Speaker 1: Happy Saturday, since the Year Without a Summer got a
Speaker 1: very brief mention in our roller Coaster episode, we were
Speaker 1: bringing that out as Today's Saturday Classic. And this episode
Speaker 1: kicks off with us talking about author Mary robin At Kawal,
Speaker 1: who has actually been on the show since this episode
Speaker 1: came out. We interviewed her in twenty eighteen about her
Speaker 1: Lady Astronaut Duology. Tracy did that interview that is set
Speaker 1: during an alternate version of the Space Race. So we
Speaker 1: talked about things like how she avoided anachronisms and various
Speaker 1: real world historical people and events that played a role
Speaker 1: in the books. So if folks are interested in hearing that,
Speaker 1: it's a really great talk. It came out on August twentieth,
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen. This episode came out on January twelfth, twenty fifteen,
Speaker 1: So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
Speaker 1: a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I am Tracy and I'm Holly Frying. So perhaps you
Speaker 1: have heard of Mary Robinett Kalal. Maybe you're a listener
Speaker 1: to this podcast. She has written, among other things, a
Speaker 1: series of novels that are known as the glamorous histories,
Speaker 1: and these are basically Jane Austen novels with magic. So
Speaker 1: if that sounds delightful to you and you have not
Speaker 1: read them, you will probably be delighted because they are
Speaker 1: pretty charming and touching and funny. And the third one
Speaker 1: was some of my most recent airplane reading while I
Speaker 1: was on a flight, and that book is called Without
Speaker 1: a Summer. It's said in eighteen sixteen, and in addition
Speaker 1: to several running mentions of past podcast subjects the Luddites,
Speaker 1: there's ongoing discussion about about whether that year's unseasonably cold
Speaker 1: weather is caused by magic. Basically, so this is not
Speaker 1: unseasonably cold like chillier than normal. It's unseasonably cold like
Speaker 1: it's snowing in July and all of the crops have
Speaker 1: frozen in the ground. So, in spite of the similarities
Speaker 1: in their names, I was so absorbed in this book
Speaker 1: that it wasn't until the very end that I made
Speaker 1: the connection that this unseasonably called fictional setting is the
Speaker 1: same as the real world event the year Without a Summer,
Speaker 1: which is also a listener request from listener Cecile, so Cecil,
Speaker 1: you can thank Mary Robinett Koal for bumping this to
Speaker 1: the top of the list, because after we landed, I
Speaker 1: was like, I want to learn more about that and
Speaker 1: what really happened. So this story actually starts with the volcano.
Speaker 1: And the volcano, which was Tambora on the island of Sumbawa, Indonesia,
Speaker 1: was probably not the only factor in eighteen sixteenth bizarre weather,
Speaker 1: and we'll talk about that a little bit more later,
Speaker 1: but it was definitely a very significant major part of it,
Speaker 1: and it had immediate devastating effect in Asia and the
Speaker 1: tropical Pacific, and a lot of these are unfortunately really
Speaker 1: glossed over when people talk about the year without a summer.
Speaker 1: There were several major volcanic eruptions in the early eighteen teens.
Speaker 1: One was Sufferrare on Saint Vincent Island in the Caribbean
Speaker 1: in eighteen twelve. Mount Mayon and the Philippines erupted in
Speaker 1: eighteen fourteen, and then there was an immense explosion from
Speaker 1: Tambora which started on April fifth, eighteen fifteen, and went
Speaker 1: on for days, with the worst of the eruption really
Speaker 1: getting going on the tenth. And in the memoir of
Speaker 1: Sir Stamford, Raffles, the British Lieutenant governor of Java at
Speaker 1: the time, quote, the first explosions were heard on this
Speaker 1: island in the evening of the fifth of April. They
Speaker 1: were noticed in every quarter and continued at intervals until
Speaker 1: the following day. The noise was in the first instance
Speaker 1: almost universally attributed to distant cannon, so much so that
Speaker 1: a detachment of troops who were marched from Joke Jakarta
Speaker 1: in the expectation that a neighboring post was attacked, and
Speaker 1: along the coast boats were in two instances dispatched in
Speaker 1: quest of a supposed ship in distress. On the following morning, however,
Speaker 1: a slight fall of ashes removed all doubt as to
Speaker 1: the cause of the sound, and he goes on to
Speaker 1: say that it sounded so close that they really all
Speaker 1: believed it was a volcano that was actually much closer
Speaker 1: to them than Tambora. When the eruption started, eyewitnesses on
Speaker 1: the island of Zimbawa reported three extremely tall, very distinct
Speaker 1: columns of flame that came up from the volcano's crater,
Speaker 1: and then they kind of crashed into one another high
Speaker 1: up above it, before cascading back down stones that were
Speaker 1: on average the size of a walnut also rained down,
Speaker 1: along with tons and tons of ash. Also falling in
Speaker 1: the vicinity of the mountain were trees and even animals
Speaker 1: that had been on the upper slopes, which were torn
Speaker 1: apart by the eruption. The eruption of Tambora case you
Speaker 1: could not surmise this from Tracy's description, was huge. It
Speaker 1: was much bigger and much deadlier than the far more
Speaker 1: well known eruption of Krakatoa that happened almost seventy years later.
Speaker 1: People reported hearing it as far away as Sumatra, which
Speaker 1: is more than a thousand miles away from where it
Speaker 1: was happening. There was also so much ash in the
Speaker 1: air that it was, according to reports, dark for three
Speaker 1: days for three hundred miles around the volcano. After the
Speaker 1: eruption peaked, the volcano itself also got a lot shorter.
Speaker 1: It lost almost a third of its pre eruption height,
Speaker 1: dropping from four thousand, two hundred to two thousand, eight
Speaker 1: hundred meters. Not surprisingly, the island of Sumbawa was devastated.
Speaker 1: More than ten thousand people died in the eruption itself.
Speaker 1: The entire island was covered in ash, and this ash
Speaker 1: had an average depth of between fifty and sixty centimeters,
Speaker 1: so between twenty and thirty inches of ash. The ash
Speaker 1: was deeper the closer you got to the volcano, and
Speaker 1: so much of it fell that buildings collapsed under its weight,
Speaker 1: and a two thousand and four archaeological expedition found a
Speaker 1: village that was buried under an ash layer ten feet thick.
Speaker 1: Ash spread to the north and northwest, blanketing the sea
Speaker 1: and the neighboring islands. British vessels reported patches of ash
Speaker 1: in the sea around Indonesia that was several feet deep
Speaker 1: and had to be essentially plowed through. Two of Simbawa's
Speaker 1: prinstoms were completely destroyed and their common languages became extinct,
Speaker 1: and the influx of volcanic material into the ocean also
Speaker 1: spawned a tsunami that struck other parts of the island
Speaker 1: as well as neighboring islands, so that people who had
Speaker 1: survived the initial eruption wound up being killed in the tsunami. Afterward,
Speaker 1: most of the crops in the surrounding area were destroyed, and,
Speaker 1: as is so often the case when such a massive
Speaker 1: natural disaster, famine and disease spread and its wake, including
Speaker 1: among livestock and wild animals. People became so hungry that
Speaker 1: they resorted to eating their horses, which were working animals
Speaker 1: that were necessary for transportation and for work. And all
Speaker 1: of this wasn't limited just to the island of Simbawa.
Speaker 1: People in neighboring islands starved to death as volcanic ash
Speaker 1: killed their rice crops. There was a massive migration to
Speaker 1: other islands, and some of those islands could not sustain
Speaker 1: the needs of all of these newcomers that were causing
Speaker 1: their economies and their food supplies to collapse. And many
Speaker 1: of those islands were facing famines and epidemics of their
Speaker 1: own in the wake of the volcano. Bali and Lombach
Speaker 1: were particularly hard hit. Estimates of the total death toll
Speaker 1: in Indonesia really vary, but sources generally agree that it
Speaker 1: was at least one hundred seventeen thousand people who died
Speaker 1: in the eruption and its aftermath. It took more than
Speaker 1: five years before crops could be harvested again. On the
Speaker 1: most affected parts of Sumbawa, recovery was extremely slow. Two
Speaker 1: government officials wrote that the princetoms of Sumbawa and Dampo
Speaker 1: were quote beginning to recover in eighteen twenty four, so
Speaker 1: we're talking about almost a decade later. Other Prinstoms were,
Speaker 1: in their words still quote a desolate heap of rubble.
Speaker 1: The whole thing had an extremely long lasting effect on
Speaker 1: the island's ecology. You could probably even say that it
Speaker 1: was permanently changed. And places ash made the ground were fertile,
Speaker 1: but it was also drier. So Bali and lomboch So
Speaker 1: neighboring islands wound up with really bountiful rice harvests a
Speaker 1: few years later thanks to all the ash and the soil.
Speaker 1: But on Sumbawa, the volcano and the ash destroyed all
Speaker 1: the vegetation, and the streams and springs that the vegetation
Speaker 1: had been sheltering consequently dried up, so while the soil
Speaker 1: was richer, it was also a lot drier. Sumbawa didn't
Speaker 1: get quite the same benefit as some of the other
Speaker 1: outlying islands did once it had started to recover. The
Speaker 1: dust from the ash spread around the world, caused brilliant sunsets,
Speaker 1: and it also reaked havoc with the weather over the
Speaker 1: following months. In the US, dust in the air was
Speaker 1: reported in the Washington, d c. Daily National Intelligencer on
Speaker 1: May first of eighteen sixteen, and in the Norfolk, Virginia
Speaker 1: American Beacon on the ninth. The editor of the Boston
Speaker 1: Columbia Sentinel remarked that the sun itself seemed dimmer on
Speaker 1: July fifteenth, which he thought was because of sun spots,
Speaker 1: and while there was a lot of sunspot activity, it
Speaker 1: was almost certainly because of all of the ash in
Speaker 1: the atmosphere. So we are going to talk about exactly
Speaker 1: what that ash caused in terms of the weather after
Speaker 1: a brief word from a sponsor, so to return to Tambora.
Speaker 1: Before we talk about how this eruption affected the weather
Speaker 1: in parts of the world, we have a couple of caveats.
Speaker 1: One is that the measurement and record keeping related to
Speaker 1: weather statistics have really improved dramatically in the years since
Speaker 1: all of this happened. Most of the places that we're
Speaker 1: talking about did not have any sort of methodical pattern
Speaker 1: of observing the weather and writing it down, which is
Speaker 1: something we pretty much take for granted today. So that
Speaker 1: means a lot of the records that we have are
Speaker 1: erratic and subjective, but there is a ton of documentation
Speaker 1: overall in the historical record, in the form of newspapers, letters, journals, diaries,
Speaker 1: and other documents. So there's so much of it that
Speaker 1: we know just from that part that this was a
Speaker 1: real event and not just somebody overreacting about a cold snap. Also,
Speaker 1: we have a lot of documentation about eighteen sixteens weather
Speaker 1: in North America and Europe and parts of Asia. But
Speaker 1: while it's pretty logical to conclude that the weather was
Speaker 1: completely weird everywhere as a consequence of all of this
Speaker 1: volcanic activity, we have much less in the way of
Speaker 1: actual records from Africa, South America, and Australia. So when
Speaker 1: we walk through what we know, it is mostly from
Speaker 1: North American, European and Asian points of view. In North America,
Speaker 1: particularly on the east coast, stretching from the Carolinas all
Speaker 1: the way up through what's now Ontario and Quebec, the
Speaker 1: spring of eighteen sixteen was overall cooler and drier than normal,
Speaker 1: although there were some big warm spells mixed in, Temperatures
Speaker 1: kind of swung wildly from balmy to freezing and back again.
Speaker 1: Then the summer had three extreme cold spells in June, July,
Speaker 1: and August the first huge cold wave stretch. From June
Speaker 1: fifth to June eleventh, Temperatures in New England dropped from
Speaker 1: the eighties to the forties in the wake of a thunderstorm,
Speaker 1: and that actually became the high for the next several days.
Speaker 1: Eighteen inches of snow was reported in Cabot, Vermont, on
Speaker 1: the eighth, and a hard frost that stretched well into
Speaker 1: the south on the eleventh killed most of the crops
Speaker 1: that had managed to survive up until that point. People
Speaker 1: started to talk about the real possibility of a famine.
Speaker 1: Within weeks, New England temperatures were really unseasonably hot, again,
Speaker 1: breaking one hundred in parts of Massachusetts, which doesn't happen
Speaker 1: all that often, especially not this early in the season.
Speaker 1: Another four day cold snap hit eastern North America starting
Speaker 1: on July sixth. In this case, frosts killed the replanted crops,
Speaker 1: although it was not as snowy this time around. Most
Speaker 1: of the snow reported in the US was in the
Speaker 1: mountains of Vermont, but further north in Montreal, bodies of
Speaker 1: water completely froze over with a layer of ice. This
Speaker 1: snap also reached even farther south, causing cold weather and
Speaker 1: frosts in places that had escaped in the June wave.
Speaker 1: The cold weather came back again on August twenty first,
Speaker 1: causing more snow in the Vermont Mountains, along with frosts
Speaker 1: as far south as North Carolina and as far west
Speaker 1: as Kentucky and Ohio. Just as alarming at this point
Speaker 1: was a drought which had affected much of the southern
Speaker 1: and eastern US, and it's estimated that up to half
Speaker 1: of the cotton crop in the South failed because of
Speaker 1: this dry weather. Grain prices skyrocketed and the drought didn't
Speaker 1: break until September, after the cold weather was over, only
Speaker 1: to be about to start again because it was heading
Speaker 1: into autumn. The price of flour rose from four dollars
Speaker 1: a barrel to between eleven and twenty dollars per barrel,
Speaker 1: The wholesale price of wheat nearly doubled, and the price
Speaker 1: of virtually every food staple shot up. There was also
Speaker 1: a huge increase in migration of farmers from the Eastern
Speaker 1: United States into the West, as people hoped that they
Speaker 1: would find better growing conditions, and because the West really
Speaker 1: hadn't seen the kind of unseasonable cold that the East
Speaker 1: Coast had about twice as many people decided to move
Speaker 1: west that year, as was typical at that point. In
Speaker 1: several states, including New York, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey,
Speaker 1: people called for a ban on distillery because of the
Speaker 1: grain shortage. When people couldn't afford grain to feed their
Speaker 1: livestock and their working animals, they ate the animals instead.
Speaker 1: So that was North America's eighteen to sixteen summer. In Europe,
Speaker 1: the summer was similarly wintry, but it also seemed like
Speaker 1: it got all the rain that North America had been missing.
Speaker 1: Western Europe was the most affected, but crops failed all
Speaker 1: over the continent thanks to the fields being flooded and
Speaker 1: later frozen. Crops that are sensitive to having too much water,
Speaker 1: like wine grapes, really suffered in their quality when they
Speaker 1: managed to survive. Plus, all the incessant rain made things
Speaker 1: generally wet and moldy. Because horses were the main source
Speaker 1: of transportation and grain became so much more expensi of
Speaker 1: the cost of travel in Europe skyrocketed. Famine spread in
Speaker 1: Switzerland and Ireland. In Switzerland, the government had to distribute
Speaker 1: information about how to tell poisonous plants from ones that
Speaker 1: were safe to eat as people try to scavenge what
Speaker 1: they could from out in the woods or the wilds.
Speaker 1: In Ireland, a typhus epidemic spread in the wake of
Speaker 1: the famine. The story that sticks in a lot of
Speaker 1: people's minds about how this played out in Europe is
Speaker 1: that the infamous evening in which George Gordon, Lord Byron,
Speaker 1: proposed that all of his guests at his Lake Geneva
Speaker 1: Villa write a story. That's the visit in which Mary
Speaker 1: Shelley wound up writing Frankenstein. That all happened in the
Speaker 1: middle of this cold, wretched summer, And also written during
Speaker 1: this was Byron's poem Darkness, And that poem begins, I
Speaker 1: had a dream which was not all a dream. The
Speaker 1: bright sun was extinguished, and the stars did wander darkling
Speaker 1: in the eternal space Raylists and Athlas, and the icy
Speaker 1: earth swung blind and blackening in the moonless air. Morn
Speaker 1: came and went and came and brought no day, and
Speaker 1: men forgot their passions in the dread of this, their desolation,
Speaker 1: and all hearts were chilled to a selfish prayer for
Speaker 1: light in Asia. Moving on to the third big place
Speaker 1: that we have lots of information about the volcano disrupted
Speaker 1: the monsoon cycle in India and Korea, so things were
Speaker 1: dry when they were supposed to be wet, and then
Speaker 1: way wetter than they were supposed to be once the
Speaker 1: rain actually arrived. This caused rice crops, which really rely
Speaker 1: on that monsoon cycle, to fail all over. The change
Speaker 1: in the weather also affected which bacteria could thrive in
Speaker 1: the Bay of Bengal, and unfortunately, one species that did
Speaker 1: thrive was a new strain of cholera, which people had
Speaker 1: less resistance too than previous strains. Bengal Kolera spread out
Speaker 1: of India to the rest of the world in eighteen seventeen,
Speaker 1: and the strain killed tens of millions of people. There's
Speaker 1: actually some debate in the scientific community about just how
Speaker 1: much of this shift had to do with the volcano
Speaker 1: and Unon Province in southwestern China, crops failed in the
Speaker 1: face of just a bitter bitter cold and a much
Speaker 1: wetter season than normal, and the book Tambora, The Eruption
Speaker 1: That Changed the World, author Gillen Darcy Wood connects this
Speaker 1: and this massive crop failure in famine to the rise
Speaker 1: of opium growth in Unon as farmers turned to it
Speaker 1: in desperation is a way to try to just make
Speaker 1: enough money to survive when the rest of their crops
Speaker 1: had failed. A huge famine swept through southwest China and
Speaker 1: it lasted for years. Neighboring parts of China had an
Speaker 1: influx of refugees, and much of the nation faced a
Speaker 1: serious social unrest. So before we talk about some of
Speaker 1: the theories at the time for what was going on,
Speaker 1: let's have another pause for a word from a sponsor
Speaker 1: that sounds grand. So unsurprisingly, there were many many explanations
Speaker 1: at the time for what was going on and what
Speaker 1: was causing this just bizarre weather. These I actually start
Speaker 1: with a story about why the volcano erupted in the
Speaker 1: first place. The population of Simbabwe was largely Muslim, and
Speaker 1: there was a folk tale explaining the event, and that
Speaker 1: was that a prince had fed a devout Muslim a
Speaker 1: dog and then killed him, and the volcano's eruption was
Speaker 1: an act of divine retribution for that act. A range
Speaker 1: of explanations for the weather cropped up in North America
Speaker 1: and Europe as well. A primary theory was sun spots.
Speaker 1: As we mentioned briefly earlier, there were a number of
Speaker 1: extremely large sunspots that year, some of which were visible
Speaker 1: to the unaided eye, and people thought these darker areas
Speaker 1: of the sun were colder, which is true, and a
Speaker 1: colder sun meant colder weather. Not everyone was on board
Speaker 1: with this idea, though, since the timing of the sun
Speaker 1: spots did not always match up with the coldest weather.
Speaker 1: There's actually a lot of continued study and discussion about
Speaker 1: exactly how much sunspots can affect the Earth's weather and climate.
Speaker 1: And it's partly because this all happens on such a
Speaker 1: huge scale, and the sunspots cycle itself is so long
Speaker 1: that it's almost impossible to isolate just sunspots from all
Speaker 1: of the other stuff in the world that's going on
Speaker 1: while the sun spot cycle is peaking. Yeah, you can't
Speaker 1: really turn off the sun to get a control group
Speaker 1: without it, Yeah, And you can't turn off the volcanoes
Speaker 1: to study just the sun. Yeah. So I really tried
Speaker 1: to find a definitive answer of good sun spots I've
Speaker 1: been and that there's not a definitive answer. Another theory
Speaker 1: at this time is that it had something to do
Speaker 1: with ice in North America. Ice seemed to persist in
Speaker 1: the Great Lakes for longer than normal, and a number
Speaker 1: of ships reported huge ice floes floating in the North Atlantic.
Speaker 1: People thought that all of this ice was actually sucking
Speaker 1: the heat out of the atmosphere. This is really more
Speaker 1: of a cause and effect situation. There was more ice
Speaker 1: on the Great Lakes because it was colder than normal,
Speaker 1: But then there was more ice floating in the Northern
Speaker 1: Atlantic because this whole time actually caused a warming trend
Speaker 1: over the poles, and so a lot of polar ice
Speaker 1: broke up and floated away, so that it was more
Speaker 1: of a cause and effect situation than the ice sucking
Speaker 1: the heat out of the air. Also, a series of
Speaker 1: pretty large earthquakes had struck various points on the Earth
Speaker 1: in the eighteen teens, and people also blamed the weather
Speaker 1: on this. The idea was that the Earth's motion had
Speaker 1: somehow caused some kind of fluid equilibrium between the surface
Speaker 1: of the Earth and the atmosphere, and that until something
Speaker 1: broke that equilibrium, that there would not be enough warmth
Speaker 1: available for crops to grow. Other scapegoats that were named
Speaker 1: as the cause of all of these problems, Benjamin Franklin's
Speaker 1: lightning rods, they were stealing electricity and disrupting the weather,
Speaker 1: because you know, he'd invented them in the mid seventeen
Speaker 1: hundreds and they'd become more commonplace since then. So clearly,
Speaker 1: since that happened before the weather, it must have caused
Speaker 1: this terrible weather. That there's so many explanations that logic
Speaker 1: is sound yet there. I mean, we still see this
Speaker 1: today when people don't totally understand something, and they'll feel
Speaker 1: like that because one thing happened before another thing, that
Speaker 1: the first thing caused the second thing, And it's often
Speaker 1: not true at all, right, It's that like chronological causality
Speaker 1: attribution that's not always valid. So the prevailing theory today
Speaker 1: is that the volcanic activity, including that from Tambora and
Speaker 1: the other eruptions that were mentioned at the top of
Speaker 1: the show, was at least one of the primary contributors.
Speaker 1: And this was actually something that people did discuss a
Speaker 1: little bit at the time. It was certainly not a
Speaker 1: widespread theory, but there were people who were like, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe all this ash in the atmosphere, which is from
Speaker 1: a volcano, is making it colder. People are pretty smart
Speaker 1: that way. However, eighteen sixteen was not the only year
Speaker 1: in that time period that had weird weather. In general,
Speaker 1: it was colder than normal in a lot of places
Speaker 1: from eighteen twelve to eighteen seventeen, to the point that
Speaker 1: people took notice, and by studying things like ice cores
Speaker 1: and tree rings and that kind of long term documentation
Speaker 1: that the earth leaves of itself, scientists know that this
Speaker 1: was not really just a little five year window of
Speaker 1: a cold snap. The eighteen hundred spell at the end
Speaker 1: of a relative cool snap that lasted around the world
Speaker 1: for almost five hundred years, starting in fourteen hundred and
Speaker 1: ending in around eighteen sixty. At least in the US,
Speaker 1: the year without a summer prompted people to start making
Speaker 1: more routine observances and recordings of weather conditions. The Commissioner
Speaker 1: General of the Land Office, Josiah Meiggs, sent out a
Speaker 1: memo to all of his registers at twenty different land
Speaker 1: offices instructing them to make and record a number of
Speaker 1: observations about everything from the weather to animal migrations. The
Speaker 1: military also started making and recording weather observations at the
Speaker 1: direction of Joseph Lovell, the Surgeon General of the Army,
Speaker 1: and the Patent Office and the Smithsonian Institution got in
Speaker 1: on the action as well, and consequently, the first published
Speaker 1: weather forecasts came out in the US in eighteen forty nine.
Speaker 1: So when I started researching this episode, I kind of
Speaker 1: expected it to be a little bit like The Long
Speaker 1: Winter Part two. So we talked about the Long Winter,
Speaker 1: which Lara Engels Wilder wrote about last time about this
Speaker 1: time of year, and that was the weather was really cold,
Speaker 1: things were really hard, things were tough, but overall everything
Speaker 1: worked out okay for the most part, and I sort
Speaker 1: of thought this was going to be similar to that.
Speaker 1: I was not expecting all of the famines and deaths
Speaker 1: and the extreme scale of how deadly the volcano was.
Speaker 1: The a lot of like a lot of people who
Speaker 1: have written to suggest the topic or other things that
Speaker 1: I've seen about it, kind of go, this was a
Speaker 1: year that had terrible weather, a volcano caused it, and
Speaker 1: the that's sort of all that said about the volcano,
Speaker 1: as though the volcano was on an island that was
Speaker 1: totally uninhabited, right, and that is not the case at all.
Speaker 1: This episode gives me flashbacks to when I was a
Speaker 1: kid and Mount Saint Helen's erupted because I lived in
Speaker 1: Washington State at the time, so I am very familiar
Speaker 1: with being covered with ash. Yeah, I've never lived near
Speaker 1: an active volcano, so I have not had that experience.
Speaker 1: Those are wild times. I remember my biggest concern, and
Speaker 1: again I was a child at the time, so my
Speaker 1: biggest concern was that all the animals have been killed.
Speaker 1: I was really upset about the animals that may have
Speaker 1: lost our lives. Even though probably most of them fled
Speaker 1: before the activity actually started. I'm sure some still lost
Speaker 1: our lives, but that was my big focus as a child.
Speaker 1: I did not care that there was crap all over
Speaker 1: everything we owned and like a half inch of ash
Speaker 1: sitting everywhere. I was like, what about the deer? I was, really,
Speaker 1: that's my focus. Thanks so much for joining us on
Speaker 1: this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive,
Speaker 1: if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL
Speaker 1: or something similar over the course of the show, that
Speaker 1: could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History
Speaker 1: Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Our old health stuff works
Speaker 1: email address no longer works, and you can find us
Speaker 1: all over social media at missed in History, and you
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