773: The Longest Distance Between Two Points

Ira Glass

Cassidy's 10, fifth grade. At the end of the school year, he's one of the talented extroverts singing in front of everybody, parents and kids, with his band.

Ira Glass

OK, but here's something that's hard for him-- reading. He'll be OK for stretches, when he already knows the words.

Ira Glass

But he has dyslexia. So reading an unfamiliar word, he has to decode it.

Ira Glass

Thinking of the word "bed" is a way to keep B's and D's straight. This is actually one of the toughest things for Cassidy to learn, B's and D's, when they're not capitalized.

Ira Glass

So there's this trick that lots of people with dyslexia are taught. They picture the word "bed," which, if you think about it, kind of looks like a bed. The posts of the B and the D are like the footboard and the headboard of the bed. And then the E is kind of the mattress.

Ira Glass

There are so many little rules and tricks like this that some kids with dyslexia use. They have all kinds of names-- the fizzle rule, the floss rule, short vowel protectors, welded sounds. These are the rules of the English language that most of us somehow absorb, but we are not aware of-- the mechanics of when to use a long vowel or a short vowel, when G or G-H are silent. They learn dozens of these and then wield them like tools, one after another, to decode how our words should sound.

Ira Glass

Anyway, back to decoding this word.

Ira Glass

Which, by the way, the word he's trying to read is "devastating."

Ira Glass

He tries breaking the word down syllable by syllable, like his teacher taught him. Explains one part of the word is a CVC-- consonant, vowel, consonant. He looks for parts of the word that he recognizes.

Ira Glass

Later, I asked his teacher, what rule might have gotten him there? And she said, magic E. If you recognize that the ING in "devastating" might have been replacing an E on the end of the word, that final E would have told him how to pronounce the tate in "devastate." So many rules to remember and, irritatingly, so many exceptions to the rules you have to memorize.

Ira Glass

And so Cassidy is in this situation where things that seem to come so easily to other kids, he has to work so much harder at. Kids like him can become as fluent in reading as anybody else, but it's like, to go to the mile that other kids go, they go 10 miles and need every navigation tool and touch every blade of grass along the way before they get there. Other kids really don't understand this.

Ira Glass

Well, today, on our program, we have people like Cassidy who have to take the long road to get to a place that other people get to more quickly. It takes them more time. It's more effort. But the thing about doing it that way, you don't take anything for granted. You see so much more than other people do. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, "Voter Reformed." So Mississippi is one of a small number of states where something like a robbery conviction can cost you your right to vote. Even after you get out of prison, even after you complete your parole, pay all your fines, all that, you still can't vote.

Mississippi is unusual in that regard. Most states do not permanently take away a person's right to vote. And if they do, it's usually just for crimes like rape or murder. But in Mississippi, there is one way-- one long, winding path that people can take that will let them vote again. This is the path that most states do not offer. Johnny Kauffman explains.

Johnny Kauffman

When I first learned about this, I was a little baffled. To get your voting rights back, you have to get your own personal bill passed by the state legislature. These bills-- they're called suffrage bills-- are just one page with your name, your conviction, and a line about being a, quote, "honorable citizen," kind of your own personal law giving you permission to vote. The bills have to go through committees and pass the House and Senate, all that stuff. And we'll get to that.

But the thing to know in general about this is, it's pretty hard to pass any bill, ever, about anything. So this is pretty hard. And the people that try, they tend to really care about voting, like this man, Gerald Laird. One of the main reasons he really wants to be able to vote again, the thing that drives him kind of crazy--

Johnny Kauffman

--local school board. He talked for almost 10 minutes about it, how they closed the high school.

Johnny Kauffman

And the school board members, he says, OK, they have credentials, but no real experience with education.

Johnny Kauffman

Gerald lives an hour south of Jackson, Mississippi's capital, where he helps run the family business, a funeral home. Gerald told me he's an introvert, but he also said he's the person at church who will stand up and tell the deacon to get closer to the microphone. Gerald's the guy who sits in the back and records the service.

He's pretty open about, well, pretty much everything, including how he lost his right to vote. He robbed a bank back in 2002. He told me he was grappling with drug addiction, relapsed, and bought cocaine from a guy. It was that guy's idea.

Johnny Kauffman

He wasn't wearing a mask. He didn't even know what was on the note.

Johnny Kauffman

They got caught the same day. At first, he was charged with armed robbery. But then the prosecutor looked at the security footage and realized he didn't have a weapon.

Johnny Kauffman

These days, Gerald watches after his mom and his uncle, who owns the funeral home. He's been out of jail for 16 years. He doesn't see any reason why he shouldn't be able to vote. Gerald started on this long, strange journey to get back his right to vote one day in church. A friend told him about the suffrage bills.

So he decided to try. He filled out a form. A non-profit in Jackson passed it on to a state representative, who introduced his bill. Gerald hadn't actually seen it when we met, but I had a copy with me. It was wild for him to see it, House Bill 1721, an act to restore the right of suffrage to Gerald Laird of Jefferson Davis County, Mississippi.

Johnny Kauffman

To be clear, this bill hadn't passed. But just to see what could happen, there on the page--

Johnny Kauffman

This year, Gerald was one of 23 people who got bills introduced, hoping to get the right to vote back. I tried to talk to as many as I could. It was a pretty determined group-- a dad and tool factory worker who had been on a union board; an older man who was sick in bed, used to be a county supervisor; and a guy who worked at a mental hospital. He showed me a news clipping about how his father was shot and nearly killed trying to register people to vote.

There's something like 44,000 people in Mississippi who can't vote because of a conviction. A disproportionate percentage, 60%, are Black, in a state that's 38% Black. Gerald is Black. So is Nsombi Lambright-Haynes. She's the person who took the form Gerald filled out and gave it to a legislator who introduced the bill. She helps a lot of people do this.

Johnny Kauffman

A joke because a bill can die with no explanation. There's nothing on any government website telling you how to get your vote back, even finding out when the bills are discussed.

Johnny Kauffman

Fortunately, when Nsombi stalks people, they like her. She's fun to talk to. They answer her texts. Nsombi was head of the Mississippi ACLU for nearly a decade. Now she leads a nonprofit called One Voice. The office is in an old Masonic building that the civil rights activist Medgar Evers used to work out of. Nsombi seems busy all the time. A friend gave her this mug once that says, "Fuck it. I'll do it." And this is one of those things. She's got lots of other stuff, but she makes time for these bills-- been doing it for over a decade.

The lifetime voting ban is enshrined in the Mississippi constitution. And the history of how it ended up there is pretty well documented and revealing. It starts after the Civil War. Black people could finally vote, and they were putting people in office, including the first Black US senator, Hiram Rhodes Revels.

But there was backlash. In 1890, white leaders like Senator James George said the state needed to hold a convention to write a new constitution. George said the new census was going to show there were more Black people than whites in Mississippi. And the goal of the convention should be to make sure whites controlled the government.

The president of the convention was a man named Solomon Calhoun, who said, quote, "Negro suffrage is an evil, and an evil to both races." In his opening speech at the convention, he said the voting scheme should be arranged to keep white people in power. They decided on a few things. There was a poll tax and this really vague test called the understanding clause that said a voter had to be able to interpret part of the constitution. One newspaper called it a gigantic fraud. Then there was the part of the new constitution about crime and voting.

Johnny Kauffman

I talked to two historians who said the list was clearly meant to target Black people, crimes delegates at the convention thought Black people would be more likely to commit. And the novel idea that you could get your rights back if you get a bill through the legislature with your name on it, that was also in the 1890 constitution.

Historians don't know much about how it ended up in there. Maybe they were trying to keep the governor from gaining too much power. Or maybe they wanted a way to help their white friends and family if they happened to commit one of the crimes on the list. Whatever it was, this last chance is still there for anyone who wants to try. But most people don't even know about it.

Gerald's journey began where all epic journeys begin-- the subcommittee of the House Judiciary B Committee. Gerald wanted to be there when they discussed his bill-- which, it turns out, is difficult to do because you don't know when the heck they're meeting. Even the legislators don't know sometimes.

I managed to get the phone number of the lawmaker who chairs the committee, but it wasn't until the day before that he let me know when it was going to happen. Gerald wasn't going to be able to make it. He couldn't find anyone to cover for him at the funeral home. I visited him the night before. We sat in his living room.

Johnny Kauffman

It seemed like Gerald's bill stood a chance of passing. Sometimes the bill fails because the person has an unpaid fine they don't know about or because they only recently finished their sentence. Those weren't problems for Gerald. I told him I'd let him know how it went.

I went to the hearing the next day. Six state representatives, all but one of them white, sat around a couple of folding tables in a big committee room that was mostly empty. Off to the side, a red plastic coffee dispenser with Styrofoam cups. The legislators had background checks in front of them for everyone with a suffrage bill. Only like three other people were in the room. I set a microphone on the table.

Johnny Kauffman

This is Representative Noah Sanford. They went through suffrage bills. The first bill passed. So did the next one. There wasn't really any discussion. Then Gerald's came up.

Johnny Kauffman

Sanford read through the bill.

Johnny Kauffman

House Bill 1721, Gerald's bill, made it out of the committee. The next day, it went to the full House for a vote.

Johnny Kauffman

For a suffrage bill to pass, it takes more than a normal bill, like to adjust income tax rates or give teachers a raise. You need more than a majority. 2/3 of the House would have to vote for it. And then, if it passed here, 2/3 of the Senate.

Johnny Kauffman

106 representatives voted for Gerald's bill. Nobody voted against it. It was through the House. It just had the Senate to go.

Johnny Kauffman

Next step, the Senate. It started the following week. Just like on the House side, Gerald's bill had to be passed by a committee before it could go to the full senate. He had been trying on his own to reach the chair of the committee, Senator Joey Fillingane. He thought it might help his case.

Johnny Kauffman

The Senate committee met a few days later. Again, we only learned about it the night before. And like last time, Gerald couldn't go because of work. He had to watch it on YouTube from the funeral home. This committee room was slightly bigger, fancier than the first one. It was the end of the session. And only six of the committee's 15 members showed up. All of the ones who did were white. Here's Senator Fillingane.

Johnny Kauffman

They were going to be considering just three suffrage bills. The first bill came up. It wasn't Gerald's. The sponsor from the House talked about it, and the committee passed it. Then another representative came to the microphone. She was there to talk about two other bills.

Johnny Kauffman

Neither bill was Gerald's. His did not even come up. It was dead. I looked into it, and this is how it goes a lot of the time. The House will pass a suffrage bill, but then Fillingane blocks it. So I put in a request to talk to him. Gerald called me the day after his bill died.

Johnny Kauffman

Gerald had no idea why Fillingane killed his bill, why these other people made it and not him. Fillingane got back to me and was happy to talk. I met him in his law office. He's a real estate lawyer when he's not at the Capitol.

Johnny Kauffman

I brought a copy of Gerald's bill with me.

Johnny Kauffman

Robbery is classified as a violent offense in Mississippi law. It doesn't mean the crime itself was necessarily violent, but Fillingane has a general rule-- doesn't consider any suffrage bills for violent crimes. He says that's what the lieutenant governor, who put him on the committee, told him to do. That's why Gerald's bill died.

But ultimately, it is up to Fillingane. He can do what he wants. And he said he does sometimes weigh information that sways him one way or another. But there's no part of this process set aside for people to come talk to him in the committee, introduce themselves, tell their story. I told them that Gerald's crime was almost 20 years ago and that he didn't have a gun at the bank.

Fillingane said, yes, those are the kinds of things that could persuade him in the committee. But he said he'd look at other things, too. Fillingane said it might hurt someone like Gerald if the police had been called to their home or if they'd been convicted of another crime. I wondered how Fillingane felt about enforcing this particular part of Mississippi's constitution, given how it disproportionately affects Black people and given its history.

Johnny Kauffman

I asked him about this rule more broadly. If someone does their time, they're out of prison, off parole, years have passed, why shouldn't they be allowed to vote?

Johnny Kauffman

Of course, the thing about public support is that the people directly affected by this provision in the 1890 constitution, they can't vote. This year, just five people got their right to vote back, which is pretty typical. This year, it's four women and one man. I don't know much about them because I couldn't reach them, just what's on their suffrage bills. Two were convicted of forgery, two of embezzlement, and one burglary. Most of them finished their sentences before Gerald did. Some of them hadn't been able to vote for decades.

There's a lawsuit in the federal courts trying to argue that this whole process for getting the right to vote back is arbitrary, and therefore, unconstitutional, as in the US Constitution. But it's in the early stages. And any ruling could take years. Nsombi, the woman who helps get a lot of these bills introduced, told me she's basically stuck, trying to get as many of them through the House and Senate as she can, one by one, using the very process she doesn't think should exist in the first place. Gerald told me for sure he was going to try again. He still has the copy of his bill that didn't pass.

Johnny Kauffman

A few months later, we talked again. And he told me he'd been arrested for cocaine possession. He didn't have to tell me about it. But he did, just volunteered it. He said he was driving a friend, and they got pulled over. Gerald says his friend had the cocaine. The police report says both of them did. In any case, Gerald was angry at himself for having gotten into that situation.

Drug possession is not a crime that's on the list of things that will cost you your right to vote. It wasn't in the 1890 constitution. But based on what I learned from Senator Fillingane, Gerald's arrest might be enough reason to kill his bill. If the point of putting this in the constitution was to make it a long journey for people like Gerald, it's working.

Ira Glass

Johnny Kauffman is a senior producer at Campside Media. Coming up, a truck that's speeding down a California highway with 100,000 passengers inside. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, The Longest Distance Between Two Points, stories of people who have to take the long and, sometimes, absurd way to arrive somewhere that should be so straightforward to get to. We've arrived at Act Two of our show. Act Two, "Ill Communication."

In this act, we turn to a story of somebody who starts at home and then ends up at home with a long, time-consuming journey in the middle. This whole thing happens in China. I guess you've probably heard just how different and fantastically aggressive China's response to COVID has been. From the start, they shut down entire cities, and it got results. Best estimates are that China has had fewer than 20,000 people dead from COVID versus, as you know, a million here.

And when Omicron arrived, China treated it with the same severity as the earlier variants, even though 90% of the population is now vaccinated. They locked down all of Shanghai in April. And lockdown in this case means really locked down. Over 25 million people could not leave their apartments or homes. Grocery stores and food delivery was shut down. Lots of people couldn't get food or medicine. It was pretty awful. This lasted for two months.

And we still haven't gotten much of a glimpse of what it was like to live through that. So I was excited to talk to Yang Yi about this thing that happened to him and his boyfriend during that period. Yang is a podcast producer in China, lives in Shanghai. And one day, early in the lockdown, he did his daily required self-test, as usual.

Ira Glass

Anybody in China who tests positive is required to report it to the government, which, in Johnny and Yi's case, means calling one of their neighbors, a very kind retiree who is the person in their apartment building designated to deal with government on all matters, getting new elevators installed, dealing with a blocked sewer, whatever. So they call her.

And then they figure, within a couple of hours, the government's going to send somebody to take them to a quarantine center that's part of China's zero tolerance policy. Unhealthy people are separated from the rest of the population.

And then, the next very urgent order of business-- they really don't have much time for this-- is figuring out where to send their dog while they're in quarantine. He's just a puppy, a five-month-old schnauzer. They had seen this video online that was being passed around of a corgi being killed, supposedly because its owner had COVID and had been sent to a quarantine center.

Ira Glass

It's actually harder than you might think because the whole city is closed up. Johnny calls lots of places before he finally finds an animal hospital that can take their schnauzer. But then they have to find somebody who's authorized to drive a car in Shanghai with all the streets shut down. So a friend knows some professional freight drivers, and they help with that. And then, they have to find somebody who's allowed to walk from their apartment building to the car to hand the dog to the driver. It takes a government official to arrange that. Finally, the dog is delivered into the car. Yi and Johnny can start packing, figuring somebody's going to come for them any minute to take them to the quarantine center.

Ira Glass

Or the second or the third. Someone calls from the Shanghai CDC to follow up, but didn't send anybody. Other officials call. More days pass. Finally, on the eighth day, they do their daily self tests, and they learn they do not have COVID anymore. And then that night, before dinner, they get the phone call.

Ira Glass

They decide that it's smart to go because now they have this bureaucratic thing that they actually need to fix. China has these QR codes. Everybody has one on their phone. Red if you have COVID, green if you don't have COVID. Now theirs were red, meaning they wouldn't be able to go into any building or store or office or just anywhere when lockdown ended. That's the thing they thought the quarantine center could cure for them.

Ira Glass

Some people are sent to stay on the basketball court on the third floor. He and Johnny were pointed to the first floor, where they learned they'd be living in the swimming pool. There's no water in it. Instead, there were rows of cots, men in the deep end, women and children in the shallow end. Elderly people with mobility problems were on the edges of the pool. Because it was just a high school pool, there's only a tiny bathroom with one toilet in it for the men and another bathroom with one toilet for the women.

Ira Glass

Yi and Johnny figured they'd be there for four or five days. The rumor was, you needed two negative PCR tests to get out. And they give the tests every other day.

Ira Glass

That's not what really gets to Johnny, though. What kills Johnny about all this?

Ira Glass

He says that to avoid using the bathroom for, I'll just say number two, Johnny took steps, real steps.

Ira Glass

The daily routine at the quarantine center, every other morning at 7:00, everybody would line up at the edge of the pool for a PCR test. When you finish your test, you get breakfast. Young people usually go back to sleep, he says. 7:00 AM is a little early for them.

Pretty soon, their sleep is disturbed by housekeepers who come through spraying disinfectant everywhere, which is really, really loud, he says. He and Johnny would work, do remote meetings with their colleagues. And then when it's almost time for lunch, a nurse stands at the edge of the swimming pool and gets on a megaphone. And in that noisy, echoey room, people talking on their phones--

Ira Glass

After that, Yi says, everybody tries to figure out, why did that person get out? How many negative tests do you really need to get out?

Ira Glass

And the quarantine center, he says, wasn't all bad. In fact, a bunch of things were better than their life back home with the city on lockdown.

Ira Glass

This is another thing. Back at home, Yi says, at their apartment building, people would only see each other when they went downstairs for the official COVID test. When they did that, everybody was pretty quick about it. Nobody would stay and chat, scared of getting infected.

Ira Glass

Well, everybody but them. And they were all stuck together, so people talked and hung out. And you can just watch people, which he likes.

Ira Glass

Other people Yi observed-- a middle-aged businessman, big guy, big voice, very pro-government. He would spout off after breakfast every day about politics at length, for everyone around him, like his own political talk show. On the cot next to him, a skinny university lecturer who Yi saw try to argue with the businessman one day, which, apparently, did not go very well. The business man just kind of drowned him out.

And then there was the guy who slept on the cot next to Yi. He was a source of fascination because, more than anybody in the quarantine center, he seemed the most desperate to get out, the most upset each day when he was not on the list to go home. Yi didn't know his first name.

Ira Glass

One of the ways that Wang deals with his anxiety over this, he never changes his clothes. He says that he's in the same red shirt and white socks every single day, even though he has a big suitcase by his cot.

Ira Glass

Some nights, Wang stays up all night, worried that he's going to sleep through the PCR test at 7:00 AM.

Ira Glass

Finally, one morning, they read Wang's name. Yi says he was out of there in three minutes flat. Threw his sleeping bag and toiletries into the garbage, pulled his unopened suitcase out of there before Yi could get his phone number or say goodbye. Johnny and Yi got out the next day. They got the dog back. QR codes were fixed. They had started in their apartment, went on a six-day journey that was completely pointless, and delivered them back at the end of the road to the exact spot they had started, no better and no worse, though Yi says he's glad it happened.

Ira Glass

When they're dropped off afterwards, it was at a crossroads near their place. And they walked through the empty streets to get home. Yi liked that. No cars, no people. Just cats, he says, just strolling in the middle of the street like they own the place. When would you ever see that? Or any of it? If he had a choice, Yi definitely would choose the experience they had. Johnny, however? No way.

Ira Glass

Act Three, "The Roe Less Traveled." So ladies and gentlemen, perhaps you remember the critique offered by a 10-year-old at the beginning of today's program about the way we spell the name of a certain fish, S-A-L-M-O-N.

Ira Glass

Fair point. This last story is about salmon doing something about as logical as that spelling, taking a ridiculous route to get where they need to go. And by that, I mean a ridiculous route that is different from the normal kind of ridiculous route they usually take. Jaime Lowe went to California to see it for herself.

Jaime Lowe

I have an above-average attachment to salmon, an obsession that began in college when I took a class with salmon guru Peter Moyle. He's famous in salmon circles, trust me. I think I was attracted to their epic migration and the macabre nature of their lives.

They're born, wiggle around in a cold stream, make their way to the ocean, then instinctually, against all odds, return to the place of their birth, hurling their bodies over waterfalls, flesh rotting, dodging bear claws, simultaneously decaying as they're pushing towards their exact nook and their exact birth stream to lay eggs and let the cycle begin again. It's like they're dying to live.

I mean, there's this whole industry of nature documentaries centered on dramatizing the species and their odyssey, films which feature the sound of raging water in the background while a serious narrator describes their majesty.

Jaime Lowe

It's a staple of nature porn. But the world has changed. The climate has changed. There's been increasingly hot temperatures, fires, drought, pollution. And many of the rivers salmon used for their migration have run dry or have been blocked by dams. That's why today, in California, many salmon follow a radically different course. They make their way to the ocean not through rivers, but inside a fleet of tanker trucks with human drivers at the wheel.

When I first heard about trucking salmon, it seemed so dystopic, a cold, mechanical process. The idea of salmon stuck in traffic just made me feel sad, like nature had been hijacked. But I was also kind of curious. I really wanted to see this Rube Goldberg, tin-cans-and-rubber-bands environmental hack in person. So I decided to follow five silver trucks transporting about half a million adolescent salmon on a 120-mile drive to the San Francisco Bay, a migration that no longer starts with the sound of babbling water. It's got a different sound.

[MACHINERY HUMMING]

Late one Tuesday afternoon, I found myself at the Mokelumne River Fish Hatchery, standing in front of a gas-powered machine that looked like it would be more at home on a construction site. The hatchery is about an hour northeast of Modesto in the Central Valley. It's rural and isolated, and so hot, the sun immediately burns, even in May. Mokelumne sits next to a river that was once known for thriving salmon and trout runs, but was dammed in the '60s. To offset the lost wild populations, the state built a hatchery and a parking lot close to the old stream bed.

I should say, hatcheries are controversial. The fish raised in them are not as prepared to survive in nature. And when they're released, they breed with native salmon, compromising the gene pool. There are people who think we shouldn't have hatcheries at all. But California has had them for decades at this point, a really long time. Mokelumne is not a massive operation, just a few bungalows and 20 concrete trenches packed with adolescent fish.

When I pull up, I meet the guy responsible for getting the salmon to the ocean. Bill Smith, the hatchery manager, greets me, then walks me over to this machine that's now so critical to salmon migration, and we try to talk over its roar.

Jaime Lowe

Bill's a big, bearded, burly guy. And the suspenders are not just for show. They hold up jeans which are tucked into waterproof boots. He's introverted, seems a little gruff. But there's a tenderness in the way he talks about the fish. In fact, he tells me, when these fish were just born, babies the size of fingernails, wriggling in the water, he would sometimes sleep at the hatchery overnight. He wanted to make sure their water was the right temperature, that the electricity stayed on. He wanted to make sure they were OK.

It's comforting to know someone who cares is at the heart of this operation. Bill grew up in the area, a fisherman. His life revolves around raising these animals for harvest. But he rarely buys salmon in the store, says he can't afford it. He only eats what he catches.

He mounted the moving platform of the crowder and started in on his job. The crowder has a metal grate that dips below the water. It pushes the fish, each the size of a hot dog, to one end of the raceway. Then they're sucked up into a tube that's connected to the top of a truck. The tube was translucent. And I could see all these salmon whooshing by, like documents being transported in a pneumatic tube.

I wondered how they felt, if they felt. What did they think of the sudden rush of movement, the dramatic shift in their environment? One minute, shining in the sun, the next, dropped in a big, dark tanker. There was no way to really know. After Bill filled each truck with brackish water and fish, and bags of ice to maintain the temperature, we pulled out of the hatchery.

We're on the road, me and 500,000 fish, and it's weird. Bill's driving ahead in a pickup. I follow behind the caravan. The five trucks look like any other fuel tankers you would see on the highway. They blend in seamlessly. You'd never know how many lives were speeding by in the lane next to you.

What's amazing is that even though the fish are traveling by truck, they'll still be able to trace their way back to their birthplace, the hatchery. The fish are imprinted with hatchery water, Bill told me. So if they survive long enough at sea to reach spawning age, they can use their sense of smell to return to him, swimming up rivers till they're at the stream bed by the hatchery.

It takes 2 and 1/2 hours till the trucks finally pull in to their destination, Fort Baker. Nothing can happen until the dead of night because if the salmon are released when it's light out, seagulls, pelicans, and cormorants will circle, dive, and swallow as many of the 500,000 fish as they can. In front of us, the Golden Gate Bridge frames the San Francisco Bay, which glimmers against the skyline. They can't get very close to the water because the pier is a historic landmark.

So Bill sets up a chute, which extends about 100 feet. It connects the truck to the edge of the pier. Then there's a 20-foot drop from the pier to the bay. Darkness finally closes in, and Bill signals that it's time. As oblivious teenagers make out at the end of the pier, a slow trickle of water drips down into the bay. Then a steady stream flows with a few of the small fish. Then a cascade, a rush all at once, crowded and alive. The salmon are falling in a flurry to the bay below, crashing against the water, then making small waves of their own.

It's chaotic and beautiful, but everything about this is fucked up. It feels crude and kind of rude to the animals. I feel like we don't even deserve salmon, if this is the world we've made. But at the same time-- and I hate that I'm saying this-- it's not so bad. I love salmon, and I want them to survive. And if we're going to have salmon in California, this might be the only way. Bill repeats the process with each truck four more times. A few fish flop on the pier, and he picks them up tenderly and throws them in the water with the others. He's gotten them as far as he can.

Ira Glass

Jaime Lowe, her most recent book is called Breathing Fire, Female Inmate Firefighters on the Front Lines of California's Wildfires.

[MUSIC - "I'LL TAKE THE LONG ROAD" BY NAOMI SHELTON & THE GOSPEL QUEENS]

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Chris Benderev and Nadia Reiman. The people who helped put together today's program include Bim Adewunmi, Sean Cole, Michael Comite, Aviva DeKornfeld, Chana Joffe-Walt, Seth Lind, Michelle Navarro, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Alix Spiegel, Laura Starcheski, Christopher Swetala, Marisa Robertson-Textor, Matt Tierney, and Diane Wu. Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry.

Special thanks today to Paloma Wu and Blake Feldman at the Mississippi Center for Justice, Arthur Bass, Carson Jeffres, Autumn Bernstein, Steve Gough, Alicia Netterville, Patricia Trowles, Jay Jackson, Omar Travis, Sam Levine, Pippa Holloway, Dorothy Overstreet Pratt, Kerri Cleeland, Rebecca Vitali-Decola, America Billy, and Rebecca Kanthor.

Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can stream our archive of over 750 episodes for absolutely free. Also, there's videos. There's lists of favorite shows. There's tons of other stuff there, too. Seriously, it's good. Again, thisamericanlife.org.

This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. He is still bitter, bitter, so bitter over Julie Andrews leaving him long ago, to star in the movie, Mary Poppins. He remembers telling her--

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.