The Auralyn with Blair Braverman

If you see a shark circling your boat, you should think Purse.

Welcome to Your Wrong About the podcast where sometimes we get a little bit lost.

And today we are, of course, joined by Blair Braverman, our survival correspondent.

Blair has a suspenseful survival story for us today that was an absolute secret for me as I was preparing to record.

And I am so excited for the journey she is about to take us on.

You might remember Blair from previous fan favorite episodes covering such topics as Balto, Baby Jessica, The Miracle in the Andes, a Diatlove Pass Incident, Aaron Ralston, and Chris McCandless.

Blair also has an amazing new children's book coming out.

It's called The Day Leap Sword.

It's out on October 21st.

It's about joy.

It's about dogs.

It's about so many of the things that you know and love about the episodes that she's been on and so much more.

As always, we have a lot of great bonus episodes for you on Patreon and Apple Plus.

Go check them out there.

And if you have a survival-related question for Blair, we have a post up on our Patreon where you can ask her some questions that might show up in an upcoming bonus episode, where she answers your questions about survival, wilderness, and how to pee in really cold weather.

A lot of people have asked that already, but you should ask that again if you want.

We also have recent bonus episodes on Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, with our Hollywood correspondent, Eve Lindley.

And this month, we brought on our legal correspondent, Mackenzie Joy Brennan, to join us for our true crime coroner.

Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for listening.

Here's your episode.

Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we are all just trying to get through this thing called life, sometimes in the wilderness, sometimes not.

And with me today is our survival correspondent, Blair Braberman.

Sarah Marshall!

Blair Braberman!

You're wrong about!

Oh, that felt good.

How are you?

I'm so happy to have you back here.

It's been many months.

I am so good talking to you, Sarah.

I can see your face.

Your listeners can't.

And you are like

an oasis in the desert.

You are an oasis in the desert in every way.

And I'm so happy to see your beautiful face, too.

So, Sarah, I feel like I should intro.

Oh, I just knocked over my chocolate milk.

It was empty.

Okay, thank God.

Sarah, I feel like I should introduce this because what happened here is that I heard a story and I thought, I want to tell this story to Sarah.

And then I thought, I'm not going to tell her anything about it.

I'm just going to ask her to schedule a podcast recording with me on trust.

And she'll have no idea where this story goes.

Which is the first time I've done this on this show, I realize now, because usually I at least know the name of the thing that we're talking about.

But yeah, it's, I mean, it's a complete mystery.

I'm extremely excited.

and also, you've more than earned that trust.

Do you have any predictions?

Um, well, okay, my only guess, and I don't think it's this, but the only thing I thought of was because I was like thinking about telling you the story, and I was like, Oh, it would be bad if this is the story she wanted to tell, is about that lesbian couple who pretended to be lost at sea, but that they weren't really lost at sea.

No, it's not that.

Okay, all right, it's not that, but I will say this is a survival story.

I guess that's a spoiler, Sarah, but you probably would have guessed it.

It's one I wasn't familiar with,

which was exciting to me.

I'd never heard about it at all.

I feel like I'm going to start talking about it and you're going to be like, oh yeah, I know all about this.

Let me just recite all the trivia.

Like it's fairly obscure.

I will be like both chagrined and encouraged if I don't know it because I spend a lot of time

soothing my anxious brain by reading about scary things that happen.

My other guess is that it's about the the Lonergans who were the inspiration for open water, but they famously did not survive.

So it's probably not that.

Sarah, why are your guesses all about survival at sea?

I think about it a lot.

Is it that or is it, are we on land?

I'm so excited.

I don't know.

I don't know.

We don't just have to see what happens to these people.

We don't know.

We'll just find out, just like in real life.

Oh my God.

Okay.

Tell me, begin where you would like to begin.

Okay, well, I want to say that the way I learned about this story is I was assigned a book review for the New York Times, and the book is by Sophie Elmhurst.

Wait, I don't want to say the title because it's going to give away a very slight spoiler, but I'll say the title at the end.

It's so good.

And I read it and I was immediately became obsessed with the story.

Like I read like two pages in and I was running around my house, like screaming for people to listen to me,

reading it aloud.

And then I, in a very paranoid way, was like, Sarah, whatever you do, don't Google me.

Don't look up anything I've written.

Don't look on my social media for months because I just don't.

This isn't like that big of a surprise, but I just was like, I want purity.

I don't want her to see.

We need nice surprises in our lives, especially when there are so many weird, bad ones on the news.

And I'm really, and I have managed to not accidentally spoil it for myself.

So I'm really excited.

All right, here we go.

Okay.

So, Sarah, I want to introduce you to a suburban couple in England.

Okay, hello.

The year is like 1960.

Okay.

There's a gentleman named Maurice who works at a printing press.

He's kind of a lonely guy.

He was sick as a kid.

He spent months alone in bed.

So he really learned to enjoy his own company.

He had a really strict religious family.

He's not very close to them.

They were very harsh.

And he has terrible self-esteem.

He has a stutter.

He's shy.

He just sort of has a

he's kind of a negative Nancy.

That's what you need to know about Maurice.

Yeah.

Or Morose Maurice, let's say.

Oh, my God.

I can't say that, but I'm going to

try to say it every time.

Morose Maurice.

But he's also, he's like fairly adventurous.

He's shy around people, but he learns to fly.

He's a pilot.

He likes to climb mountains.

And he has a friend named Mike who always goes to car rallies.

And one time Mike can't go.

So he asked Maurice to take a spot.

I'm not positive what a car rally is.

I tried to figure it out.

I was just going to say, is it like British for stock car racing, kind of?

Or like a car show?

So from reading the description of the scene, I feel like it's just people driving cars around to show them off.

All right.

Yeah.

People do do that.

I look forward to hearing from listeners who know what this would be in 1960 England.

Especially if they were there.

And also the word rally, as we learned from an American tale, a rally is a large gathering of mice for a reason, if you're a mouse.

And so it it makes it sound like the cars are getting together to demand rights.

The reason is cars.

And they probably were, and we just couldn't understand them.

Yeah, that's true.

They tried, though.

So Morose Maurice, he goes to a car rally.

He's supposed to be sharing a car with a girl he doesn't know who's like a friend of Mike's.

And he meets this girl.

She's gorgeous.

She's 21.

She's a tax accountant and her name is Marilyn.

And Maurice Maurice is like immediately head over heels for her.

He's just like, oh my God, she's so charming.

She's sweet.

She's energetic.

He's so head over heels.

He just completely embarrasses himself all day.

Like he keeps driving in the wrong direction.

He says the wrong things.

He just is like, he already feels bad about himself, but by the end of this night, he's feeling worse about himself than ever.

And he's just like.

Got a case of the flipperty gibbets.

He does.

And he feels so embarrassed.

He's like, at least I'm going to buy her a tank of gas.

like as an apology for my completely embarrassing behavior.

He fills her gas tank and then discovers he doesn't have any money.

So

she has to pay it anyway.

He's just like, this couldn't have gone worse.

I completely blew it with this girl.

He sends her an apology letter and some flowers afterwards.

She writes back.

He somehow gets the guts to be like, Marilyn, like, would you try again?

Would you go on a date with me again?

And she agrees, and they fall completely in love with each other.

Yay!

It's an unlikely romance.

She's this like sheltered-only child.

She's stubborn, she's adventurous.

She's drawn to him because, like, she loves that he takes her in planes and teaches her how to climb mountains and do things like that.

This is crazy because I'm a sheltered-only child who loves to run in planes.

Okay, for our listeners, recently, Sarah and I tried a, what was it?

It was like a.

It's a very immersive VR flight simulator, I would say.

I don't know if what it was called.

Yeah, a very realistic VR flight simulator.

I could not land the plane.

I crashed it so many times.

And then Sarah tried, and she just like beautifully piloted an entire flight.

It did take many attempts.

Well, it was just, I just knew that I needed to get you in all of those unlabeled boxes to, well, the Scapu's airfield, because that was where I decided to land because I wanted to show you my, where I grew up.

So I legitimately, like, I saw that you were so smooth touching down on the runway, like in an emergency.

That makes me so happy.

Cause, yeah, it is like, have you ever watched an Indiana Jones movie and they have to land a plane all of a sudden?

And they're like, I guess we'll figure it out.

And you're like, oh, I would not know where to begin.

But if I have someone very nicely explaining it to me the entire time, I think I could do it.

That's just, it's hard to find the nice explainer in the emergencies, though.

But maybe this will come up as a theme too.

Interesting.

Well, I just felt like sharing that little braggy thing about you because I was highly impressed.

I love that.

That's like the love that should find everyone listening to this is like

the people who are just like, I need everyone to know about this thing my friend did that I loved.

Sarah and I also tried sensory deprivation a few weeks ago.

And you wrote about it.

Yeah.

it was great.

I highly recommend it.

Anyway, back to Maurice and Marilyn, our lovely, our lovely couple.

They fall in love.

They get married in 1963.

Marilyn is 22 and Maurice is 30.

And they're in a culture with a lot of expectation on them.

Like they both have professional jobs.

They're presumably going to have kids.

She'll be a mom probably and quit her job.

Like there's, there's just societal expectations.

They're in the suburbs.

Maurice doesn't want kids because he wants his genetic line to end with him.

Why is this like something I find so attractive in a man, you know?

But it is.

I'm just going to set that out there and look at it.

Do you find it attractive in a woman or just a man?

Well, I think that you kind of expect it more in women, you know, because it's like such an issue these days that like, you know, women or people with fallopian tubes like have such a hard time getting tubal ligation

and like so few doctors appear to want to perform it.

And there is some kind of awareness of like, you know what, this is this is it.

Let's seal up the cave.

That's a weird metaphor, but they do do that with real caves sometimes.

It wasn't, I wasn't talking about cervixes.

Maurice, in a move that would appeal to Sarah very much, is determined that his genetic line should end with him.

Marilyn's fine with that.

She doesn't want to be a mom.

It doesn't interest her.

But she's also bored with the suburbs in general.

And she's like, Maurice, let's sell our house and live on a boat.

Yes.

I mean, no, but yes.

Oh, God.

Maurice is like, sorry, what?

And she's like, yeah, let's just sell every single thing we own and sail to New Zealand and just see what happens.

And Maurice is like, this is a bad idea, Marilyn.

Like, this doesn't make any sense.

We'd be living everything we know.

What?

But she,

Marilyn is stubborn AF.

Like, this is one of her

most defining characteristics.

And she won't let go of the idea.

And eventually, Maurice sort of gives in.

He's like, okay, I mean,

sure, I guess let's sell every single thing we own, move on to a boat and sail to New Zealand.

Do they know how to sail very well?

No, they have to learn.

Do they have a boat?

No.

So they spend four years getting ready.

They get a boat built.

They sell all of the furniture in their house.

Like all their peers are, you know, buying nice furniture and starting to have kids.

And Maurice and Marilyn are like having a yard sale to buy boat paint or whatever.

They're working on the interior of the boat.

They're learning sailing.

It's a 31-foot yacht and they name it the Oralin, which is a combination of their names.

That's really cute.

It's really cute.

Is this the time to mention

that,

well, I guess three years ago.

So if I had started working on this, I would be buying boat paint as well, but obviously I wasn't going to.

But three years ago, when my dad died, I was like, I'm going to sail to New Zealand, I think.

That was like the form that my grief took.

And I wrote a tough love letter about it.

You did.

And you wrote the most beautiful.

tough love column about, well, I have to return to it and we can put a link to it, but something to the extent of like, you want to do this huge thing.

And also, I don't say, oh, I'm not a sailor.

I'm not a nautical person, surprise.

But it was something like, you know, your grief is telling you to do this huge thing, but you can also honor this love that you've lost by getting a little boat and going out a little bit, which is very good advice for a grieving person.

But I feel like I'm like, oh my God, if I had started three years ago, I would still be having the yard sail part.

Does that help?

Well, it's just, I mean, I can tell that it was was never like a serious desire for me.

It was more sort of like a mind vacation because I think that my brain attaches to certain themes, especially in times of uncertainty.

Who doesn't?

Yeah, I don't know.

I think it's like, and especially if you have sort of the gift of feeling comfortable like in research and in books and in other people's stories, then there's something.

Yeah, it is such a meaningful way to process stuff.

But I think it's just like, it's the kind of thing that you say and it's such a simple sentence.

You're like, I'm going to to sail to new zealand and people either like okay cool or they're like i don't know maybe you should think more about that but then once you get into actually doing it it becomes

you know like something you shape your entire life toward especially if you're starting from scratch and that it becomes i don't know that like quests are tricky things but i feel like if you're going to have a quest and be married then you should probably have the same quest

i mean and i understand why you wanted that too i feel like if you're grieving someone or something big in your life and it leaves this big hole, like

you have to look for something really big to fill that hole.

Like you can't go for a walk.

Right.

I wasn't going to fill it with a bunch of pebbles.

I would let it erode to that gradually.

You had a vacuum.

I mean, and you still do.

It doesn't go away.

Yeah, but you, but at a certain point, you've like...

Well, to quote Bitsy von Mufflangening, just like that, quoting her Kabbalah class, there's a hole in you that doesn't get filled in, but new life grows around it.

Oh, I like that.

Yeah.

I want to think of a segue, but I don't have one.

You know, sometimes holes get filled with water, and you can put a little boat in them, but you know what's even bigger than that?

The ocean with a people-sized boat.

Well, it's the best we can do.

We got to keep going.

I'm not even going to try to think of segues.

I'm just going to be like, Sarah, give me a segue.

Yeah.

Okay, June 1972.

Oh, boy.

They sail out of Southampton.

They're going to see

the Titanic.

New Orleans.

Oh, uh-oh.

By the way, Sarah, they decide not to bring a radio transmitter.

Guys, why do they decide that?

Wanted to save 15 bucks.

They're going to do things old school.

They're going to navigate by the stars, man.

No,

don't.

Look, there's a reason we invented all these things, and it's because people died doing that.

They can't hear me.

They're in the past.

Maurice is the captain.

And for the first couple months, the trip is pretty smooth.

They stop in Spain, they stop in Portugal, they stop in the Canary Islands, they stop in the Caribbean.

They're on their own schedule so they can stop and meet people and party and explore and work on the boat and see other people's boats.

They pass through the Panama Canal in February.

Oh, Jesus.

Okay.

And they're headed for the Galapagos.

So this isn't just like, oh, we're going, you know, beelining for New Zealand.

This is like, we are touring the world.

They're on their way to the Galapagos.

On March 4th, 1973, it's super early in the morning.

Sun's barely risen.

There's a bang.

Everything goes flying off the shelves.

Books, equipment.

They don't know what hit them.

They run outside.

They discover they've been hit by a whale.

That's a great sound.

They've been hit by a sperm whale.

Jesus.

It's pouring blood.

Oh, my God.

Not from the Orland, but from something else.

Like, clearly, it's a dying whale, and that's probably why it hit the boat.

Yeah.

And by the way, I want to tell you that as as I've been researching this story, I've gotten to the point where all of my ads are for boat insurance.

They're like, so I hear you've been reading about boats looking pretty good.

Am I right?

Oh, oh, might your boat get a hole in it?

You seem to have a boat hole problem.

We're here to help.

The Oralin sure did.

Oh my God.

There's a hole.

A hole in the hull.

That's hard to say.

The whale has punched a hole in the boat.

It immediately starts filling with water.

They try to cover the hole with a sail from the outside to sort of block water from getting in.

That doesn't work.

They start like stuffing clothes into the hole.

It's not huge, but it's a hole.

There's the force of water pushing into it.

They start pumping.

They're not going to be able to fight this hole.

The boat is going to sink.

It's really clear.

The water is coming in too fast.

Maurice gets the life raft ready.

Marilyn, who can't swim, by the way.

Marilyn.

Marilyn.

Should have learned to swim.

I'm sorry, but come on.

She's wading around in the water, trying to grab supplies, trying to move it to the life raft.

It is about an hour from the time of the whale hitting the boat until it finally disappears under the water.

Jesus.

And I want to read you just a line from this book, which is how I first learned about this story.

It's called, I'll Tell You Now, A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhurst.

It's so good.

It's so good.

Okay, but listen listen to this line.

Marilyn took a picture as the last triangle of sail and the tip of the mast disappeared beneath the surface.

Frozen in the photograph, the mast looked as if it might be coming the other way, emerging from the water like a thin arm hoping for rescue.

Ah, okay.

Jeez.

They have a life raft and a dinghy tied together.

They're both made of rubber.

Neither of them are very big.

One of them has like a covering so they can get out of the sun, and one of them is open air.

And they have about 20 days' worth of supplies.

They have food, water, a few flares, a biography of Richard III.

Oh, that's nice.

But they have no motor, no radio transmitter, no communication device at all.

Man.

And immediately they have different perspectives on the situation.

Marilyn is cheerful.

She's like,

What are we?

Like 300 miles from the Galapagos?

Okay, we'll row there.

Maurice, on the other hand, literally at the same time is trying to determine if if there's enough gas in the canister, the stove, for them to kill themselves.

He's paralyzed.

Like he's,

even as Marilyn is planning how to get to the Galapagos, he's just planning how to like kill them as gently as possible.

It's clear that Marilyn is the new captain,

right?

He was the captain of the Oralin.

Marilyn is the captain of the lifeboat.

And she says, okay, we're going to row to the Galapagos.

It's too hot during the day, but all night long, they're rowing in two-hour shifts.

Just, it's exhausting.

It's blistering.

They're steering by the stars.

You know, they're on food and water rations.

They have food and water, but not a ton.

But they are working incredibly hard.

And after two nights of rowing all night long, using every bit of strength they have, they've gone four miles south, which is the direction they need to go.

And they've drifted 30 miles west.

After four nights, they've made it 10 miles south, but the current's carrying them west even faster.

And it becomes clear they're like working against a treadmill.

There is no amount of rowing that's going to get them to the Galapagos.

Maurice suspected this from the start.

Yeah.

He's like, yeah, obviously we're just going to die here.

Everything's terrible.

Marilyn's like, all right, whatever.

We've been staying up all night.

We have blisters.

Everything's awful.

We'll just aim for a shipping lane so that a ship will see us.

And she like ties a sail bag to the oars to try to make a sail and figures that's the next plan.

Now they are near a shipping lane.

Even if you're in a shipping lane, it's hard to be seen if you're in a lifeboat.

The ocean is huge.

The horizon at sea is about two miles away.

So the odds of a ship passing close enough to you are pretty slim, even if you're in a place where a lot of ships are passing through.

I feel like it's hard for my brain to like conceive of the scale of the ocean because it's like when you try and visualize it, there's no, I mean, if you imagine being on the open ocean, you don't, or I don't really visualize like distinguishing features.

So it feels like just space with no sense of proportion.

But the figure of like the horizon being two miles away and you trying to be found, I don't know, I never thought of it that way before, because even if you're in a big freighter, you can only see like an infinitesimally small piece of the ocean that you're going through.

Yeah.

The ocean is simply too big.

It's too big.

Have you ever been at sea, Sarah?

I was on a cruise ship to Puerto Rico once and like even that was extremely humbling, you know, because there comes a point when you can't see land.

And that just like feels

strange.

It feels so interesting to be like on this, you know, floating principality with a little casino in it.

When, I mean, that's why one of my favorite pieces is this Atlantic article on the sinking of the Estonia, which was a passenger ferry that sank in the Baltic Sea in 1994.

And just a description of like, it takes very little time for this sort of like piece of civilization to become claimed by the ocean.

And also it turned out, and we didn't know this for a very long time, but that it collided with a submarine.

And that was the reason that it sank.

Really?

Yeah.

And that was, I think, like a post-Cold War secret for a while.

And yeah, also the idea that you can be like, just

run into something giant with your boat had not even occurred to me to worry about.

So

this is how I feel.

I was talking to a pilot recently who was trying to explain to me how planes collide with each other in mid-air.

Because to me, I'm like, the air is so big.

There's so much of it.

It's so big.

Go around.

I know that's an incredibly ignorant way to see things.

But yeah, but if you don't understand something, you are like, surely we're safer than we are.

Yeah, so you can only see about two miles.

And sure enough, they're incredibly lucky.

Marilyn was right.

And they see a ship.

Marilyn.

And they start lighting flares.

And they light a flare.

It doesn't go off.

Oh, my God.

And it turns out their flares aren't working.

And the ship passes them.

Oh, God.

At the same time, they discover that four gallons of water that they have are contaminated with salt.

So they have to discard them.

Oh my god.

Days go by.

They don't see another ship.

They run out of gas for cooking so they can't heat up their canned food.

And they're out in the sun.

Their skin is getting weathered.

They're getting sores from the salt.

They don't know what to do.

They're going to run out of food.

They're just waiting for another ship to find them.

Now, there are turtles everywhere.

And here's the thing about turtles to Maurice and Maryland.

They're full of blood.

They're annoying.

The sea turtles are annoying them.

They're always in their way.

They're bumping on the bottom of the boats.

Like they're constantly being bumped by sea turtles.

And they're like, okay, if we're going to kill something, we might as well start with something annoying, I guess.

So they've been on the raft for 24 days.

It's March 28th.

And it's hard to do, but they kill a small turtle and they start fishing.

They don't have any fish hooks, but Maryland makes fish hooks out of safety pins.

And so they're able to start fishing.

They're running low on water, but they start drinking the liquid from fish eyeballs

and they eat the turtle blood, which congeals into a kind of a solid, jelly thing.

Huh.

Okay.

And they start doing this regularly.

They're getting into a new routine.

Marilyn is wrestling a turtle one day, and she has another idea because this turtle is really, really strong.

And Marilyn's like, Look, I understand that we can't row to the Galapagos,

but I bet

I bet if we harness this sea turtle,

it can pull us to the Galapagos.

Like some kind of sled dog.

Like some kind of sled dog.

So she catches a turtle, like a strong turtle.

She makes a harness out of rope.

Oh my gosh.

She puts it back in the water.

And sure enough, it immediately starts pulling them just in a straight line through the sea.

There's water streaming across its shell.

It's amazing.

It's completely working.

She's like, I solved it.

I solved it.

So she catches another turtle and she makes a harness for the other turtle too.

I would love to know what Maurice is thinking while this is happening, Brian.

Right.

He's like, thank God I asked her out that second time.

Also, how do you harness a turtle?

Because like, do they have shoulders really?

She wraps ropes around their flippers.

Okay.

I mean, I get that maybe this is not the ideal turtle harness, but it's a tough situation.

It's if you have to make do, you have to make do.

Yeah.

So she needs more power than just one turtle.

She catches another turtle.

She harnesses the second turtle.

She puts the second turtle in the ocean.

It immediately starts swimming in the opposite direction.

No.

They are a turtle tug of war.

And the whole thing falls apart because she cannot convince these two turtles to pull together.

They will only pull against each other.

So that plan fails.

Marilyn's on plan number eight at this point.

She's like, okay, the turtles aren't going to pull us.

We don't have turtle sled dogs, but I'm going to keep one as a pet.

She finds a cute turtle.

She makes a leash for it so it like swims around while she's fishing.

She totally has a turtle pet.

Now, this whole time, weeks and weeks are going by, Marilyn never questions that she and Maurice are going to survive.

There's this moment where they see a whale.

It surfaces right next to them.

And she says, oh, it's too bad that we don't.

have a camera.

We could take a picture because without a picture, no one will believe how close this whale came to us.

And Maurice is like, she's just assuming that we'll be telling people about this whale.

Like she never doubts.

And she, for what it's worth, she's religious, he's atheist.

So she's really leaning into like, this is how things are meant to be.

When a ship passes, she tells them, okay, well, it's not the ship that's meant to save us.

It couldn't have been the ship because this isn't the ship that's meant to rescue us.

Now, the thing about survival, in a lot of cases, and this is a great example of it, is that a lot of survival stories aren't super dramatic.

They're just about things getting worse and worse and worse.

They're about lowered expectations.

They're about lowered standards.

Something I think is interesting about survival stories is that there often isn't a lot that happens.

The tension is just time passing.

And survival itself is really tedious.

The amount of time it makes to procure water, to handle food, it's just the same thing again and again and again and again.

But it's gradually getting worse over time.

And that's what they're experiencing too.

So when it rains, first they need water.

They don't have enough water.

They're worried that they're going to be so dehydrated, they'll die of dehydration.

Then it rains and they're absolutely bombarded.

They aren't able to get dry at all.

Their skin starts sort of falling off in little strips.

They get sores all over.

They're losing a lot of weight.

Their skin is just wrapped over their bones.

Marilyn's hair is so tangled, it takes her a tremendous amount of time to untangle it every day, but she refuses to cut it.

She's like, I love my hair.

I'm going to have long hair.

It doesn't matter how much time I spend untangling it every day.

They see a fourth ship finally.

They've been drifting for however long.

They have no more flares.

Marilyn invents a smoke flare by burning paper in a turtle shell.

Ah!

And the ship turns around.

Oh my God.

But then it turns back again.

God.

It thought it saw something and then it turned and it sailed on its way.

And then they're like, that can't be a turtle shell flare.

I'm just hallucinating.

That couldn't possibly be a woman with long, beautiful beautiful hair burning a turtle shell.

At this point, they start being upset when they see a ship.

It's actually more upsetting to see a ship than not to see one because they just presume it's going to pass by.

But Marilyn is determined to keep them moving forward.

She makes playing cards out of paper from her journal.

It's so thin that they can see each other's hands.

Like

it's absolutely on our system because they can just see through the backs of each other's cards.

But she makes cards.

She makes them play games.

She starts designing their next boat on paper.

She's like, we're going to get a better boat.

And so they start arguing about the yacht they're going to have and the meals they're going to serve on it and which entrees should be served with which wine and the kinds of cakes they're going to eat.

And on April 24th, they've been at sea for seven weeks.

It's Marilyn's birthday.

And she has this kind of fish that she really likes.

It's become her favorite fish while they're out there.

And Maurice is like, I'm going to catch her favorite fish for her birthday.

And he tries to catch the fish.

He punctures the raft with a hook.

Oh, Maurice.

Oh, no.

Oh, my God.

Oh, no.

So now their raft is leaking.

Meanwhile, within like a few days, a spiky fish punctures the other raft.

So now both the life raft and the dinghy have holes and they're just constantly having to deal with the hole.

Like the rubber is sagging, air is escaping, water is getting in.

So then because the boats are sort of saggy, they're like pinching their skin and causing even deeper sores.

They can't sleep because they end up sort of like stuck in these crevices of deflating boat.

Like when you're on an air mattress.

Yeah, exactly.

Like picture the most uncomfortable air mattress you've ever slept on, but you're stuck on it.

And then you're covered in sores.

You're covered in sores.

And the ocean is around you.

There's birds just constantly landing next to them because birds at sea don't really have predators on land.

Like if they do land on an island, there's just rodents there,

not big mammals.

So they just land on the raft.

Like they think it's a cool place to land.

And so then, you know, Marilyn and Maurice just sort of wring their necks and eat them.

Like Lake Lively should have done in the shallows.

There you go.

Exactly.

That's what I was going to say.

One time a seabird lands there and just like starts regurgitating fish.

Oh, that's convenient.

Six or seven fish.

So they eat the fish.

They don't need to eat the bird.

Now, here's a question that I feel like is occurring to listeners it's certainly occurring to me and i wonder if you have any insight about it which is that like you know i mean i'm like i'll eat a lot of stuff but we all have limits generally nearly everyone does and i feel like if you were to give me a plate

of fish that had just been regurgitated by a seagull like today i feel like i would have a hard time eating it But in a survival situation, I certainly like to think that I would get over myself.

But like, is that, do you think that's a matter of hunger that enables you to do that?

What do you think that's like?

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

If you're very hungry, your standards change.

Right.

When I did Naked and Afraid and I hadn't eaten for like two weeks, I started salivating when I saw large mammals walk by,

which is definitely not a thing that occurs to me in my normal life.

Yeah, I know you pretty well.

You don't do that, you know, at home.

I really, really don't.

I really don't.

But I was like, oh, I see, I see how this happened.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, which is good because you don't want your body to reject nutrition when it needs it.

But it's interesting that we develop such different standards so quickly.

I think it changes really, really fast.

I mean, relatively speaking, I think it changes very fast.

Yeah.

Now, the dinghy and the raft are getting barnacles all over them.

Oh, God.

Right.

So then fish are constantly trying to eat the barnacles.

So there's fish bumping on the bottom of the raft all the time.

But then sharks and dolphins are trying to eat the fish.

So then there's sharks and dolphins bumping on the raft all the time.

And they are just like constantly pumping at this point, pumping water out every 20 minutes, all day and night.

So they're going through the torture of sleep deprivation.

I mean,

neither of them can sleep more than 20 minutes at a time.

The sores are getting really deep, going down to the bone.

There's constantly waves pouring over the side.

They get diarrhea.

They had a little bit of fresh water stored in their containers, but it sort of spoils.

Like somehow the plastic of the containers has some sort of reaction and it turns the water green and chemically and they can't drink it.

And Maurice starts to get some sort of lung condition.

He's coughing constantly.

At one point, he coughs up a big chunk of something of like flesh that he believes to be part of his lung.

Oh, God.

Oh, if you hear grunting next to me, it's just a sled dog.

Yep.

We love to hear it.

I feel like they have, in a way, become like, because they can't, it seems like they have, you know, very, very little effect over what direction they're traveling in and have kind of maybe at this point given up on expending the energy to try and row it all.

They've kind of, they've just become like the inhabitants of a piece of ocean trash that's like getting covered in barnacles and just sort of like drifting through the ocean, but it has people on it this time.

Like they've become like a passive part of the ecosystem and animals are like not afraid of them, but also just like gonna just bother them.

I don't know, it's just kind of incredible to think about and also very scary.

So, Sarah, I want to show you an image that I found while researching this.

Oh, boy.

And I want you to describe it for listeners.

Yeah.

Now, we can bring up the different ways that survival stories are portrayed,

but here's an example of one of the ways this story has been portrayed.

I'm sending you a link.

Okay.

So, open this, scroll down to the bottom, and describe what you see.

It is like a beautifully, it looks like watercolor, like a raft with a canopy over it.

And this bedraggled but smiley couple with torn clothes are like leaning their heads together and smiling.

And there's turtles in the ocean smiling at them.

There's like...

what literally looks like a parent and a baby hammerhead shark smiling just like

this is nice Like all the creatures in the ocean are like, yeah, we like these guys.

There's a caption that refers to them becoming sea creatures themselves.

So this is a highly idealized version of what's going on with them.

Yeah, hammerhead sharks nearly never smile, I would think.

Just don't have the muscles for it.

There's stingrays smiling, there's octopuses smiling at them.

It just, this is, it's like a Garden of Eden style illustration.

Yeah, totally.

This is on a website for a company that you can pay for them to strand you on a deserted island.

Oh.

They're like, see, it'll be like that.

Which I totally want to do.

But anyway,

okay, we can remove that.

Oh, hello, sir.

I have a dog near me.

Anyway, Maurice is coughing a part of his lung.

They have sores down to their bones.

They're constantly.

He's like, I'm going to get sores down to my bones if you don't pay attention to me right now.

Wait, what's that?

Oh, whoa, whoa.

Excuse me.

I'm being paged by a dog.

I'll be right back.

Let me let that dog out.

Okay.

Okay, the dog has been freed.

So, Maurice, at this point, he starts like passing out of consciousness for long periods of time.

Marilyn's doing all the fishing.

She feeds him little bits of fish, just sort of trying to keep him alive, taking care of him, dressing his wounds, helping him go to the bathroom, everything he needs.

When she's not doing everything to keep them both alive, she is doodling cats

and designing dresses in her journal.

I'm very glad she's got her journal.

And it was a little bit hard.

I found, you know, I was trying to read her journal.

I couldn't read all of her handwriting, but she's like describing outfits.

So, for instance, here's some of her notes.

Paneled, tailored, camel color, long skirt, wear all brown or green blouse, two pockets, navy skirt.

Skirt and jeans are similar, but in brown denim.

Brown and pink paisley, approximately five yards.

Yes.

I love that she's designing brown and pink paisley outfits while she's out there.

I know, that's so good.

Yeah, because you want to feel pretty when you come back from trying to harness yourself to the turtles.

So I want to read you, there was one thing that struck me most about this story, and in particular, Sophie Elmhurst's book about it.

And I want to read you a paragraph that I wrote in the review.

Yeah.

Survival stories are rarely about women, and even less often do they recognize traditionally female tasks as the actual work of survival, not decorations of life, but the fight for life at its most essential.

Between stints at fishing, bailing out the raft, smothering seabirds with a towel, and cleaning Maurice's seeping wounds, Marilyn plans dinner party menus, doodles cats, designs dresses she wants to sew, brown and pink paisley with straight long sleeves, and crafts playing cards out of thin paper.

She kills and skins a shark with pearly skin, planning to make a purse.

She serves as indisputable captain of the lifeboat.

To his credit, sort of, Maurice recognizes her skill, though in his writings he still paints himself as the active decision-maker, conferring the favor of responsibility.

I saw that she was stronger and more capable than I was, he wrote, and I sat back and was prepared to let her take over, and she did.

I think it's so interesting to see Marilyn Maurice in this situation.

And part of her buoyancy, part of what is keeping her alive, is her dedication to things that are would be sort of smeared or dismissed as female.

She's designing dinner parties.

She's working on her hair, making sure that her hair is untangled.

She's planning dresses.

She's doodling cats.

She's making games.

She's like decorating things.

These are things that are dismissed as not survival skills.

And this is a case that so clearly positions her.

It is indisputable that she's the one surviving for both of them.

And I think that these things she does that are traditionally female, they're not contradictions to that.

They're part of why she's able to keep them both alive.

And so part of what I love about Sophie Elmhurst's book, she isn't super explicit about this, but it really rose to the surface for me, is how much she gives attention to these traditionally female tasks that Marilyn's engaging in.

And I feel like there's this, and I'm sure we talked about this before because we're always talking about gender and the wilderness story, but this, I think, bias in sort of like

at least, you know, British and North American literature and sort of survival stories and narratives of masculinity that like the ocean or the forest or just like nature generally the mountain like that these are places where you go to like have the feminine stripped out of you you know it's like the whole call of the wild thing and that the wild that is calling is like very manly and you can't be a city dog

anymore um and so it feels like there's i don't know that just from kind of like young adult books i remember reading that like there comes a time in a lot of these stories at least fictionally, where like, you cut your hair off short as a boy's and you realize that you feel better now and you don't care.

And it's like, some of us care so much about our hair.

And that's not like, that doesn't have to be an impediment to survival.

And in fact, I don't know that what this shows in so many ways that like.

It doesn't depict it that, you know, she isn't it nuts that she was such an accomplished survivalist and also was wanted to make a pink and brown Paisley dress.

And it's like, no, she was good at surviving because she wanted to make that dress and was thinking about it and was thinking about the future that she wanted to live for and doing housekeeping on a life raft, basically.

Right.

Survival isn't masculine.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But I think people think that it is.

I think I even deep down still think that it is.

You know, it's just like in there is what I feel like the, I don't know, the narratives that we learn really want it to be.

I think Marilyn's actions really

make clear the absurdity of the idea that toughness and femininity are contradictions.

Yeah.

But that's an idea that serves the patriarchy, right?

It's insidious.

It digs deep.

I mean, I think about the times when, let's see, when I was,

I guess I was 19 and I first started working as a dog sleigh guide in Alaska.

And I was living on a glacier.

And one of the first things that I did on my day off was go to Salvation Army and buy all men's clothing because I knew I wasn't going to be taken seriously.

I could just feel that I couldn't be wearing the women's clothing I was wearing.

And I had to buy men's car hearts.

I had to buy men's coats.

And then I was able to sort of be treated a little bit more human.

And that was shocking to me, but I felt it very deeply.

I needed Marilyn.

Yeah.

Right.

I mean, we, we all do.

I think that's why I'm so attached

to My Side of the Mountain, which is a book that so many people read growing up and bring up to you and that I feel like has piece so many people have asked you about that you feel like you've read at this point.

And where it's about like an adolescent boy, but where,

and this is by Jean Craig Hedgorg, who also wrote Julie of the Wolves, which is about a girl, but is obviously,

you know,

like a very sad book for many reasons.

And My Side of the Mountain is about like hollowing out a tree to live in and then like making a little stove out of a can so that you can make blueberry pancakes with the blueberries that you picked and training a falcon to hunt for you and this idea of like, I guess in a kind of Therovian way, like going to the woods so that you can live well

and like looking for the life that you want out there.

And because I feel like it seems like a big,

a core part of at least toxic masculinity is that toughness involves suffering on purpose.

And it's like, actually, if you suffer on purpose, you have less energy for helping other people, which arguably is weak.

Like you've used, you've expended, I don't know, it's like how there's kind of, it's sort of a meme, I think, lately for people to talk about.

Like, you know, David Goggins is like this ultra marathoner that insoles are obsessed with because it's about like run 300 miles at a time and do the Navy SEAL exercise plan and run like a half marathon and eat a single banana every morning before work.

And it's like, but this guy like isn't parenting his kids.

It's like, you know what's hard to do?

Being a parent, like just do that.

You don't have to run 300 miles or you could like do some parenting and then have a shorter run.

Just do a 5K for God's sake.

Get a jogging stroller.

Get a jogging stroller.

No, that's toughness.

I read so many survival books growing up and they were pretty much all about boys.

We talked about this a lot in the Banana Island episode.

Yeah, which I love.

But one of the book that I'm working on now that I'm really excited about is a chapter book for kids that's a survival book featuring a girl or starring a girl.

It's like the very book that I wanted when I was growing up.

It's the book I wanted too.

Yeah.

A girl and a dog.

I mean anyway, okay.

Now, Maurice said in an interview after this was all over, If there had been two men there in that life raft, we wouldn't have been able to survive.

It's just that Marilyn was able to sustain the will to live.

That's what females of the species usually do.

Very British way of saying that.

Tally hoe, off to put on shorts and boots.

Have we ever talked about the Alfred Hitchcock movie Lifeboat?

No.

It's very good.

It's, I mean, Alfred Hitchcock made like 60 movies, I think.

So it's like very easy to end up on the long list.

But it was like,

I think it didn't do super well because it was just like quite a downer, but it's about a group of people who are on a lifeboat during World War II that's been torpedoed by Nazis, and then they actually like fish a Nazi out of the water and have to figure out what to do about that.

But one of the, you know, it has this cast of like 12 characters and you kind of are thinking at the beginning, kind of based on your assumptions as a person and a viewer, who you think is going to make it the longest.

And the person who like keeps it together the most and is the most emotionally strong throughout the movie and who has this tension with the sort of like man's man who's trying to take the captain role is this journalist played by Tallulah Bankhead, who's wearing a fur coat when we first meet her, and who's just, you know, she's Tallulah Bankhead.

She's very glamorous, but I feel like that's, I don't know, for what it's worth, another entry in the feminism and the art of survival story that we're telling.

Feminism and femininity, more to the point.

There's some overlap.

Yeah.

What do you think of that statement by Maurice that if there had been two men, they wouldn't have made it?

I want to be careful how I phrase this.

I think he's blaming a little bit of his incompetence on his gender.

Like some men would have made it, obviously.

Yeah.

There's some women who wouldn't have.

Yeah.

Or like maybe not giving enough credit to her character.

It's a little bit like, oh,

it's not my fault that I gave up.

It's because I'm a man.

Yeah.

Like I, I appreciate that he's giving credit to women and I appreciate that he's giving credit to Marilyn, but it is a little bit like, oh, she did it because she's a woman and not because she's an extraordinary human being.

Right.

Because I mean, that, the degree of mental toughness that it takes to continue to plan for the future day after day and week after week, I think is, is, I don't know how rare that is because most of us never find out if we have it.

I think she's exceptional.

I think she's at the far extreme.

There's people who would have made it, but without the incredible will to live that she had.

Yeah.

They would have made it at least part of the time.

Yeah.

At some point she would have outlived them.

Yeah.

But it also feels like almost like a parable, not to, because I don't know, because you don't want to make real events into metaphors because primarily they just are the thing that happened.

But it does make me think about just like living with long-term depression or something like that, where it's just like, it just continues and you can't lay back and let it happen to you because it's what's happening and that kind of every little thing you do and every cat that you draw is actually you very bravely fighting against this entropy that you're living in.

Yeah.

I mean, getting through depression is survival too.

If someone's drawing it and manages to draw a cat in a day, then they're

doing what Marilyn did.

Like if that's very hard and you do it, that's a huge triumph.

Right.

And that anything that connects you to life and hope is pretty much by definition, not a waste of time, you know, unless it's like a great caloric expenditure you know if you're in a lifeboat but if you're at home you can just go to mcdonald's after so there you go

so summer rolls around day after day things are i mean it's just

the sores get deeper they get hungrier they're thinner their legs can't support them summer on the open ocean what a time love it what a time their legs can't support them anymore oh my god uh their muscles are too atrophied uh they get stuck in storms where the waves are so tall that they block out the sun Oh my God.

It feels like they could have and maybe should have died like many, many times, right?

That if you're covered in sores, then like it seems like the odds of neither of them just like developing a horrible infection that way.

Like it seems like there are many things that could easily have killed them at this point.

I mean, the difference between the people who have been in wilderness survival situations, who we celebrate, who made it out alive, and the people who survived a long time and ended up is often pure luck.

Yeah.

But we ascribe so much glamour and resilience to some of them.

And then it's like, even after you cut your own arm off, you better hope there's tourists hanging out like pretty close by.

You better.

I always think that's so interesting.

Like someone could survive 200 days in a life raft and it wouldn't be seen as a success story if they didn't make it out alive.

They wouldn't be seen necessarily as an inspiration.

I mean, it would ultimately be a failure.

And as I say this, I'm like, okay, yeah, they died.

Their goal was not to die, but it doesn't mean anything less about their character.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And also, I guess that people who last any length of time in a survival situation and are able to,

I don't know, to just share something with each other

in the way of just having a relationship where you still remember what day your wife's birthday is and you still are kind of sharing some kind of warmth of human hope and compassion with each other to the end, even if you don't like it, that that deserves to be celebrated too, I think.

On June 30th, they've been at sea for 118 days.

Maurice is unconscious, and Marilyn sees a ship.

They haven't seen a ship in 43 days, and she can't wake up Maurice.

She's unable to get him to stir.

But the ship is getting closer and closer, and she starts to think it actually sees them.

And suddenly she sees people on deck.

calling to them.

And it turns out it's a South Korean tuna fishing ship.

It just spent two years in the Atlantic.

What?

It's now heading back to Korea.

They drop down a rope ladder.

It's real.

They're being rescued.

Oh, my God.

Before she climbs the rope ladder, Marilyn sets their pets free because she had the

collection of pets.

They set them free.

The crew brings them up on deck.

They have to crawl because they can't walk.

Their legs are just too weak now.

And so they sit on a blanket and they drink milk.

And Marie says to Marilyn, we made it.

And Marilyn says, now for Oralin 2.

Marilyn, you have a lot of dresses to make.

You should just do that for a while.

And sure enough, that is what they do.

Back in England, they sell the rights to their story to buy a new boat.

Perfect.

They call it Oralyn 2.

The press is all over them, of course.

Now, At first, it is reported incorrectly that they were at sea for 117 days.

So their book is called 117 Days Adrift, even though it was 118.

It's just like PR recognition.

You know, 117 was the number they committed to in their stories.

It kind of sounds better, possibly.

It's got a nice meter.

Now, predictably, the media really focuses on Maurice as the hero of the story.

He continually tries to give all the credit to Marilyn.

Yeah.

He's just repeatedly like, Marilyn got us through.

It was all Marilyn.

She did everything.

He's just singing her praises constantly, like trying to express to people how much she did, how much she, as their captain, saved them both and kept them alive.

But, you know, he can't fight against all the sexism of the world.

Here's a line from the book of Marriage at Sea.

Another journalist asked if Marilyn would follow her husband to sea again.

Follow her husband.

Quote, the small brunette said, of course, reported the Korea Times.

We're like, what size is this woman?

Is she little?

We got to hear her.

She's sure small small now.

Oh, God.

Yeah, it is because they reveal so much in just kind of like news articles throughout history where they're like, here's the only way we know how to communicate something, even if it's in fact inaccurate.

It's interesting, too, because, of course, based on Brandy, you're a fine girl.

A sailor's life, love, and lady is the sea.

And you never hear the sea referred to as like,

I don't know, a sexy man that your wife is gonna run off into.

I'm here, I'm here for that framing.

I think the sea can have however many genders we want to give it, it's big enough,

Sarah.

I think the sea is gender fluid.

Yeah,

sorry,

it couldn't

play her off.

Um, they continue, they continue sailing the world on the Oral and II.

Marilyn dies in 2002 at the age of 61.

Maurice lived another 20 years, basically.

They were lifelong vegetarians after this.

And he just spent the rest of his life in love with her and telling everyone how wonderful she was.

He was pretty lonely at the end, but he was writing letters about her and just

sharing the story and trying to celebrate everything they'd done.

So they were just lifelong soulmates.

And that was a tiny part of their lives in the the scheme of things.

That's fantastic.

God.

So, okay, here's a question that occurs to me.

And I feel like the answer seems like it should be obvious, but I can't think of it.

So, of course, you have to tell us, which is, because one of the things that kind of sticks in my mind, in a lot of people's minds about Ocean Gate, the Titanic submersible, is that Stockton Rush, the founder of this company, who, you know, was just like

not trying very hard to make a submersible that wouldn't implode at some point, it would seem, was famously like, well, I don't want to die and I'm not going to.

I'm paraphrasing, but not by much, where it was just, it's that sort of like, I don't know, like, I think something we're all very familiar with at this point, because we have to be the sort of like American CEO billionaire stupidity of like, reality is what I say it has to be, and I'm not going to die if I don't consent to it.

And it's like, okay, well, guess what?

And then the sort of like different kind of stubbornness of like, well, who knows what she felt in her deepest thoughts, but at least outwardly, like never suggesting that you don't think that you're going to make it in a situation like this.

Like, how do you determine or what do you see as the difference between those demeanors?

Oh, that's interesting.

I mean, I think the biggest difference is that once the Oralyn sank, of course, everything Marilyn

did was designed to keep them more safe, not less safe.

As opposed to intentionally seeing how dangerous she could make things just like for fun.

I mean, they did go to sea, so

I'm not saying, okay, they weren't locked in a padded box.

I think if you have the need to brag about it,

it's probably a sign.

Then it becomes more of a performance.

It's about like you want people to think that you won't die.

That's a good question.

I don't think that Marilyn intended to stay alive because because of her ego in any way.

Or if she did, it certainly

didn't come through in her journal or anything like that.

Yeah.

Well, and I feel like there's like in what you're describing to me, it feels like sort of a daily practice and like a work that you do in this case, where you wake up every morning and believe in the future and try and create a better quality of life for yourself and the person you're trying to survive with and do what you can to share that hope with them.

And also, I don't know, something I think about a lot with survival and with the shows that we've done is

it seems, you know,

it seems like the main thing is just luck.

And then maybe the next thing is preparedness.

But somewhere, as far as I can tell in the rankings of level of importance, I mean, we were

talking recently about Oregon Trail, like the 90s computer game and how what you remembered, which was like, it doesn't really matter what choices you make as long as you just start off as a banker.

Yeah, I remember the version I played at least.

You could start out as a farmer or a doctor.

Like if you were a doctor, you

were able to heal your wagon party if they got sick.

If you were, you know, a carpenter, you were able to fix your wagon.

There were all these little benefits you could get.

But none of them allowed you to do as well in the game as if you just started as a banker with no skills, but a fat lot of money and you're never going to run out of money when it's time to take the ferry and you're going to be able to make you know good wagon choices yeah and that's it's a very instructive game for that and many other reasons um and also don't shoot too many buffalo even though they make a cool sound when they fall over don't do it um But I feel like one of the things that seems most important to survival, as far as I can tell, is the ability to assimilate new information and like deal with it and deal with the situation that that you're in.

Because I think that at least the kind of like if you were to call Stockton Rush the Ocean Gate guy optimistic, it would be in the sense of like complete denial of reality, you know, which is kind of the political moment we're into, where it's like, wow, we're in a dire situation, but what if we ignored it?

And what if we based an entire ideology on ignoring it?

And what if we refuse reality and pretend it can't hurt us that way and how that might make you feel better momentarily, but really it's not increasing your chances of survival.

And in fact, it's decreasing your chances because you are not allowing yourself to make any kind of realistic judgment of what your chances are.

Whereas if you're able to accurately assess where you are and what the situation is, and for example, to say, like, well, like, I choose to survive and I believe that I will survive and I have faith that I'll survive, but I have this many ounces of water and that'll get me through this many days.

And when I don't have it, I'm going to have to drink turtle blood.

That feels like, I don't know, like a humility too, in the face of just facts, which I mean, we really shouldn't see empirical thinking as like rare and impressive, but maybe it always has been and always will be.

And just the ability, I don't know, the sense of self that allows you to believe in your own capacity to survive, but also not do so only because you're lying to yourself about what the situation is.

I mean, you have to live in the situation you're in and not the situation you want to be in.

Yeah.

And I think that acceptance is one of the hardest things that people can do.

Yeah.

I'm curious, Sarah, as I was reading this, I kept thinking, it's very clear what Maurice is getting from Marilyn.

What is Marilyn getting from Maurice?

I mean, I think that there has to be something nice about being in a relationship with somebody who you get to bring into a life that takes a shape they never imagined for themselves.

And also maybe he's funny.

He might be funny.

He might be really charming.

I did watch some video interviews with him and he was very sweet.

He seemed very sweet.

Yeah.

It's also, I feel like the nice thing about happy couples is that they just don't talk too much about it.

So like, you often don't know what their deal is because they just are like busy doing it, you know, whereas like, you know, if you have like like

the most obvious counterexample I can think of is Rachel Hollis who like had a marriage advice podcast with her husband up until the day they were like we're getting divorced JK

you should stop taking advice from us right now

I don't know, but I think that like there, I think that there are many different kinds of relationships in your life.

And there are a lot of like more casual relationships or just acquaintanceships or somebody who like you get together when you're in town and you have dinner and you have a great time where like not every relationship in your life needs to be with somebody who you could be in a lifeboat with but i do feel like the people who you're closest to like to me it's a helpful question like do i want to be in a lifeboat with this person you know because if i had to answer that question about you like absolutely yes and not just because you're a survivalist and not just because of your skill set, but because you're fun and because we would have fun.

We would like reminisce about the stuff we did on the lifeboat, even if it got really horrible, I think.

Well, Maurice later said, toward the end of his life, he said that if he knew that he was going to be rescued again four months in,

if he knew that he was going to survive at the end of it, he would do it again.

He learned enough from the experience.

And there were so many beautiful moments that he would go through all of it again just for the experience.

Yeah.

And just to share it with Marilyn.

This also reminds me of the Andes survival story, the Miracle in the Andes episode that we did.

Because it seems like,

again, you know, that luck was a big part of it and just sort of happenstance, but also that everyone could have died so many times, but that there was this camaraderie that kept them going.

Yeah, it's about people.

It's about who you're with.

I think,

I mean, a good companion is the best survival tool you could have.

Oh, gosh.

Yeah.

There's nothing you should trade for that.

Yeah.

And if you can catch a shark, you should try and make a purse out of it.

If you see a shark circling your boat, you should think purse.

So that didn't work out because she caught the pearly shark.

She skinned it.

And then when the skin dried, it stopped being pearly.

No.

And that's why we don't have shark purses.

I really hope she got a pearly purse somehow after that.

I actually really want to try to recreate the dresses.

Yeah.

Not recreate.

I want to create the dresses that she designed.

I want you to too.

Like use her notes and have a Marilyn Bailey dress made of five yards of pink and brown Paisley.

I think she would look great in a pink and brown Paisley dress with straight sleeves and maybe like kind of a boat neck.

I don't even mean that as a pun.

I just thought it was a fix.

I'm going to wear it next time I see you.

Good.

If you want to know more about this story, the book A Marriage at Sea, Sophie Elmhurst, it is so beautiful.

It tells the story in way, way more detail than anything I've said here.

It's gorgeously reported.

It's also just spectacularly written.

The book is not spoiled for you just because you've heard this podcast.

In fact, you might appreciate it more.

Oh, yeah.

The last of the summer reading.

It's not too late.

And then there's fall reading and then winter reading.

Really good for any season.

Curl up by the fire with A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhurst.

And And then you have a survival book, by the way, Small Game by Blair Braverman.

I do have a survival book, Small Game.

It's a novel.

And I also have my very first kids' book is coming out this fall in October.

So if you're listening to this before it comes out in late October, you can pre-order it and it'll show up at your door.

But you may be listening to this once it's out.

It's called The Day Leap Sword, and it's about sled dogs.

It's about a sled dog sort of learning about running with the team and what she has to give the team.

It's about self-esteem.

It's about teamwork.

So it's about real dogs who I've worked with.

And it is so beautifully illustrated by Olivia Wynn.

She made paintings for every single page.

I'm obsessed with it.

So

yeah, it's my first kid's book.

I'm really excited.

And if you have any kids in your life or if you just love you know, beautifully illustrated books, I'd love it if you'd pick up a copy or have your library order it.

I'm so excited for this book.

And I also feel like, I feel like you're entering the era of writing the books that you needed when you were growing up and that a lot of kids need now.

And I'm so happy you're doing it.

I'm excited about that era for me.

I think that's what we all do.

I think that's what a lot of writers do, at least.

Yeah.

And I'm a dog slitter.

I'm an adventurer.

And I'm a keynote speaker.

So you can bring me to your events and I will talk about resilience and teamwork and use exciting stories to sort of give examples of things we can all be learning from the wilderness.

So I hope to encounter some of you.

Yeah.

And there's, I don't know, I feel like the more we talk about survival stories, the more it feels so much more relevant to everyday life than most people give themselves credit for.

And I'm just so happy to get to keep bringing you back for the survival beat.

Oh, thank you, Sarah.

That's something I will never stop.

That's my sort of annoying thing that I preach is that survival is not relegated to the wilderness.

It's something that everyone's doing at all times.

And these wilderness stories are just a way of sort of distilling it into a pure form that allows us to look at it a little bit more clearly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And these stories are for all of us.

They are.

And we're going to have a bonus episode with you soon where we had Patreon supporters ask you their survival questions.

I'm really excited to record that.

And as I predicted, 10% of the questions are about: should I drink my own urine?

Should I or shouldn't I?

And I still don't know and I can't wait to find out.

So everybody, listen to that if you want to know too.

Tune in.

I made a Google Doc of those questions for you and I was so pleased with two of the different titles I chose for the urine questions section that I couldn't pick one.

And so I put in both.

And so you'll notice that the section is called Potent Potables

slash Urine Trouble.

So look out for that on Patreon and Apple Plus subscriptions.

Is that going to be the name of the episode?

It can be, yeah.

Please.

You're in trouble.

No, I'm in trouble.

Anyway, I'll see myself out.

I love you, Sarah.

I love you, Blae.

This was so good.

And that was our episode.

Thank you so much for listening.

I hope at least one of you is in a corn maze right now.

Thank you to Miranda Zickler for producing and editing this show.

If you want to learn more about Marilyn and Maurice, please check out Sophie Elmhurst's A Marriage at Sea.

Thank you so much to Blair Braverman for joining us on this episode, for sharing her stories and her wisdom.

And thank you, also, Blair, for writing your debut children's book, The Day Leap Sword, at October 21st.

We'll see you next time.