The Moth Radio Hour: Sink or Swim
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This autumn, fall for Moth Stories as we travel across the globe for our mainstages. We're excited to announce our fall lineup of storytelling shows. From New York City to Iowa City, London, Nairobi, and so many more, The Moth will be performing in a city near you, featuring a curation of true stories. The Moth mainstage shows feature five tellers who share beautiful, unbelievable, hilarious, and often powerful true stories on a common theme. Each one told reveals something new about our shared connection.

To buy your tickets or find out more about our calendar, visit themoth.org slash mainstage. We hope to see you soon. From PRX, this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Meg Bowles. Some people dive right in, throw caution to the wind. Others stand back, consider all the variables. And sometimes people have absolutely no choice. They have to think on their feet, sink or swim. In this hour, stories of how people cope when they find themselves out of their depths.

Our first story comes from Anthony Chinqui. He told it in an evening we produced at the Union Chapel in London. Here's Anthony, live at the Moth. Hi. Alright. Okay, so, July 1st. This is the day that I, having just graduated from medical school, finally a fully fledged doctor, right? I was unleashed on the unsuspecting public.

Now on June 30th, I was nobody, right? Just a very ambitious but ultimately very useless little lapdog with an adorable short white coat. But on July 1st, I got that long white coat and it was crisp and it had these pockets that were filled with stethoscopes and prescription pads and of course the terror that I would be found out as an incompetent fraud. And that terror, completely valid, primarily because of the unofficial intern year credo.

we be fucking up. And when we're not fucking up, we are concerned with fucking up. Now, a little bit about me.

I went to Harvard for university. It's the epitome of my Jamaican and Trinidadian immigrant family's American wet dream. And then I went to Emory for medical school. And after all that school and the hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt, I just felt like becoming like a badass surgeon was the only way I was going to make it worthwhile.

So, surgeons in intern year, we rotate through all different types of surgery for one to two months at a time. And I started on the plastic surgery service, which was not as glamorous as it sounds. The days were filled with grimy skin infections and hands that had gotten crushed in car doors and faces that had gone head to head with steering wheels and lost.

And speaking of loss, that's how I felt most days, lost and scared, of pretty much everything. For example, where's my pager? I would lose it like six times a day. Also, do I tell this patient that this is the first time I'm seeing their illness outside of a textbook? And did I get myself locked in the inescapable stairwell for the third time today?

But nothing was scarier than July 4th, American Independence Day, and my first day on call. And what that means is that I was the only representative for the plastic surgery service for the entire hospital from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. And I was told that if I had any questions or concerns, just pick up the phone, call my senior resident, and they'd come in and help me out. But here's the thing with asking questions in residency training. You're only supposed to do it

as a last resort. Now, most questions you could figure out the answer if you did a little bit of independent research and that was good because if you were to call your senior they'd want to know that you'd at least tried to solve the problem or you get yelled at. So take initiative but don't be cavalier and try to be independent but don't be dangerous and trying to find that balance on that first day by myself, terrifying.

So I sat in the call room, willing my pager into silence for the rest of my life. And then...

at 11:43 a.m., that little Motorola box of horrors chirped at me for the very first time. And it was the ER, so I call them, and they say, "Hey, we got this 40-year-old guy, he was riding his bike, and he fell off, and he dislocated his right ring finger. And we've had a couple of residents and a couple of attendings, the boss doctors, try to pop it back in, but no luck. So we wanted the hand specialist to come and help us out." To which I replied,

I mean, yeah, it sounds like y'all should totally do that. To which they replied, so are you going to come down or what?

Right, because plastic surgery was taking care of hand trauma that day, so the hand specialist in question was me. Great. So, hang up and then hop on the computer to look at the x-ray, of course holding my right hand up for reference as the number of hand x-rays I'd critically evaluated to that point in my life equal to zero. And even with all of my inexperience, I could tell one thing: that this guy's finger looked funny as hell.

Unfortunately unhelpful, but luckily, anatomical vocabulary started flowing through me from some dusty med school corner of my brain. So I was able to deduce that there were no fractures in any of the bones in the hand. The fourth metacarpophalangeal joint was indeed dislocated and seated dorsal to or behind the metacarpal bone, which makes up the palmar portion of the digit. Nice. So step one complete, make sure the ER was not lying to me.

Now, step two, do something. But, like, should I do something? I mean, I had never, like, ever fixed a dislocated anything before in my life. Maybe it was time to just call my senior, just come in and help me out. On the other hand, what was the worst that could happen? I mean, I could try and fail, like everyone else, mind you, and the dude's finger would continue to dangle in the breeze. So, no, no.

there would be no call. That day I would celebrate my Independence Day. And with that in mind, I decided to exercise one of the freedoms that my forefathers had fought, bled, and died for: access to the internet. I logged on to YouTube and I typed in "How to fix dislocated finger." And after ten minutes of an intense and very academic rabbit hole on YouTube,

I wouldn't say I was feeling confident, but I knew what my patient needed from me was for me to seem confident. So I roll up in the ER, right? I'm just like feeling real strong and like my white coat's just billowing out behind me and I pull back the curtain and I'm like, "Hey, I'm Dr. Chin Kwee of plastic surgery." And the guy looks up at me and just relief floods over his face because the specialist had finally arrived. And that specialist, he looked like he knew what he was doing.

So he holds up his arm and he says, "Alright doc, do your worst." Now, I've been running this procedure through my head multiple times over the last ten minutes. Right on down to my victory moonwalk out the door and how I was gonna give the black man head nod to the first of my brethren I saw in the hallway. It was gonna be great. But then, right then in that moment, I just, I froze up and very nearly ran away.

Because what was I doing? Right? Except masquerading in doctor's clothes. I couldn't do this. I couldn't do anything. But he was my patient. And he was in pain. And this, this was a job. So I had to find the strength from somewhere. And then, like a beacon in the night, I heard in my head the voice of Hollywood actor Bill Pullman as President Whitmore in the 1996 blockbuster film Independence Day.

Also starring Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum and a bunch of other true patriots who saved the planet Earth from the July 4th invasion by ill-tempered aliens. Now, I love this movie, right? And I also know every single word to this movie. And why the entirety of its screenplay takes up valuable space inside my head that should have otherwise gone to things like math, I will never know. But right then, I finally understood what those fighter pilots must have felt like

when their president rallied them to fly into battle against highly intelligent extraterrestrials with every tactical advantage and it gave me life. We will not go quietly into the night, inject lidocaine into one side of that joint. We will not vanish without a fight. Injection into the other side. We're going to live on. Flex that wrist back. We're going to survive. Pull that finger, hyperextend it until today.

We celebrate our Independence Day. So I did it. And the dude knew I did it too. He started playing some air piano and I realized I had not been breathing the entire time. So I'm trying to let that out real inconspicuously when he just wraps me up in this glorious embrace. And I needed that hug, man. So I held on maybe like seven seconds longer than was professionally appropriate.

And then I left. And on the way out, I actually saw one of the ER attendings and I said, "Hey, everything's fine. Popped back in, no problem. You call me if you have any questions." And I did some finger guns there, mostly because fake confidence was still a lot easier than the real confidence it would have taken for me to humbly tell him that I just learned to do that shit on YouTube.

So time went on and I learned quite a bit. We have this adage in medicine: "See one, do one, teach one." And I saw quite a bit, like not just on the internet, but like in real life. And I ended up seeing so much that people started to encourage me to do the things that used to freak me out. And the more I did those things, the more they became second nature. And ultimately, I was able to teach them to other people. It's the circle of mastery and I think it's pretty amazing.

But what was even more fascinating to me was what I learned about how I felt that day, that feeling of being a fraud. And I think there's something really important to hold onto from that, is that feeling of being an imposter. I know I felt it because I wanted to be the best I possibly could, but I just didn't feel like I had the tools to do that yet, so I felt like I didn't belong.

And as I got older, the kernel of that insecurity stayed with me, but the questions I started to ask myself changed. So instead of wondering whether I was supposed to be there, I started asking myself, why am I still here? Do I still love this? And am I doing this to the best of my ability for all these people who depend on me? And I think that's what most people hope their doctors are asking themselves.

So, eventually I grew up. I became an ear, nose, and throat surgeon. And that means that I pick your noses and pull Legos out of your children's ears professionally. And I finally feel like I can give you some medical advice. So here we go. If you are sick, please stay off the internet. Like, just, it is terrible. It's the scariest and most vile cesspool of misinformation and just like, just don't do it. Instead, go to the doctor and leave the Googling and YouTubing behind.

to the professionals. Anthony Chin Kwee hung up his white coat in 2019 to work as a medical consultant for the television show Grey's Anatomy and as a staff writer on The Resident for two seasons, where he would distill complex medical and social issues into compelling storylines.

He's also the author of I Can't Save You, where he candidly recounts the physical and psychological rigors of medical residency training. Anthony said he gained so much from his time in medicine. Through the very highs and the low lows of training, he learned empathy, compassion, and acceptance of himself. I asked Anthony what advice he would give when faced with being thrown into the deep end, and he said...

Preparation for and worry about the hard thing is usually way more difficult than actually doing it. Just jump. You can find out more about Anthony and info about his book and other writing endeavors on our website, themoth.org. Coming up, what happens when you say, I do, a little too quickly, when The Moth Radio Hour continues. ♪♪♪

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and presented by PRX. This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Meg Bowles.

When you take a leap, sometimes you're going purely on gut instinct. It's just an impulse buy that seems totally rational in the moment. It's not until later, when that buyer's remorse kicks in, that you start questioning and saying, maybe I didn't think this all the way through. Like our next storyteller, Nancy French. She shared this at the Paramount Theater in Austin, Texas. Here's Nancy. I sat in the apartment of my fiancé, David, surrounded by all of his friends.

David told me they wanted to get to know me because we'd just recently gotten engaged, and so I put on my prettiest dress, and I held his hand as they began to ask me questions. One of them smiled politely and asked me how we met. Well, we'd met on the campus of a Christian college in Nashville. It was a fundamentalist college, so it had three admissions requirements, a 2.0 GPA, a 19 on the ACT,

And baptism by immersion. So I qualified and attended, but I didn't like it very much, and I wanted to get out of there as soon as possible. One day I was walking to class, and I bumped into David, and he was wearing a Navy suit, and he was carrying a briefcase, and we stopped and chatted so long that I missed my next class. He told me that he had gone to the same Christian college, but had since graduated from Harvard Law School and had just moved back to Nashville.

At the end of that conversation, he asked me out. Now, he did so by handing me a business card, which I thought was not cold and impersonal, but rather fancy. He was like no other men that I'd ever met. I grew up in a small town in Tennessee called Paris, and yes, we did have an Eiffel Tower.

But in spite of its European name, it was full of pickup trucks filled with gun racks. And I myself took my concealed carry permit class at church. In seventh grade, my science teacher announced that he didn't want to teach science that year, and he replaced our science curricula with hunter safety. So at the end of the year, we had a shooting contest at school, and I was the best shot of my seventh grade.

So I was very popular with the guys, but the kind of guys that I knew, they wanted to go muddin' and huntin', and David was not like that at all, and I said yes when he asked me out. And it was wonderful. We would go out on dinners and have conversation, and we would watch artistic movies and analyze them late into the night. And he invited me to meet his family, and they were wonderful, and once we took a walk, and at the end of that walk, he asked me to marry him.

Now, I could tell it was spontaneous, namely because he did not have a ring. But I didn't hesitate. I have prayed more about finding a parking space at Walmart than I prayed about marrying this guy. But I said, sure, why not? But I had two conditions. Number one, I wanted to get married in Paris, the real Paris.

Now, I had never been to France, but it loomed large in my mind. And number two, I wanted to live in New York City with a view of the Empire State Building. Now, I also had never been to New York, but I had recently watched Sleepless in Seattle. And it sounded like the type of thing that a recent Harvard Law grad might expect in a future wife.

I knew that he was smarter than me and he outclassed me and I was trying to pretend to be more sophisticated than I am and he bought it. So back in Nashville, all of his friends listened attentively as I explained how we met and started dating and how hopefully we were going to get married in France and move to New York. And by the way, I was going to accomplish all of this by quitting college. And one of his friends interrupted and said, wait, what?

long ago did all of this happen? Now I paused here because I knew this might be a bone of contention. And I answered, three weeks. I heard someone whisper, three weeks. And then someone other said, so how old are you? And I said, 20. And he said, it's very unusual for a 20-year-old to drop out of college and marry someone they just met. Maybe you should get a college degree first.

or premarital counseling. I searched the faces of all of his friends looking for one ounce of approbation. I only saw incredulity. One person began to cry. I squeezed David's hand and I answered them and I said, I did not believe in premarital counseling. I believed in love. And they were very, very sad. And then one guy stood up and he goes, there has to be more to this story.

Are you pregnant?" But I was not pregnant. I could tell they didn't understand the urgency. They thought we were nuts. My friends thought we were nuts. My mother, when she found out I was getting engaged, she said, "To the rank stranger?" Yet, three months later, we go to France.

and we get married, and we moved to New York, and I had an apartment that had a view of the Empire State Building. If you crawled out on the fire escape and craned your neck, we had defied everyone's counsel, and we had done exactly what we wanted, and it was wonderful. And then I began to notice things about my new husband. Let's call them discrepancies. When we were dating, we watched artistic films.

When we were married, he preferred movies that had aliens and a high body count. When we were dating, he told me he hated sports. When we were married, he joined a fantasy baseball league. When we were dating, he seemed cool. When we were married, he told me he read Lord of the Rings every year and bragged about speaking Elvish.

Once we went out to dinner and he ordered coffee and he excused himself to go to the restroom and the waiter asked me how David took his coffee and I realized with a sinking sensation that I had no idea who had I married and what had I done. My concern over this decision grew exponentially when he started working in the law firm. He would go in early in the morning and he wouldn't come home until past midnight and I wondered, hmm, is that really how law firms work?

And then one day the phone rang, and it was a woman with a deep, sultry voice. And this was before we had caller ID. This was a landline. And she asked to speak to David. And I said that he wasn't home. And she hung up. And I didn't think much of it until the next day the phone rang again, and it was another woman, and her voice was equally sultry, higher pitch, different lady. And she asked to speak to David, and this time he was home. And so reluctantly...

I handed my new husband the phone, and he walked out of the room, and I followed him. And I overheard him say, I'm sorry you have the wrong number. And the phone kept ringing. It rang at 3 o'clock that morning and at 4 o'clock in the middle of the night. And the next day, my answer machine was blinking red with messages like, I had fun with you last night, David. Your lips tasted like butter. Some people were angry when I told them that David wasn't at home.

One lady burst into tears and I said, "What is wrong?" And she goes, "I just want him to call me back. I just saw him last night." But he was supposed to be at work last night. So I said, "Where did you see him?" And she said, "Soho." But his law firm was in Midtown. And I said, "Are we sure we're talking about the same David? He's tall." And she said, "Yeah, he wrote down your number on this napkin and she read me the number and it was ours."

And I felt terrible. I knew that I had made this terrible mistake and I decided that I had to confront him. And so that night after midnight, he came home, he was exhausted from whatever he'd been doing. And I had this list of women's names and I dropped them on his lap. And I said, you missed some calls. And he looked over the list and

He casually tossed it on the coffee table and he said, "Huh, I don't even know a Desiree." And I said, "What's weird is that wrong numbers don't usually ask for you by name." He shrugged it off like it was a conspicuous incident, not an indication that I had made the worst decision of my life. The phone kept ringing, but instead of hearing the sultry voices of the women on the other line, I only heard the unheeded warning of all of my friends and family not to get married quickly.

It went on for three weeks. One day, a man called. He asked to speak to David. I said that I was sorry that he was at work. And he said, "At work? All work should go through me." And I didn't know how law firms allocated cases. So I said, "I'm so sorry. I'll take a message. What is your name?" And he said, "How dare you ask me who I am?" I have known David for years. The real question is, "Who are you?"

And I was embarrassed and ashamed because the true answer to that question was I was a 20-year-old who had watched too many romantic movies. But finally I said, "I'm his wife." And at that, he absolutely exploded at me. He said, "His wife? I didn't even know he was dating anyone." And I said, "I'm sorry. We got married quickly. It was in France. We should have invited you."

And then I launched into a defense of getting married quickly, but with less enthusiasm than I'd managed to muster back in that Nashville apartment. And he said, "Okay, this is a huge problem. Do not answer the phone. Do not leave your house. Do not speak to anyone. I am coming right over." And I said, "Okay." And he goes, "But first, I have to ask you, are you pregnant?" And I said, "I'm not pregnant." And he goes,

a little David Lee would really hurt our comeback. And I said, "David Lee?" And at this he laughed at me, he started mocking me. He goes, "You don't even know him, do you?" Well, he had me there. I may not have known what he took in his coffee, but I did know his name, and his middle name was Austin. So I said, "Are you calling for the attorney, David French?" And he said, "No, I'm calling for the singer, David Lee Roth."

And I said, David Lee Roth, the lead singer of Van Halen, the big hair, the spandex, the rock star. And he goes, yeah, I've been his agent for years. And oh, I forgot he changed his number. I must have called the wrong one. So that's when I realized that we had David Lee Roth's old phone number and he was still using it.

Apparently he would go to bars in New York City and meet women that he had no intention of following up with. And those were the heartbroken women that were following us for three weeks. We just happened to have his number and it was a big, big almost marriage ending coincidence. So that night when David came home from work, David French, the attorney, I explained what had happened and we laughed.

But I thought, how precarious love is that in the short amount of time that David Lee Roth transitioned from one phone number to the next, I began to doubt the man I loved. But our love turned out to be more than

robust than I ever could have imagined. It has thrived through hardship and heartbreak and health scares, and it kept going through financial problems and unspeakable joys. I wasn't wrong to believe in love. In fact, I didn't believe in it enough. I was just a small-town girl who learned how to shoot guns at church and

and dropped out of college because I wanted romance and roses, but what I got was a man who spoke Elvish, but a man who has been by my side for the past 26 years. And I can tell you unequivocally that he takes hazelnut creamer in his coffee. And eventually when someone asked me, "Are you pregnant?" I was able to say yes. David and I have three kids and a grandchild.

And that's why I'm so thankful that many years ago, I decided, in the immortal words of David Lee Roth, to go ahead and jump. Nancy French is a three-time college dropout and five-time New York Times bestselling author and essayist and investigative journalist. Her most recent memoir is entitled Ghosted, An American Story. She lives in Franklin, Tennessee with her family and two dogs, where she says she, quote, messily creates abstract art.

Nancy says she's a very decisive person and never regrets her decisions. She says not second-guessing herself has been liberating because it has allowed her to live quickly and get a lot done in a short amount of time. When she first met her husband, she felt he was someone she could joyfully fight through life with. So in spite of everyone's protests, she married the man her mother called the Ranked Stranger. And 28 years, three kids, and two grandchildren later, she says it was absolutely the right decision.

You can listen and share the stories you hear in this hour and find out more about the storytellers on our website, themoth.org. And while you're there, maybe you'd like to take a leap and share a story of your own. On our website, if you look for Tell a Story, you can find all the info for how to leave a two-minute pitch. Coming up, a life-threatening hike in the wilderness of Alaska when The Moth Radio Hour continues. ♪

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by the Public Radio Exchange, PRX.org. This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Meg Bowles, and our final story in this hour comes from Monty Montepar. He told it at St. Ann's in Brooklyn, New York. Here's Monty. At 23 years old, I was in my third season working as a glacier guide in Alaska.

I took people hiking on glaciers, ice climbing on glaciers, and that spring I had successfully summited the 16,000 foot glaciated volcano that looms over town. I was feeling very confident in my skills in the mountains and I could finally grow a full beard. So when my friend Elizabeth asked if I wanted to be her assistant on a fly-in base camping trip, I said, "Oh yeah, that sounds super chill."

She told me the four clients were the women that I had met that afternoon on the deck of the guide service. They were decked out head to toe in brand new Arc'teryx rain gear, which is a red flag. Not only is Arc'teryx the Prada of outdoor equipment, but generally speaking, the newer the gear, the less the experience, which was exceptionally true in this case. They were from New York City.

and had never been camping. They had never slept in a tent. I lived in a tent. Elizabeth said, yeah, that's why they want you along. She said, they really like the idea of a full bearded Alaskan along to protect them from the wilderness. How could I say no? Fly-in base camping is like car camping with a bush plane.

So all six of us get into an airplane the size of a minivan with wings. We fly for 40 minutes over forests and rivers and mountains and glaciers, some of the wildest landscape on the planet. And the plane lands on a little gravel strip in a giant valley next to an even bigger glacier. We're surrounded by snow-capped peaks.

Dripping with ice. There's these babbling creeks. Beautiful green alpine. I'm pumped because I just got a free plane ride to a place I've never been before. Our clients are in a state of shock and awe and stimulation overload.

And as the plane leaves and goes out of sight, I watch all four of them have the gut-wrenching realization that they just paid somebody to strand them out here. They wanted their own personal space because it was the end of a long trip, so they each wanted their own tent. But they also wanted to sleep next to each other because they were afraid of camping. So I set up four identical tents wall to wall like a nylon apartment building in the wild.

And that night, Elizabeth cooked dinner and I entertained and their first night out was like an REI ad come to life. The goal of this weekend was to have a relaxing trip, maybe take a couple day hikes. So the next day we set out to hike to this area of Alpine on the other side of the valley. And it was a beautiful, sunny summer day. But after a couple hours of rocky walking, morale was low.

This was the end of their whirlwind let's go everywhere in Alaska trip and they were kind of over it. And I'm pulling out all the stops too. I'm doing interp on geomorphology, pointing out the patterns glacial output streams carve, telling lichen jokes. Fun stuff. None of it is landing. We get to the head of the valley and we see that the easiest way to the alpine is over this glacier.

And Elizabeth and I take people hiking on glaciers all summer long. We don't have our full kit, but it's good weather, good hikers, we're good to go. And when we get up on the ice, everything changes. Summer glaciers are alive. The ice is sparkling. There's these creeks carving these beautiful channels. There's these blue pools of water that are reflecting that glacier blue from the inside.

It's stunning. And our clients start enjoying themselves. They're engaging with the environment. They're taking selfies, doing yoga poses. This is what they're here for. And then we encounter a little bit of snow and then a little bit more snow. And when you are on a winter glacier that's covered in snow, it's customary to rope yourself to each other in case somebody unexpectedly breaks through the snow and falls into a crevasse.

In the summer, the snow is gone and you can see all the crevasses and just walk around them. This is a summer glacier, but there's some patches of winter left over. So Elizabeth goes ahead to scout our way off of the ice, which can be problematic.

And I stay behind guiding our clients. And I've got them behind me in a single file line, and I'm making sure to stay as much as we can on the exposed ice. And if we have to step on snow at all, I use my ski pole to probe it first to make sure that it's snow over ice, not snow over air. And now I'm having a good time.

I'm moving my clients through terrain, I'm picking lines that are mostly ice. If I got to deal with a little bit of snow, I probe, I step, I probe, I step. I'm thinking, "I am a good guide." Then the next step I take is just in front of my probe pole, and the snow beneath me disintegrates instantly, and I begin to free fall into the glacier immediately.

and for long enough to think a few things. First, I'm gonna die. Followed by, "What an embarrassing way for a glacier guide to die." And then, "Hey, let's try and not die." And I put my arms and legs and ski pole out to try and slow me down, and I come to a stop on this rotten pile of snow. I'm 20 feet below the surface of the glacier,

It is dark and cold. It's like a long, narrow hallway with tall ceilings and a single skylight. I have been inside glaciers before but never involuntarily. Not to mention that being swallowed whole by the earth is an immensely humbling experience. And I just left the four New York Never Campers.

who had just spent their first night in a tent after being flown into the middle of nowhere and then watched the guy they brought to protect them from the wilderness vanish into thin air. I assessed my situation and I was not injured besides my ego. I couldn't see or hear my clients. I didn't know where Elizabeth was. So I decided the best thing to do was to wait. My mind was racing. How was I ever going to get out of here?

How was I ever going to live this down if I did? How big of a mistake did I just make? I knew that I was already starting to get cold and I knew that our emergency equipment and technical gear was over a two-hour hike from where we were. I knew that even if we initiated a helicopter rescue, it can take up to eight hours for them to show up. I knew that this was not the bottom of the crevasse.

I guessed the ice in that area was anywhere from 600 to 800 feet deep. And what I was standing on was just rotten snow bridges that had collapsed from two or three years ago and gotten lodged in this constriction. I started to do some like preliminary investigation of the snow beneath me, but I didn't want to poke on anything too hard, feeling like I might trigger a second trap door.

And that's how most people who perish in crevasse falls go, is they fall down to a point where they get squeezed by the walls of the ice and are slowly crushed. Glacier ice is so dense that it eats sound. So I sat there in the quiet with just my thoughts, constricting and releasing my muscles to try and stay warm without moving.

Finally, Elizabeth looked down at me through the hole that I had punched in the snow. We made eye contact and neither of us needed to say we should have brought a rope. We went into problem-solving mode and I told her I thought that I could climb up a ways but I didn't know how to get past the overhanging lip of snow at the top of the crack.

It's hard to get past the snowy lip even if you're roped in and you fall into a crevasse. By punching through, you create this overhang that you have to somehow get over. And Elizabeth's eyes lit up and she said, "If you can get up here, I can get you past that lip." And then she disappeared. By the time I started climbing, I had been in this crevasse for at least 20 minutes.

and I'm cold and I'm stiff and it was narrow enough that I could touch each wall and I start pushing and pulling on the walls with my hand and using smaller cracks as hand holds, improving tiny ledges with my ski pole and I climb up five feet and ten feet and then I look down and I do not like what I see. This snow I had landed on looks like cotton candy.

and there's darkness through the holes, and any time that I knock an ice crystal through them, I cannot hear it hit the bottom. I climb up five more feet until I'm finally right below the snow, a place that I can't go any further by myself. And I establish this icy stance, and the reality of this situation hits me really hard.

I have just turned a relaxing weekend in the wilderness into a life or death situation. And I'm terrified. And just then, I hear the flap of fabric and a flash of color. And the first of four brightly colored, brand new, Arc'teryx rain jackets tied sleeve to sleeve is lowered down in front of me.

And I had never been so happy my clients had brand new rain gear. And I grab a hold of what is at least a $3,000 rope. And Elizabeth and those New Yorkers pulled me past the lip and into the sunshine. And when I got there, I was embarrassed. But they tried to soothe me. They said things like, "We're just really impressed that you climbed out of there."

And you know everyone makes mistakes. They even swore themselves to secrecy to hide my shame. Which I hope they told some people, because that is one doozy of a first-time camping tale. I myself didn't tell anybody for years I was so ashamed of this incident. But these days I own that guide service and I tell all the new guides this story under the heading, "The glacier does not care how full your beard is."

Because the truth is we all do make mistakes and the real shame is not being able to admit them and share them with others so that we can all learn. Thank you. Monty Montapar is a comedian and adventure guide originally from Breckenridge, Colorado. He's been a keynote speaker at the Yurei Ice Fest, is on the cover of the Alaskan Packraft Guidebook, and is part owner of Kinnikot Wilderness Guides in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, Alaska.

all real things and real places. He now lives in a little house on a hill with his partner Jill, their baby Rocky, and their little dog Sage. I asked Monty if he had any advice for when you find yourself in too deep, and he said, slow down. The impulse can be to try to get out of there as fast as possible, but usually impulsive thinking and actions are what got you in deep trouble to begin with. Think quicksand. The more you struggle, the worse it gets.

We use a saying in the guide service, "slow is smooth and smooth is fast." Often when I'm working with storytellers, most are people who've never been on a stage in front of a thousand people before. As the date of the show approaches, they get a bit nervous and think, "Oh wow, what have I gotten myself into?" But I always try to calm the nerves by telling them that Moth audiences are unique. The energy in the room is incredibly supportive. People don't come to the Moth as critics. They come to listen to the stories being shared.

I describe it as the same energy as hanging out with your friends around a big table. The night Monty told his story, it also happened to be his birthday, and the crowd of a thousand in the pews of St. Anne's burst into song. There was even a little harmonizing. I tell you this because no matter what predicament you find yourself in, you might be surprised to find someone there offering advice or willing to pull you out of a hole or support you through the scary stuff.

And if all else fails, there's always Google. That's it for this episode of the Moth Radio Hour. We hope you'll join us again next time. This episode of the Moth Radio Hour was produced by me, Jay Allison, and Meg Bowles, who also hosted and directed the stories in the show, along with Sarah Austin-Ginness. Co-producer is Vicki Merrick. Associate producer, Emily Couch.

The rest of the Moth's leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Jennifer Hickson, Kate Tellers, Marina Cloutier, Leanne Gully, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Sarah Jane Johnson, and Aldi Caza. Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Nightmares on Wax, Van Halen, and The Style Council. We

We receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by PRX. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching us your own story, which we hope you will, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.