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This is Love

Prairie Warbler

This is Love

Vox Media Podcast Network

Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.79.7K Ratings

🗓️ 13 May 2020

⏱️ 39 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

When Drew Lanham was a child, he used to lie down in a field and play dead, just so he could get a glimpse of vultures flying over him. He made binoculars out of toilet paper rolls, and wings out of cardboard. He loved birds. But when he went to college, he says "I was trying to live up to the expectations of others who said, ‘you're a black kid who's good at math and science.’” So he studied engineering, and was miserable. And then, one day he heard the call of a Prairie Warbler. Drew Lanham’s book is The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2BmMZr5 We also make Criminal and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Support for this show comes from Krakan.

0:03.0

Krypto is like the financial system, but different.

0:07.0

It doesn't care where you come from, what you look like, your credit score,

0:11.0

or your outrageous food delivery habits.

0:13.7

crypto is finance for everyone everywhere all the time.

0:18.4

Krakhan, see what crypto can be.

0:21.3

Don't invest unless you're prepared to lose all the money you invest.

0:25.0

This is a high-risk investment,

0:26.4

and you should not expect to be protected if something goes wrong.

0:31.1

This episode contains one instance of a racial slur.

0:35.0

Please use discretion.

0:37.0

It seemed back then like it was miles and miles between my grandmother's ramshackle, as I call it, and my

0:46.0

parents more modern ranch.

0:47.8

But really, it was probably only about a quarter of a mile if that, you walk the road if you just walk through the

0:55.1

pasture that separated us really more of a holler than anything if you walk that

1:00.1

it was even shorter but that was the that was the more fun walk to leave the beaten path to lead the road and to

1:09.9

find yourself in that pasture which then offered all sorts of opportunities for fun

1:15.5

distraction so one of those distractions was was playing dead and I got the idea from books really and understanding what vultures were. Back then we call

1:29.5

them buzzards. That was the country term for for a vulture but I wanted to see them more closely I

1:38.7

wanted to sort of understand who those birds were and so I would play dead. I would...

1:50.0

Because if Olcher would, if you play dead, they might come close to see if they might have you as their breakfast.

1:57.0

Yeah, they, you know, breakfast, brunch, dinner, whenever I was out there roaming Phoebe it was just this thought as a

...

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