadiq: Thank you. So back in May, the body of a gray whale washed up on a beach in Bandon on the Southern Oregon coast. Typically, what would happen is you’d have scientists and state officials go there, collect samples, and do a necropsy to determine the cause of death. But this time, something additional and different happened. Remarkably, state officials from the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department contacted the Coquille Indian Tribe – their ancestral land spanned the Southern Oregon coast – about this discovery because they realized the importance, the cultural significance of this whale on their ancestral lands.

[Recorded clip from an interview with Coquille Indian Tribal Chair, Brenda Meade, playing]

Brenda Meade: It really started with us coming together and just being thankful for this, being thankful in prayer, being thankful in song and offering our ask of forgiveness if we were handling it in the wrong way.

It really is something that we don’t have elders standing behind us to tell us exactly how they did it before. So we’re relying on archives. We’re relying on stories that have been passed down for generations and just our purpose and intent of being on that land in that same place that our ancestors have upheld that ceremony. It was very moving that all of our Tribal members that were there were there for the right reasons and it was to accept that gift for us.

[Clip ends]

Sadiq: That was Brenda Meade, the Coquille Indian Tribal Chair, and she was such an amazing guest. What an incredible story. It also speaks and highlights … it’s a testament to the difference in the relationship that sovereign nations have with state officials. This wouldn’t have happened decades ago.

And the other thing that also really stood out for me is that they had gathered at this beach 50 tribal members, ranging in age from folks who are senior citizens to kids as young as 3 or 4 years old. And as the tribal chair told us, it had been maybe 100 years since they had had such a gift from the Creator.

I also followed up by contacting the communications director of the tribe to ask him, “Well, what happened? How did the tribe use parts of the whale?” And he told me that the tribe was able to render the blubber and use that for their traditional lamp oils, and then they buried the whale and are preserving the skeleton for use at a later date. So all in all, it’s just an amazing conversation. I’m so glad that we had her on.

Castillo: Yeah, I mean this one really, really stuck out to me as well. Seeing that respect between the Parks Department and the tribe, I still think today, a lot of that respect is missing in a lot of different ways. So just hearing this all play out, I was like, “Wow.”

Miller: Sage, what do you have for us?

Van Wing: Yeah, Hannah Glavor is a local Portland musician who put out an album earlier this year called “Hold On, Hold Tight.” The music is just really fun indie rock, but the lyrics are so heartfelt and so raw. I gotta tell you, I cried when I talked to Glavor on the phone before she came in for the show, and then I cried again while she was playing on the air.

A few years ago, Glavor, at the age of 30, learned that she had a brain tumor way down in the center of her brain that should have been inoperable.

[Recorded clip from an interview with Hannah Glavor playing]

Hannah Glavor: I could have and should have died, based on the size and location of everything. And I was so trapped. My brain was very awake but my body could not catch up with everything. So I was just physically exhausted but mentally spinning, very awake and aware of everything. So I think of the things that I regretted, that I couldn’t change. Like, what if I didn’t get to say goodbye? What if I couldn’t play the guitar again? Because I didn’t know, because everything was overstimulating.

I couldn’t listen to music. I couldn’t watch television. I couldn’t get up and walk around because like any motion, it was exhausting. It took everything out of me. And so I thought of all the things that I just didn’t appreciate enough when I was very able bodied, not knowing what could be retained and what would be lost.

Miller: How much of any of that emotional state has stayed with you?

Glavor: Honestly, there’s almost this sense of desperation, like I have to play music, I have to express myself. This is the only life that I get.

Miller: Can we hear “Hold On”?

Glavor: Absolutely.

[”Hold On” by Hannah Glavor plays]

Miller: That is Hannah Glaver with the song, “Hold On.”

[Clip Ends]

Miller: Elizabeth, you’re up next.

Castillo: This summer we spoke to Mitsuko “Mitzi” Asai Loftus. She was born in Hood River. She’s the author of “From Thorns to Blossoms: A Japanese American Family in War and Peace.” She spent some of her childhood in the so-called relocation centers during World War II, incarcerated because she’s of Japanese descent. Dave asked her to describe the loyalty oath questionnaires, and these were used in 1943.

[Recorded clip from an interview with Mitzi Asai Loftus playing]

Mitzi Asai Loftus: Basically, one said, “I pledge that I have no loyalty to the Emperor of Japan and I forswear allegiance,” which in the first place we didn’t have. And the other one was, “I’ll serve in the armed forces at any time I’m called upon to do so.” And that was asked of all men 17 years old and older. And my father was 69 years old. He had to answer those questions, too.

First place, he has to pledge complete allegiance to the country that would not allow him to become a naturalized citizen, and to say, “Sure, I love this country that just locked me up, and I’ll do anything for it.” And the same for serving in the armed forces. Well, my two brothers were already in the U.S. Army before Pearl Harbor, along with several thousand Japanese American boys who are already in. And they drafted people out of the camps, eventually. For a while they stopped, at the time that that questionnaire came out.

[Clip ends]

Castillo: So Mitzi is 92, and she’s just been so generous with her time and her experiences. She’s so open about all the things she’s gone through. And it just reminded me that there are like so many people who live here with just such important stories to tell. So this was like a super powerful conversation. I think right after I’m like, “oh, I’m going to bring this one up at the end of the year.”

Miller: My turn for one. Our big trip this year as a show was the week we spent in Richland, Washington in September. We went there to talk about the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, a mammoth production job by our own Allison Frost and reporter Anna King from Northwest Public Broadcasting. It’s really hard to summarize just the historical and environmental cultural impact of this place. It’s the first place on Earth where humans made plutonium on an industrial scale. It’s basically part of the birth of the atomic age.

One of the people who really helped me just feel like I had a little bit more of an understanding of the place was a writer named Kathleen Flenniken. She grew up in Richland. She actually worked as a civil engineer at Hanford in the 1980s, and then she pivoted. She became the poet laureate of Washington state. Here she is.

[Recorded clip from an interview with Kathleen Flenniken playing]

Kathleen Flenniken: I love my country. I feel it’s complicated. And that the main issue for me around this whole story is the idea of secrecy, that secrecy is an enemy of democracy. And that’s kind of where I landed. I had a number of people come to me and say, “oh, you must be so angry,” as I was writing these poems, “your poems must be so angry.” And I tried writing angry poems when I was told I should be angry. In a kind of simplistic way I thought, “Oh, that’s right. I should be angry. I’ve been betrayed.”

And then eventually I worked through that and realized what I really felt was a kind of grief and that the betrayal was really … I had been part of the betrayal too. I feel like we had betrayed ourselves in many respects. And so I feel like it’s less a story about America and more a story about the human condition in general. There really are no good and bad guys. But we do these things to ourselves. I guess that was the big takeaway for me that I’m still working on.

[Clip ends]

Miller: This was so powerful for me because she was more capable of putting this in perspective in some ways than anybody else we talked to – the scientists and the civilians who are working on cleanup. It showed that sometimes you need to turn to an artist to really understand the importance of something for humans.

Castillo: Yeah, and for me, it was just so weird how there were some very specific instances that you brought up that were totally normalized, like trucks coming in to test people’s urine – nothing to see here; this is a totally normal thing – just like the milk trucks. That was such a super interesting conversation.

Miller: Sage, what do you have for us?

Van Wing: Yeah, so Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of four collections of poetry. This year, she came to town to talk about her illustrated collection of nature essays called “World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, & Other Astonishments.” Like our other author interviews in partnership with Literary Arts, we did this one at a high school – in this case, McDaniel – and as always, I was blown away by the questions we got from students.

[Recorded clip from an interview with Aimee Nezhukumatathil playing]

Audience Member: Hi, my name is Valeria. And I wanted to ask you, how do you manage to blend the difficult, painful and sometimes violent experiences that you’ve endured with the tranquility and beauty of nature in your writing?

Aimee Nezhukumatathil: Oh my goodness, you all are rocking these questions. Where are the English teachers here? I just want to give a shout out to the English teachers. Oh my gosh, I would have died to have any of you as my English teachers. I know these questions don’t happen without just the fostering and modeling from English teachers and librarians here. So shout out to the teachers.

That’s such a beautiful question. I think there’s definitely a time and place for kind of recalling those sadnesses or bits of injustice. I definitely did not want to make a “La la la, I’m traipsing through the forest” book because that’s not my reality either. And I want to begin and end in love, not in despair or like look at what’s happened to me, I can’t move on. I really wanted to showcase that I’m always fighting for the light. It’s not always easy, but I always want to fight for the light.

[Clip ends]

Van Wing: I just want to take this opportunity to also shout out [to] the school librarians and English teachers, specifically the ones who welcome us into their high schools for these shows. They are so amazing to work with and so generous with their time, and also let us all make a pact to begin and end in love.

Miller: Aimee Nezhukumatathil was not the only author who really responded with generosity to these student audiences and the student questions. Almost every author we have had over the last couple of years has done that. And I think partly – this sort of gets back to what I was saying earlier about David Grann – they probably like not just having boring old professional interviewers interact with them and ask them the same old questions. There’s a freshness that comes from talking with young people who don’t do this for a living and I think just have different tacks.

Rolie, what’s next?

Hernandez: I think many people are familiar with the U.S. census, but there’s also a U.S. agricultural census. So instead of taking stock of humans, it takes stocks of farmlands and animals. Something that was found in the data is that exotic animals have been on the decline. We spoke to Michael Lehman who raises ostriches, and we also spoke to Ron Wilkinson, who raises llamas.

This is a clip of Dave, basically asking Ron why llamas make good guard dogs.

[Recorded clip from an interview with Ron Wilkinson and Michael Lehman playing]

Ron Wilkinson: Llamas work as a guard primarily because their natural curiosity is such that, if anything strange enters their area, they immediately go to that spot. If I look out of my pasture and I see all my llamas moving towards the fence or something, I look to see what’s on the other side, because something unusual is there. So, as a guard, their first way of intimidating is that they are just big animals, and a dog or a coyote or something of that size doesn’t really want that big animal hanging over him, coming over to check them out, so they leave from that standpoint.

Miller: So they’re not necessarily aggressive, but they’re big and they’re sort of like huge bouncers who don’t know jujitsu.

Wilkinson: Yeah, that sounds good.

[Clip ends]

Miller: Honestly, it sounds weird. [Laughter] I don’t even know what I was talking about there.

Hernandez: Well, I mean something he didn’t mention, which I think was important, is that llamas spit. He told me in the pre-interview before he came on the show that his llamas will spit at things if they feel angered or threatened. And the reason why I chose this is because it reminds me of my own grandpa. I’m a fan of underdogs. So go exotic farms! I’m also a fan of unconventional guard dogs. My grandpa had a goose to guard his goats and so similarly enough, whenever anything tried to scare his goats, like my cousins who were toddlers at the time, you just hear a lot of honking and then crying. The goose did its job and maybe I’ll get a llama in the future.

Sadiq: The goose did not spit.

Hernandez: The goose did not spit. Just honks.

Miller: Gemma, what’s next?

DiCarlo: Tough to follow! I chose this one because some guests just stick with you. And Billie McBride for me was one of those people. She is this year’s Miss Trans Oregon. She’s from Astoria and lives there now, but spent most of her adult life in Arkansas as a figure skating coach. And when the Arkansas Legislature brought forward some anti-trans legislation several years ago, she decided to come out publicly and testify against that. She explained to us kind of how that went and how it led to her winding up in the Miss Trans USA pageant.

[Recorded clip from an interview with Billie McBride playing]

Billie McBride: I had lived, worked, been in business and taught generations of children how to figure skate in Arkansas. People knew me. When I came out and I went to the legislature and I testified, it was powerful because there were people in the room that recognized me that had no idea what my past was. I read them the Riot Act and it almost became viral, my testimony. So I built on that to come to this pageant, because the pageant requires you to do this sort of thing. It requires you to be an activist, to be involved in your community.

[Clip ends]

DiCarlo: That really struck me, just to go from a quiet life, [a] relatively under-the-radar life, to being very public about, “This is me, I’m your neighbor. I am who you’re talking about when we talk about these issues.” I thought it was very brave. And she’s now seeking every platform she can, including this pageant, to talk about how you can be trans and have a long, happy, fulfilled life. I did follow up. She finished in the Top 10 at Miss Trans USA and won the Miss Congeniality award.

Speaker: Totally deserved.

DiCarlo: Yeah. I love how she just sort of took the whole idea of a beauty pageant, flipped it on its head and was like, I’m not participating in it for the beauty part of it. I’m participating in it because I want people to know how beautiful it can be to be trans. So, so lovely.

Miller: Yeah, and she was very open about using this pageant as a vehicle to further her activism, an activism that she didn’t really choose. I mean, this is not a lifelong piece of her identity. It’s something that she was forced to do because of what was happening politically, and then she was wonderfully open about using this pageant as a way to make her voice even louder.

Our senior producer, Allison Frost, could not make this Producer’s Choice today, but she did want us to be sure that Robin Wall Kimmerer was not left out. Wall Kimmerer is the Indigenous author, botanist and professor who is best known for her book “Braiding Sweetgrass,” about the reciprocal relationships between humans and the natural world. We spoke in front of an audience at Oregon State University back in May. Wall Kimmerer was there to accept the 2024 Stone Award for Literary Achievement. She also gave a lecture that evening.

She talked to us about the deliberate cultivation of a state of gratitude for the non-human world. The audience was made up of a lot of students and one of the great things is that, like Robin Wall Kimmerer, they came from the sort of overlapping but often separate worlds of the natural sciences and the creative arts. There were people who were studying biology there. There were also people studying writing.

Once again, I don’t think we planned this, but this clip also starts with a question from our student audience.

[Recorded clip from an interview with Robin Wall Kimmerer playing]

Audience Member: Hi. My name is Jay and I wanted to ask … It’s kind of a silly question. But do you have a favorite invertebrate that lives in mosses?

Robin Wall Kimmerer: What a wonderful question because of course, I do. [Laughter] Oh, I know I’m with my people when someone asks that question. What’s your favorite moss invertebrate? And It’s gonna be hands down tardigrades or water bears. Do you know water bears? Oh, my goodness.

Miller: I wish our radio audience had seen just the excitement. It was like you chose the right team. [Laughter] OK. But why this invertebrate?

Wall Kimmerer: Oh, well, for one, they are darling. They really do look like little stubby-legged bears, and they move very much through the moss forest the way bears move over the landscape, except for they’re the size of a dot. And like mosses, can dry up when the sun dries them. What do the water bears do? They dry up too. Remember those instant farm animals that you used to have when you were kids? It’s just a little pellet and you put it in water and it expands to full size. That’s the way these tardigrades or water bears are. When the world dries up, they dry up to just a little dust particle and then the rain returns, the dew returns, and they come back to life. They’re resilient, beautiful. Yeah. Thank you for asking that.

[Clip ends]

Miller: It was a real pleasure to meet Robin Wall Kimmerer, who has really become a legend in a lot of ways, in the last decade or so. For me, an added bonus [is] that she grew up in, lives in still and writes about really beautifully a part of the world where I came from – Central New York State – and a part of the world that not too many people really write about. So it was an extra pleasure to meet somebody who is basically from where I initially came from.

Elizabeth, what’s next?

Castillo: So this conversation’s from January. Dave interviewed Mark Osburn and Jamie Klebe. Their districts have some of the highest rates of student homelessness in Oregon, and so Dave asked about the kinds of services that are available to Jamie’s kids.

[Recorded clip from and interview with Mark Osburn and Jamie Klebe playing]

Jamie Klebe: We do food. We’ve been helping with families with deposits and first month’s rent. If they can find something, it’s anything from helping with phone bills, to shoes, to just kind of breaking down some of the barriers for kids to access extracurriculars, no matter if that’s music or sports.When kids are connected to those things, it just increases their achievement. In any way that the kids might need help, whether that’s just some cozy blankets and stuffed animals to make their space feel more like home … It’s a variety.

Miller: Mark, what about you? What do you find that you’re providing often that really makes a difference?

Mark Osburn: You know, often it’s just taking care of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and providing food. Since I’ve started here, we’ve joined with Food for Lane County. We have a school-based food pantry where not just the McKinney-Vento or homeless kids go, but anybody who’s hungry could go in and grab some food, bring something home to cook that night. I have a giant clothing closet.

It’s taking care of general needs and things that come up. We’ll pay for sports fees, if a kid needs a baseball glove, a new pair of cleats to keep them involved in the school, giving them a reason to come back. It’s just basically giving them an equitable education.

[Clip ends]

Castillo: So for me, equitable education really stood out to me. Their schools are in Oakridge and Warrenton. This conversation was not Portland or another big city in Oregon. And then I’ve just also been thinking about how schools, libraries, park districts, [have] been filling these gaps in social services for kids around the state.

Miller: Rolie, what’s next?

Hernandez: Yeah, the Snoopy Senior World Hockey Tournament happened back in this summer. It’s like your standard hockey tournament, except all the players are older adults. So we spoke to Bob Carolan and Mike Sheehan. That’s my third Mike – bingo! Dave asked Bob one of my favorite questions he’s ever asked for a segment I’ve ever produced.

[Recorded clip from an interview with Mike Sheehan and Bob Carolan playing]

Miller: What does an indoor hockey rink smell like?

Bob Carolan: Ha ha ha, this is public radio?

Miller: This is public radio. You can say a lot. You can’t say words the FCC doesn’t like, but you can describe smells.

Mike Sheehan: Well, you could ask our wives. We have to keep our hockey equipment out in the garage or somewhere, not even in the car.

There’s a smell, there’s kind of a freshness actually when you walk into a rink, because it’s cold. And after a hockey game, it doesn’t smell so great.

[Clip ends]

Hernandez: I picked this clip just because these are just two older gentlemen. There’s also plenty of other people who are doing this too. I think the tournament attracts hundreds. They’re just doing what they love, and it gave me a new sense of appreciation of aging, and it’s never too late to pick up a new skill or just keep doing the skills you love to do.

Sadiq: It was such a fun conversation, and I should say that I had the pleasure of speaking with one of the guests, Mike Sheehan, shortly after he self-published a book on the history of the Lane County Ice Arena. And it’s full of all these amazing, interesting anecdotes and colorful characters, and also how the rink has basically served as this amazing magnet to build community. So he told me about how there was a person in the community who was diagnosed with terminal cancer at the age of 48. And his one wish was to play a hockey game for one last time. So they suited him up, put the oxygen tank, the tube through his clothes, his equipment, and they got him to play in the goalie position for one game. That was his wish and he passed away 11 days later.

Van Wing: I would also say too, Dave, you were just saying that high school students ask these questions that you would never think to ask, but you also ask some pretty amazing questions sometimes.

Miller: Well, thank you.

Let’s see … Oh, we’ve got one more clip. I was thinking, are we out of time? Happily, we are not. Sheraz. What do you have for us?

Sadiq: OK. So, over the summer we got this press release about the Portland Chaos, and I thought to myself, what is going on here? Portland Chaos is a volleyball club for girls and boys, and the name refers to what was happening in 2020 when the club was created by Nerisa Laban. She’s also one of the coaches. The wildfires were raging. The racial justice protests were engulfing Portland and other cities across America. And then you had COVID that had shut down these spaces for recreating and for practicing sports for kids. So she created this club, Portland Chaos.

Then, fast forward to 2024, when the boys 18-under team went to this grueling four-day boys volleyball junior national championship, which was held in Dallas, Texas. They ended up winning the national title, so they did much better than they did last year. They came in 5th place. The team is helmed by co-captains Lopaki Laban – coincidentally the son of Nerisa – and Given Unwin, who is a 15-year-old sophomore who goes to McDaniel High School. He’s 6′3″, so the ideal height for a volleyball player. Here he is talking about finding his second family at the Portland Chaos Volleyball Club.

[Recorded clip from an interview with the Portland Chaos Volleyball Club playing]

Given Unwin: It runs in my second family, in Nerisa’s family, that they kind of took me into.

Miller: Your newfound family.

Unwin: Yes, yes.

Nerisa Laban: He’s my baby giraffe.

Miller: That’s a funnier joke if you can see Given in front of you. Now you only look like a baby giraffe to me. [Laughter]

What is it about volleyball that has drawn you in, in addition to the charming family you’re now a part of?

Unwin: Yeah, definitely the community is a big thing. And I would say I’m pretty good at it. This year especially, all the people on the team … what do we have? Like 10, 11 people. Every single one of them just felt like a close, close friend

[Clip ends]

Sadiq: I should add that I added Given at the last minute. I thought to myself, OK, this is great. Nerisa is terrific. She is very passionate about this. She’s the coach. And then I’ve got her son, who’s the co-captain. I think I’m good. But it was thanks to Nerisa … Nerisa who encouraged me to talk to Given and he was so charming. He’s also incredibly humble. I mean, he told me that he’s very, very good at volleyball. In fact, after the championship title that he helped to win, he was actively recruited by universities, such as Penn State and Pepperdine.

Miller: And I have to say he really did look like a baby giraffe. So, when she said that, it was true that I could not get that image out of my mind. Well, that’s where we’re going to leave this today – with a baby giraffe.

Rolie Hernandez, Gemma DiCarlo, Sage Van Wing, Sheraz Sadiq, Elizabeth Castillo and Allison Frost – who is not in the room with us right now but is definitely here with us in spirit – thank you all. A million trillion thanks to our amazing engineers, Steven Cray and Nalin Silva. It is a blessing to be a part of this team of smart, creative, sensitive, kind people. It’s just an incredible privilege to get to do a job I love, with people I love. So thank you all.

We’re going to go out with a performance from this year – just about three weeks ago – from the band Blind Pilot. It’s a four-person band and they gathered around a single mic. They were, I don’t know, inches away from each other, all facing each other as they played this song. We’re gonna go out on it. It’s called “Jacaranda.”

[“Jacaranda” playing by Blind Pilot, performed live in the studio]

Spread my arms and plant my roots

Until I am native too

Heard the question in her song, calling just before the sun

“Where do I belong, where do I belong, where do I belong

Where do I belong, where do I belong?”

I didn’t fear, didn’t tire, when I was young and a liar

Just my breath was my gold when I was young enough to know

When I was young enough to know

And though I heard no help at all

It came to me and I let it fall

The only home is in our steps, I won’t wait to catch my breath

I am asking you for a miracle, I am asking you for a miracle

I heard love in it all when it was young and my fault

Saw it shine ever brighter when I was young and on fire

Just our breath was our gold when we were young enough to know

Saw it shine ever brighter when we were young and on fire

When we were young and on fire

[Song ends]

[Editor’s note: The transcript contains the correct name of Rich Patterson who appeared with fellow guest Kerby Strom on the “Think Out Loud” conversation about Portland’s wrestling history. The audio introducing the clip featuring Patterson mistakenly attributes a different speaker and guest who did not participate in that conversation. OPB regrets the error.]

Contact “Think Out Loud®”

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.