Trapped on a Bus | This American Life | Episode 892

Key Takeaway

Create a “daylight check” for thoughts or messages that feel urgent, revelatory, or emotionally charged: write them down, but do not send or act on them until you have slept and reviewed them in calmer conditions. Pair that pause with a personal list of early warning signs—such as disrupted sleep, escalating certainty, or unusual energy—and ask a trusted person for help when several appear together. The goal is not to dismiss every intuition; it is to add a reliable reality-testing step before consequences compound.

Episode Overview

This episode follows people trapped in situations they did not choose: passengers on a bus whose driver refuses to take them to Washington, a reporter managing bipolar paranoia after learning his neighbor is accused of spying, a Havana resident navigating prolonged blackouts, a community grieving a felled landmark tree, and a teenager stuck beside a terrified passenger on a long flight. Across the stories, people improvise under uncertainty, preserve what agency they can, and sometimes find empathy in the middle of bizarre or frightening circumstances.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Trapped on a Bus | This American Life | Episode 892 from This American Life. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

A quick warning, there are curse words that are un-beeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm David Kestenbaum, sitting in for Ira Glass. This morning on the subway Yeah. this guy brought his own chair. I was sitting next to him, but he was in like a fold-out chair. That's Aviva DeCornfeld, apparently our transportation correspondent. respondent. She came in the studio to tell me a story about a woman on a bus ride that went very strangely.

Um her her name's Duck, or that's her nickname. That's what we're going to call her. Okay. She takes this this bus between New York and DC a lot, back and forth. So on this trip, she's going from New York to DC, Union Station, and she's leaving around 6:00 p.m. at night. And she has this whole routine around the bus, because she's done this trip a million times. This is Duck. I'll go, get a margarita, get on the bus, take a nap, wake up back home in DC.

Now, I boarded the bus as normal. They checked me in. You know, the guy had the app with all the passengers. He made a little announcement. And they even I remember distinctly they said, "There's no stops planned." I you know, great. Are you good at sleeping in public transit? I can I can I can pretty much sleep anywhere. Oh my god, you're so lucky. My parents would always joke that I could sleep through anything. So she goes to sleep. And then she wakes up around 9:00 p.m.

to a bunch of commotion. And all the passengers are talking on the bus about what's going on. And what's going on is really odd, and so odd that Duck starts writing a thread about this online, which is how I heard about it. Here's the first post she writes. I just woke up from a nap, and somehow while I was asleep, everyone on the bus has figured out that we are not going to the right place. Aviva, do they think there's like a mistake or something? Well, the driver of the bus is apparently telling passengers like I'm not going to the wrong place, you're on the wrong bus.

This bus isn't going to Washington D.C. It's going further south to Virginia and we're not going to stop. So, Doug writes another post. He's refusing to talk to anyone while he's driving and is now driving really fast. I think this is what it starts to the attitude on the bus starts to turn a little bit towards maybe we're not in a safe situation. And what do they think is going on? Like is it possible they just got on the wrong bus? No, because every person on the bus has been checked in by the driver as going to Washington D.C.

And all their tickets say to D.C.? Yeah. So, this is the situation. They're all basically trapped on a bus. And the driver is not doing what bus drivers have typically done in the history of bus driving. I'm not sure exactly how to say this, but whatever you think of President Trump, maybe this is a feeling you've been experiencing. He's made hundreds of millions of dollars selling meme coins to his fans and other people. He is bombing boats off Venezuela. He's tearing down the East Wing and building a giant ballroom.

Maybe this makes you feel like everything's out of control. Or maybe you're fine with it. Maybe the bus driver is a genius and you think we should all just sit back and see. In this case though, the passengers are not into it. And when a person has so completely left the normal script of things, the question is, what do you do? So, the first thing they try to do is reason with the bus driver, reassert the normal facts and rules for the bus ride. Doug said that two guys went up to him at the front of the bus and said, "Man to man, we're going to Union Station." And?

He said, "No, we're not." Didn't work. What do they try next? After that, someone notices that he has a French accent. Okay. And thinks like, "Oh, maybe this is a language barrier issue." So, they start talking to him in French and then end up arguing with him in French. And then it becomes very clear it is not a language barrier issue. Wow. And then Duck starts just starts firing off post after post and you can feel things escalating like as you're reading the thread. And it's like first bus company is trying to call the driver and he's not answering.

And then someone pulls up Waze and sees that they're going 20 mi over the speed limit. And then someone gets the bus company on speaker phone and is walking it up to the front of the bus. And then Duck could actually hear the bus company guy yelling, "You're going to Union Station." to the bus driver. And then he screams in response that he doesn't get paid enough and is refusing. Wow. And then, you know, person after person each kind of feels like they're going to be the hero who convinces the bus driver to get back on track.

And so each person like takes their phone with the company reps on speaker phone to the bus driver. And then in response, he just grabs them and hangs up. Why don't they call the police? Well, so then that is the next thing that people are thinking about doing. So, while a couple passengers are in the front of the bus fighting with the driver, the rest of the people in the back of the bus are debating whether or not to call the police cuz like half the bus is thinking this is actually just going to agitate him further and that feels dangerous.

And the other half are like, "Well, the bus company can't help us. So, like who is the next authority figure who can come to our help?" So, what happens? Eventually, someone does call the police. And Duck's next post is, {quote} "Okay, someone called the police but suggested they avoid pulling over the bus because he's driving so erratically. We are passing DC." So, they feel like they're in danger? The bus is kind of split. Half the bus feels like they're in the sequel to the movie Speed.

Like they're being kidnapped or something. Yes. And then the other half feels like, "You know what? Let's just sit tight. See what happens." In the dark at like 75 miles an hour on some highway. Yes. It's like they tried all these things and now there's nothing else they can do. There's a good bit of wanting the situation to be otherwise and wanting it to be easily figure-out-able in the moment and not having to wait for something bad to happen or wait wait to figure out how it how it all resolves.

Yeah, and then at some point you're like, "Well, I guess we just have to We have to actually up to him. We have to go on this entire bus ride no matter where it ends." So, he does eventually get off the highway in Vienna, Virginia. Like Like he promised? And he does he he does weirdly sort of go through the normal motions of a bus driver at a bus stop and he helps everyone get off and get their luggage from underneath the bus and and although people are yelling at him and he's kind of yelling back and he's flipping people off and then once everyone's off, he just drives off.

Did they ever get an answer to what was going on with the guy? No. But the bus company did send another bus to Virginia to pick them up and take them back to DC and that bus driver was very apologetic and was like, "Sorry about that other guy. I think he's new." I think he's new? Yes. This does not seem like the behavior of a new bus driver to me, but But they made it home? Yes, they made it home. We did reach out to the bus company.

A spokesperson said the driver does not work there anymore. He had disobeyed his supervisor's instructions. Quote, "As to what caused him to do so, we are not sure." Doug said that the bus ride from Vienna, Virginia back to DC, their original destination, was very quiet. Today on the show, people who find themselves on journeys they did not intend or agree to. They find themselves trapped on these journeys and they have to figure out what to do. In one story, a famous tree disappears from a landscape overnight.

Also, one woman's shockingly difficult quest to get some badly needed ice cubes. Stay with us. It's This American Life. Act One, The Gardener. Sometimes the bus ride you're stuck on against your will is the thoughts that are spinning around in your own mind. Eman Oghana has a story like that. He's a reporter who's been on our show before. He does his stories from a lot of different countries and conflict zones. Here he is. My wife and I live in a sleepy seaside town on the outskirts of Athens.

The kind of place where nothing interesting ever happens. She says that's why we live there. We run into our neighbors all the time in our small apartment building. Below us, two floors down, is this guy, Christos. He's a Greek Air Force Colonel in his mid-50s, has a family, a traditional kind of guy. He's um like he has like this kind of clean face uh bright eyes always a little bit shy and um ready to help. This is my wife, Claire. Like he would always be helpful with the door.

Um or with the cat, Kuku. Kuku is our cat. He's an indoor-outdoor cat, and to be honest, he's kind of an [ __ ] Bites me in my sleep sometimes. But Christos is always nice to him. So he would always be gentle with Kuku up at the door to Kuku and say, "Hey, how are you?" Even talk to my cat, this is what I want to say. So, the feeling I have is just this kind trusted person in our building. Christos shares the apartment with his wife, teenage daughter, and mother-in-law.

The wife and mother-in-law, in our experience, are not so nice, the opposite of Christos, always yelling at him, causing problems in the building. When we heard Christos's family yelling at him, it always felt a bit sad. He never shouted back, never defended himself. He just absorbed it quietly. In the evenings, he'd water the small vegetable patch in front of our building, tomatoes, cabbages, peppers pushing up through dry soil. He was the most ordinary presence imaginable until one day in February. I'll tell you how I I find out about this.

So, I was in with my mom, Chloe, and parties, and everyone was there. Your family? My family. So, my family was there, and out of the blue, my mom says, "Did you find out about Christos? Did you heard what happened in the news?" And I'm like, totally confused. I didn't know what what she was talking about. And then she explains like Christos that lives in the building, he was caught by the police. And he's caught by the police about what? I'm like, what? And she says, "Oh, yeah, he's a spy." That was like a bomb.

International espionage in our little apartment building. According to news reports, the Greek intelligence service had been quietly monitoring him for months. He's accused of passing classified NATO material to China, and it may take a long time to fully assess the damage. For his part, Christos has largely admitted to the charges. We reached out to him and his family through his lawyer. Christos said he'd initially thought he was working with a private company on a legitimate business opportunity. He didn't know they were actually working with the Chinese government, and gradually he was pressured into spying.

He apologized to his country, the armed forces, his colleagues, and his family. Reportedly, he's cooperating with investigators. But that's not really why I'm telling you this story. I'm telling it because for years I was convinced there were spies all around me. 10 years ago, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I've had episodes of paranoia, sometimes psychosis, often involving spies. And now, here we were with an accused spy living in our building. Madness doesn't arrive suddenly. It slides in quietly, like a familiar voice whispering things you've longed to hear.

My most recent episode happened a few years ago. I had just returned from a reporting trip to Israel and the occupied West Bank. It started with my phone. It seemed to be behaving strangely, overheating in my hand, apps freezing, missed calls appearing from countries I'd never been. These could all be explained, of course, if, say, I was under surveillance. Then, I started noticing suspicious people. Chinese tourists taking pictures on their phones of things that weren't particularly interesting. What about that delivery bike idling too long outside the building?

One afternoon, I saw a woman in sunglasses walking the same way as me, which I took as a sign I was being followed. So, I hopped on an Athens city bus. I'd given her the slip, only to find myself arriving in the airport, which is a perfect place if you're imagining international espionage. People from all over the globe, flights from Istanbul, Vienna, Doha, strange tongues, faces, and people. But none stranger than me. I wandered departures slyly photographing people I thought were agents. I uploaded photos of them to Instagram to let them know I had them made.

It was exhilarating. Mania can feel electric. When I was in this state, people would notice that I was off and presume I was drunk or high. Loved ones who knew me better could see something was wrong and suggested getting help. But I wouldn't listen. Convinced that they were trying to lock me up in a psych ward to silence me. Preventing me from carrying out my hazy mission. Like I had some purpose but didn't know what it was. Soon I was sure there were spies in the building.

Weirdly, one person I did not suspect, even in psychosis, was mild-mannered Christos. Claire watched me spin out. We'd recently gotten engaged and now I was talking about spies all the time. At first, she told herself it would pass. Then she realized it might not, which was frightening. And then I disappeared. After a few days, Claire called the British Embassy and the police. They eventually found me, detained me, and took me to a mental hospital. Yeah, that was that was scary. It was a scary cuz like I was afraid like you might never come back again in your stable place.

Um that I would never see and talk to the person I remember. Oh, also I remember this. In this madness, there were moments where you had your sanity. That was so so weird. Like what? Like I remember you were at the psychiatric hospital, right? And um the nurse was trying to convince you to stay stable and have your vaccine. No, vaccine injection. Injection, sorry. In order for you to calm down cuz the police was there and they would have to put um handcuffs in order to transport you from the public hospital to the private one.

And you were in denial like you were like I'm not doing this. So at some point you said I want my fiance to come and that's my condition. If she comes then I'll So you were like negotiating things. And then when they were transporting you, I was with them and you said uh My love, didn't I promise you adventures? So here you are. These are the adventures. Later she told me she'd started to wonder if I was a spy, that my obsession with espionage made more sense if I was somehow part of it.

It turns out delusions about espionage and religion are extremely common in people who have bipolar disorder. After a few weeks in hospital, I was released. Claire found a bespectacled, goateed professor of psychiatry who she hoped could help me. He introduced me to something called psychoeducation. I'd seen shrinks before but had some bad experiences. Psychoeducation was different. It taught me to learn the mechanics of my disorder the way a psychiatrist would. What triggers look like, how symptoms stacked up, what the early warning lights were. I was less a passive patient and more a junior practitioner in my own case.

I started to map my own warning signs. A broken sleep cycle, the rush of success. I made sure to always take my meds as prescribed and guard my sleep like it was my job, especially on the days that I felt least like doing either. When I sat up typing revelations at 2:00 a.m. convinced I had uncovered truth, the rule was simple. Type them out but don't send them to anyone. Then check in daylight. Most mornings, the revelation looked like nonsense from an overheated mind. For the first few months, it was hard to admit that none of it had actually happened.

I went back over it all, searching for proof that it was real, that someone really was watching me. I've learned to remind myself that coincidences do happen all the time. Everything can be a symbol if you let it. When Clea found out Christos had been arrested, I was in Syria on a reporting trip. She was worried how I would respond to the news. How am I going to tell Ayman that what he was telling me is true in all this kind of ironic situation? You know, my fear was like, what if you if I trigger you, you know?

I trigger something bad. So, that was the point when I called you. And I remember you were in Syria reporting. And I said the whole story fast, but in every sentence I remember you were always saying, "Whoa, this is unbelievable. Whoa, this is unbelievable." I remember standing on the hotel balcony in Syria, the phone to my ear, taking it in, and thinking not just how strange it was, but that I wasn't going loopy. No paranoia. The way you reacted on that was very, very I would say uh impressive.

And relief. It made me feel relieved cuz you got the information, you process it, and it felt like you accepted as it is that this is reality, and your neighbor might be a spy. I just remember how amazing it was. I felt like, yeah, okay, you're not completely crazy. Like, there are spies out there, and there's one in your building, and it felt almost like a part of me was like, yes. That's That's your meds. That's the reminder for my meds, which is very appropriate. When I got home from Syria, I was still trying to wrap my head around the news about Christos.

I went to the garden where he used to carefully water the vegetable patch every evening. Now weeds have started pushing up through the rows. It was getting overgrown. No one was coming down to tend it. Christos is in jail awaiting trial. For a long time, his boots stayed outside his door. His family is still here. In the garage, his car has gathered dust. So my I want to ask this. What was exciting when you were psychotic about the feeling of somebody spying on me or there are spies out there?

It's like a validation. You know, you go through your life unnoticed and you want someone to pay attention to you. And the idea that someone's watching you fuels your ego that there's some higher power that's cares about you, whether it's God or an intelligence agency. And how do you feel about somebody that actually is a spy? Do you like him? Do you admire him? Do you dislike him? Well, you're a spy, right? I'm a spy. Part-time job. Um no, I I don't think I I admire them or that it's something I want to do.

And also I'd I'd be terrified having the secret, you know, from you. You know, you would definitely find out if I was a spy. There really are spies, but they're not after me. They're just people living quiet, dangerous lives I'll never fully understand. I'm okay with leaving the secret missions to them. Eman Oghana is a reporter in Greece. Act two, no power to the people. Our show today is about people who feel like they're trapped in some situation they have no control over, like passengers on a runaway bus.

And we turn next to a place where there are actually not a lot of buses running right now because the country is out of oil. It's from writer Eileen Sosin Martinez, who lives in Havana. Because it's hard to even make phone calls from there, we got an actor to read it. About 2 weeks ago, I had a silly accident. I took a step backwards thinking the sidewalk was there, but ended up stepping onto thin air. My left knee, which underwent surgery many years ago, couldn't hold me up and I suffered a sprain.

The doctor told me to take anti-inflammatories for 10 days and apply ice every 2 hours. I got Naproxen pills on the black market as is usually the case given the shortage playing state-run pharmacies. Finding the pills was supposed to be the hard part. Though obvious looking back, it didn't occur to me that the other part of my treatment, icing my knee every 2 hours, would be even harder to carry out. I filled up a half-liter bottle with water and put it in the freezer. Easy, right?

Yes, if you have power. The power company used to publish a weekly blackout schedule. They'd never fully stick to it, but you'd at least get an idea of whether they would cut the power in the morning or afternoon, and usually it would be out for no more than 4 hours. But at the end of 2025, the blackout started increasing. Then, in January, the United States launched an oil embargo threatening tariffs on any country supplying Cuba with oil. In the spring, the situation changed again for the worse.

The oil we got from a Russian tanker at the end of March ran out in early May. I expected an uptick in blackouts, but I never thought it would be this bad. Now, we don't talk about blackouts. We talk about whiteouts, alumbrones, as they would say in the so-called special period of the '90s, the crisis that devastated Cuba following the collapse of the Soviet Union. In other words, instead of counting how many hours a day the power is cut, we count how long it's back on.

Blackouts are the rule and power the exception. These whiteouts had been happening for at least a year in other provinces, but not in Havana. Now, not even favoritism can shield the capital from them. We're barely getting 3 hours of electricity a day, five at most. So, of course, there wasn't enough time for the ice I was supposed to be using on my knee to fully set. Instead of ice, I've been using cold water, a sort of slush. I alternate where I place the bottle, on the underside of my knee, on the outside, on top, on bottom.

I'm supposed to do this for 20 minutes. If I had ice, it would ease the pain almost immediately. Cold water just cools off the skin. Still, I keep a bottle in the freezer hoping. I remember how I'd react when the blackouts first got worse at the end of last year. When the power went out, I'd be overcome with an urge to do something, anything. It was winter, and it would already be dark at 6:00 p.m. So, I would exercise in the dark, read by flashlight, and wash some of my clothes by hand.

Now, it's flipped. When the electricity goes out, I feel drained, helpless, but I feel euphoric when the power's back on. "Are you happy, my love?" my boyfriend asked me on one of these occasions. It was only then that I realized I was singing while dicing onions for dinner. When the electricity is back on, people run to their washing machines, hoping the power lasts enough to get the laundry done. That's also the only chance to use the blender to have juice for breakfast or to make puree for a baby.

I'm lucky. I have a gas stove, but many rely on electricity to cook. They use those precious hours to turn on rice and multi-cookers so there'll be food for the next day. Then, everyone, rich and poor alike, faces the same problem. How to preserve food. You need a whole system and a great memory. The first rule is, don't cook what you planned, cook what's defrosting the fastest. For example, if you open a can of tomato sauce or corn, you have to store it again in a plastic container and put it in the freezer.

The lower part of the fridge barely works and is now basically a cupboard. Cooked rice, cooked pasta, it all goes in the freezer. I've had to throw out so much food because of lack of refrigeration. Carrots, chicken, mangoes, yuca, way too much rice. Throwing out food in the middle of food shortages feels like sacrilege. And while we're all going slowly mad waiting for a small cube of ice to form in the freezer, there are other indignities. For example, the trash, which piles up on street corners like monuments to this disaster.

This also isn't a new problem. For the past few years, garbage collection has varied throughout cities and neighborhoods. Maybe the truck went by yesterday in some places and weeks or months ago in others. But now, it's much worse. According to officials, there's no gas for garbage trucks, which, to top things off, break down with no replacement parts available. Clinging to a shred of civic responsibility, we take out our household trash and walk for a few blocks until we find bins that aren't overflowing, leaving it where it's least obstructive.

Just a few yards from my door, you'll find one of those garbage piles, haloed by innumerable flies that have also made their way into my home. They're always riled up early in the morning, touching your arm and back and buzzing in your face while you're making coffee. I'll brush them off and shoo them away, but they come back. It doesn't matter that everything's clean. They're already inside, and you can't take your eyes off your mug or the bread you got for breakfast because they'll land on them the minute you do.

A few days ago, I heard a neighbor complain about the heat, but she would rather shut all her doors and windows than let in flies. Sometimes, I'll also leave my windows closed to keep out the stench of garbage. I'll peek out onto the street and see flies in the flower garden, landing on tall grass, bending over under their weight, as if it were a wheat stalk made up of insects instead of grains. People started setting these piles of garbage on fire, and there was smoke everywhere.

So much garbage is still there, and the temperature's rising. I wouldn't be surprised if one day there's a spontaneous combustion. That's a real thing that can happen. A few days ago, the garbage pile near my house caught fire. We heard a little explosion, and when I looked out the window, it had already started burning. I called the firefighters at 5:00 p.m. It was very windy, and the smoke cloud was spreading. A while went by, and since the firemen hadn't come, my boyfriend and I took advantage of the fact that the flames had died down a bit and doused them with buckets of water.

We thought we'd put them out, but that wasn't the case. I kept calling the emergency line. The firefighters finally arrived at 8:00 p.m. Our house smelled like smoke for days. I don't know what's more disturbing. The growing number of sleepless nights or the torture of not knowing how much longer this will last. I still haven't found an answer to the latter. To try and solve the former, the restless nights, we bought a rechargeable fan. $40 for a tiny plastic fan. My fan pretty much looks like a toy, but now I no longer wake up sweating in the middle of the night.

The sound of the spinning blades has become a sort of lullaby that helps me fall asleep, like so many people on this sweltering island. Because on blackout nights, sometimes the silence is more frightening than the darkness. I live at the end of an avenue where you used to hear loud conversations, music, and cars well past midnight. Now, the streets are empty. I don't exactly sleep like a baby. If the power comes back at 2:00 or 4:00 in the morning, I have to leap out of bed and charge everything.

Power banks, the lamp, the laptop. And if they shut it off before morning, I have to get up again and turn the rechargeable fan back on. Lately, whenever my mom or aunts message me on WhatsApp to ask me how I'm doing, I almost always answer, "I'm here." in a blackout. As if I too only ran on electricity. As if the darkness and silence were a part of me. A few nights ago, a bunch of neighbors started banging on pots and pans. I've seen countless videos on social media of these cacerolazos, but I'd never had it happen so close on my own block.

Honestly, it sounded more like a raging party than public outcry. You could hear voices yelling "Vamos!" and bang them, bang them. It felt like a kind of release, like their weariness had reached its limit. And at the same time, there was a sense of fun, of mischief. Aside from two or three notable occasions, there hasn't been a massive protest in Cuba in decades. But now, we have these cacerolazos. After about 15 minutes of outrage, the power came back on. It was probably just a coincidence, but it felt wonderful to hear shouts of joy, as if the protest had really worked.

And then a few minutes after that, the power shut back off. Nobody yelled or made any noise. A few days later, they turned the power back on at night, and it lasted until 6:00 in the morning. These were 7 hours where the fridge door was barely opened, which meant that the next morning my half-liter water bottle had completely frozen. 10 days after getting my doctor's orders, I was finally able to ice my left knee. Actor Anna Viáfanye reading a story by Eileen Sosin Martinez, whose reporting you can find in The Guardian and elsewhere.

Anna is currently starring in Sinatra on London's West End. Gabriela Muñoz Rabello translated Eileen's story from Spanish to English. Coming up, if a tree falls in a forest, could it ever possibly be murder? A crime that captivated England goes before a high court judge. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm David Kestenbaum. This week's show, trapped on a bus. People stuck in situations they cannot control and do not like. We are at Act Three. Act Three, Murder Tree Road.

Sometimes an entire country can be taken on an unexpected journey against its will. That happened in England recently, and I'm not talking about their inability to keep a Prime Minister. I'm talking about a crime so confounding, so nonsensical, people just could not wrap their heads around it. Rosa Lyster tells the story. In September 2023, a farmer called the Northumberland National Park to report a fallen tree. Not just any tree, a sycamore more than 100 years old. By some reports, the most photographed tree in Britain. It stood in the depression between two hills in the desolate landscape of the park in a gap in a stone wall.

Not just any stone wall, an especially picturesque section of Hadrian's Wall, which was built by the Romans across the narrowest part of England. Photographers went crazy for the tree. The park ranger who arrived at the scene assumed at first that it had been blown down by the high winds the night before, until he saw the cleanness of the cut. He told the BBC, "Once you realize it's been chopped down, then it's going to become a massive worldwide story." I'd never heard of the tree before it got cut down, and neither had anyone I knew.

I live in London, though. The tree was a beloved landmark of England's northeast. Its silhouette instantly recognizable to those who knew it. And, as virtually every news report would go on to stress, it had also been featured in the 1991 movie Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Even so, I was surprised to see that quite quickly the lamentation went beyond those with a personal link to the tree. People across the country began to speak of the death of the tree, calling it slaughter and comparing its loss to that of a close family member or to the death of Princess Diana.

They said they felt as if their hearts had been ripped out. They spoke of evil and desecration and named the fantastical medieval-seeming punishments that they would like to see visited on the scumbags who could have done this. Steve Blair, the manager of a nearby pub, told me about the day he truly understood that it was gone. "It was the first snowfall," he said. "You'd get people taking photographs of the tree because it's covered in snow and it looks so, so, so good. I was driving to work and as I came over the hill, you would normally see the photographers all over Sycamore Gap.

And then, on this specific day, there was no one there anymore." For about a month, nobody had any idea who had felled the tree. Then, acting on a tip, the Northumbria Police brought in two local men, a mechanic named Adam Carruthers and his friend, a tree surgeon named Daniel Graham. 6 months later, the two men appeared at Newcastle Magistrates Court. They walked in together, a united front, wearing balaclavas to avoid the cameras outside the courthouse. The two men were charged with criminal damage amounting to 623,335 pounds, over 800,000 American dollars.

According to prosecutors, this extraordinarily specific figure was arrived at in part using something called the capital asset value for amenity trees system, a method local governments use to calculate the worth of trees. Graham pleaded not guilty, while Carruthers entered no plea. In the intense media coverage that followed, reporters and commentators struggled to come up with plausible reasons why the two men, or indeed anyone on earth, would have felled the tree. Some sort of ancient act of revenge or a grievance against the local government, possibly? Was it a protest, perhaps?

Driven by very left-wing ideas or else very right-wing ones. A case could be made for either. The explanation, whatever the hell it might be, would surely emerge at trial. The Sycamore Gap trial began in late April of last year. There was Caruthers, the young family man, dressed in a shiny black suit that was too big for him, blinking and swallowing and staring hard into the middle distance. And there was Graham, gaunt and guarded and fizzing with tension. He was only a few years older than Caruthers, but looked old enough to be his dad.

A senior High Court judge, Justice Christina Lambert, had been appointed. High Court judges deal with the most serious and complicated trials in England and Wales. Many of Lambert's recent cases have involved grave crimes, of the sort that society considers unthinkable. In 2024, she was one of three senior judges appointed to consider the appeal of Lucy Letby, the nurse convicted of the murder of seven babies. Even at the start of the trial, there was talk of a prison sentence if the two men were found guilty. The atmosphere in the courtroom was notably strange, both entirely serious and entirely ridiculous.

On the press bench, reporters murmured to one another that it felt a bit like a murder trial. It didn't, though, not exactly. Nobody was dead. There were no grieving family members. I couldn't seem to keep a handle on what was at stake, what law the two men had actually broken. Between sessions, I kept having to look up the legal definition of murder to check one more time whether the term could be applied to anything other than the killing of a human being. It cannot. At other times, people in the public gallery would burst into laughter to Judge Lambert's immense and theatrical disapproval.

She had a way of peering over her spectacles. Officially, the jury was being presented with the straightforward question of criminal damage. Were Adam Crowther and Daniel Graham responsible for cutting down a sycamore by Hadrian's Wall on the night of September 27th, 2023? Unfortunately for the defendants, this turned out to be exceptionally easy to answer. To begin with, there was CCTV footage of the Range Rover driving to and from the parking lot near the tree. Graham's phone was tracked traveling to and from the site. On the same phone, the police recovered a nearly 3-minute video very dimly lit of a small figure working at the trunk of a large tree, a chainsaw droning in the background, leaning its whole weight into the job until the crackling collapse began.

They also recovered a photo of a tree wedge and a chainsaw in Graham's trunk. The two men had sent each other voice notes talking about the heaviness of the chainsaw and the amount of coverage that the crime was getting. In one of them, Graham seemed as if he would combust with elation letting Crowther know that the tree was on [ __ ] Sky News as we speak. What else? There was a selfie Graham had taken in which he is squinting into the camera looking pleased while in the background Crowther is once again sawing away with evident expertise at the trunk of a large tree.

Neither of the men held up well under questioning. It's strange to see people tell such brazen and low-effort lies in front of the international media and a high court judge. Crowther, the younger man, was by far the more amiable of the two, striving to seem tractable and reasonable while nevertheless lying flamboyantly. His approach throughout the trial was to state over and over that he had no idea who could have done it, none at all. He brought up his partner, Amy, and their two young children often.

Caruthers seemed basically ordinary. He looked scared. Graham was different, a character from another moral universe altogether. I don't know if I've ever seen a person radiate scorn more thoroughly than he did. He seemed contemptuous of everything, trees, other people, the concept of truth. He made a point of mentioning how alone he was in the world and how fine he was with this state of affairs. The press box is directly behind the witness stand, so I couldn't see his face as he spoke. But he still managed to make the back of his skinny, tattooed neck convey the suggestion that we all go and [ __ ] ourselves.

He lied beyond the point of sense or even reason, conceding that yes, that was his car at the site, and yes, the video of the tree being sawed down was on his phone, but that none of this proved a thing. He said he left his keys in his car for the use of anyone who happened to be passing by. Caruthers could have taken it. In a police interview, Graham had provided other possibilities. A stranger from nearby Carlisle or his stepdaughter's boyfriend. As far as I'm aware, he doesn't have a stepdaughter.

He said he had no interest in sycamores. I cut trees down, I don't collect them. Not everything Graham said came across as a fabrication that could be dismantled on the spot. He appeared sincere, for instance, when talking about his father's suicide and about how he and Caruthers had become friends. Caruthers had helped him fix his father's Land Rover in time for the funeral. He also didn't seem to be lying exactly when it came to the matter of the string. Under questioning, he explained that he had first heard of the sycamore sometime in 2021, when he had gone into Caruthers's workshop and asked if he could borrow a piece of string.

Caruthers refused, saying that the string had great sentimental meaning for him. Then, according to Graham, Caruthers laid the string in a circle on the floor of his workshop. He told Graham that the circumference of the circle exactly matched the trunk of the most famous tree in the world. Nobody could quite work out what to do with this story. Lawyers for both sides kept bringing it up, but no one seemed clear on how the information ought to be used. It was too weird a detail to be helpful in a courtroom, but it was also too weird to ignore, because it didn't seem like something that a person would just invent.

If he'd simply wanted to account for how he had learned of the tree's existence, Graham could have said almost anything, instead of this otherworldly business about a piece of string that contains within it the essence of a beloved tree, like something out of the Brothers Grimm. In fact, the whole thing seemed like a fairy tale that had made its way into a courtroom. It often felt as if the most important question in the courtroom was not whether Caruthers and Graham had done it, but whether they, or anyone, understood what it was that they had done.

There was a kind of collective effort to affirm that something terrible had happened, something much worse than ordinary criminal damage, much worse than simply cutting down a tree. How else to account for the ferocity of the public indignation? At one point, Caruthers said that he hadn't been able to understand what all the fuss was about. "My understanding," he said, "was that it was just a tree." The truth is that people in Britain don't really like sycamores. Gardeners go so far as to despise them. They are among the only trees in the country that are regularly referred to as weeds.

They are prolific self-seeders. One mature tree can be the parent of thousands of seedlings in a single year. They can grow almost anywhere, and they do. They are non-native, which some people have strong feelings about. The sycamore's tendency to flourish in places where plenty of other trees would wither and die might have been the reason that John Clayton, a 19th-century landowner, planted one in a gap along Hadrian's Wall. The wall, whose construction began in the year 122, was built to mark the northwestern boundary of the Roman Empire, serving as a frontier, customs post, and reminder of the reach of power.

Clayton planted the sycamore presumably because he thought it would look nice there. An isolated tree right in the middle of a dramatic dip in the landscape, the wall running steeply up each side of it, such that hikers could look down in it as they approached. Caruthers and Graham were sentenced in July. Before the sentencing, a junior counsel presented a victim impact statement. This consisted of emails and messages from members of the public, read in a loud, slow, tragic voice. She tried her best. They said things like, "I've never felt this way about any other tree." And "This feels like losing a close family member." And "RIP, beautiful tree.

I wish I'd got to meet you." Caruthers and Graham were each given 4 years and 3 months in prison. The sentence seemed weirdly over the top. When people cut down a tree in England, what usually happens is nothing. That or a fine. The sentence, Judge Lambert said, was based on a consideration of the social impact of the offense. People had loved the tree, she said, and Caruthers and Graham had destroyed it in an act of vandalism that was somehow both mindless and premeditated. According to a tree lawyer I talked to, it was the first time anyone in the United Kingdom had gone to prison for cutting down a single tree.

I only got to see the stump. I visited in late spring. It was very sunny. The remnants of the sycamore come into view as you get to the top of a slithery flight of stairs set into the bank. Then, you look down at the stump, which is in precisely the spot where it would have been good to come across a tree, a nice tall one with spreading branches, pretty old, standing totally alone in the landscape, looking like the idea of shelter. Before this, I hadn't grasped why the locals had gotten so worked up over a single tree, let alone the rest of the country.

Up close, though, their reactions made more sense. The tree had been special. And Caruthers and Graham never explained in a satisfying way why they had cut it down. Before their sentencing, they finally admitted they had done it. Caruthers said he was blackout drunk, and Graham said he was just keeping Caruthers company. The judge did not accept this explanation, and neither did anyone else. Whenever I talked to people about the trial, the explanation was pretty simple in their minds. Adam Caruthers and Daniel Graham were morons. They always said that, morons, or else mindless, or else absolutely mindless and brain dead, no?

Almost everybody said something along these lines. They wanted to believe that Caruthers and Graham had done it because they were very stupid or not thinking at all. I could understand why. The alternative and obvious explanation, that they had thought about it quite extensively, that they knew how much people had loved the tree, and had cut it down for precisely that reason, that's much more disturbing. Rosa Lister lives in London. A version of the story was first published in Harper's Magazine. Will Stevenson edited that version of the story.

Aviva DeCornfeld produced our radio version. Act four, in-flight snack. We started today's show with someone trapped on a bus, we're going to end it with someone trapped on a plane. The someone is Leticia Lehman. When she was 16, she was boarding a flight from Sao Paulo, where she lived, to Germany. When this older woman sat down next to her, and did something that Leticia still thinks about to this day. Producer Tobin Low talked to her about that strange interaction, which started as soon as she got on the plane.

I I board early. I'm sitting in my seat, which was a window seat all the way in the back of the airplane. Like close to the toilets in the back of the airplane. And eventually this lady comes and sits next to me. And she immediately starts talking to me. And I thought, oh god, no. Like I I've sat next to Yeah, I've sat next to someone who wants to chat. I really don't want to chat. Um but you know, my parents like taught me to be polite to my elders, so I'm kind of nodding along to what she's saying, and and trying not to engage or like show too much interest, but also not be rude.

Yeah, what is she saying to you when she sits down? First she's got her She's got this bag with her, and she's like taking all of these things out of her bag and like looking for something, and she kept apologizing that she was looking for something, and then she pulled out this huge rosary. And she's like, "Okay, now I've got it." And then she starts telling me, like, "I'm quite nervous because this is my first time on an airplane." Oh, no. And I said, "Oh, okay." And she said, "Yeah." And she was from somewhere in the countryside and had taken like a bus for 18 hours or something to get to São Paulo to fly out.

And she was flying out because her daughter had gone to Germany for work and had met a German man and was getting married. And so, they had sent her the tickets to come to the wedding. But But she's going on and on, and I could tell she was quite nervous because she she kept fidgeting with the rosary, and she's just talking. And And then she couldn't put on her seatbelt, so I'm like helping her with her seatbelt. And so, she says to me at that point, "Is I'm I'm Can I ask you for a favor?" And I said, "Sure." And she said, "Can I hold your hand?" And I would I you know, I thought it was a bit awkward, but I said, "Okay, sure." So, I'm sitting in the window seat.

She was sitting to my left. So, I gave her my my left hand, and she held on really, really tight with her right hand. And this is before the plane has even taken off? Yes, we're starting to taxi very slowly towards the runway. She had her rosary in her left hand, and she's holding my hand, and she had her eyes closed, and she was praying under her breath. Like, I could see hear her praying under her and it was like Our Father. And then as the plane starts picking up speed and we're going down the runway, she she just switches to saying, like, "Oh my god.

Oh my god." And then as the the wheels sort of lift from the runway, you know, you get that feeling a little bit in your stomach. Uh-huh. And she just turns around and bites me really hard in the forearm. Wait, she she bites you? Yes, she lifted the hand that was holding my hand and sort of bit into my forearm really hard. Where did she bite you? Close to my elbow, kind of. Oh, so like a meaty part of the arm. Yeah. Yeah. Um and she didn't She didn't let go for a bit, so I was yelling and and she kind of had her teeth in me.

How hard did she bite you, would you say? So So, I she did not break my skin. There was no blood. Well, that's good. Would you say it was as hard as maybe you would need to bite into a soft piece of bread? More like an apple, I think. Oh, so some snap to it. Yeah. And it was quite sudden, as well. What do you do when she bites onto you? I let out this really loud like shout, like a yell. Um Understandable. Not like a sustained yell, but like a really loud ow, like kind of noise.

Uh-huh. Um loud enough that the people who were sort of in the row in front of us and behind us and across from us all kind of turned around. Like I could see their heads turning in my direction to see what happened. One of them had leaned and seen that she was biting me and sort of shouted out like you know, she's biting her. At which point this lady let go, um stopped biting me, and also let go of my hand, and just started immediately apologizing profusely and saying, you know, I I don't know why I did that.

I'm so sorry. I I've never done that before. And I just kept saying, no, it's okay. Don't worry. It's fine. It's all fine." And she just kept going on and on, and that made it worse. And then the seatbelt signs go off, and it it makes that like pling noise, and a stewardess comes rushing to our seat. And was like, "What happened?" And again, the person who had seen the bite leans over and says, "That lady bit that girl." Like, I didn't say anything. Uh-huh. And the stewardess was like, "Is that true?" And the lady goes, "Yes, yes, it's true.

I bit her." And I wanted to say like, "No, nothing happened." Oh, no. But the woman was like confessing, you know, she was like, "No, I did it, and I I I don't know why I did it, and I'm so sorry I did it. I've never done that before." I mean, I felt embarrassed in a way, and I just I don't like attention. I'm a fairly introverted person. So, it was making me very uncomfortable. I just wanted to listen to my music, and like put on my sleeping mask, and you know, ignore all of this.

The stewardess then says to me, "Can I speak to you privately?" Sort of in the back of the airplane, in the galley where they keep their drinks and stuff. Mhm. So, I followed her back there, and she was like, "Look, um do you want to report this incident? Because you have been sort of physically assaulted. Oh, no. So, you do have the option if we want, you we can call the captain, and he will turn the plane around." And I just said to her like, "No, absolutely not.

Like, don't worry. Everything is fine. But, um if you have another empty seat, maybe I could move?" Oh, they had to have done that for you, right? Did they They must have moved your seat. No, she was like, "Oh, um the flight is fully booked." No. And because I think I was a teenager as well, I I I just said, "Okay." You know, I didn't I I didn't argue the point. So, then I just went back to my seat. Can you remind me how long is this flight again?

It's about 12 hours. And this all happened in within the first few minutes of the flight. That's so long. [clears throat] It was a very long flight. So, you're trapped next to her, basically. Like you're stuck next to this woman who's bit you. What did that feel like? It was clear to me that she felt terrible. Um and that she was still frightened. You know, she was she did not sleep a wink on that flight and neither did I. I could tell that she felt really bad.

You know, she was still praying and just sort of mumbling to herself quite a bit. This poor woman, she kind of coiled in like on herself. And once I kind of turned my my back a little sideways, she did the same sort of facing out into the aisle. Uh-huh. So, it was clear to me that she would not want more physical contact. Or at least I felt that way. She didn't seem like a threat. Did you make any conversation after that point? No, absolute silence the whole way.

Were you tempted at all to say something? No. I I like I couldn't I couldn't think of what I would say. As you were approaching landing, were you thinking that there might be an interaction moment or you might say something to each other? I thought she would apologize again. Uh-huh. I really did. I thought that like when she stood up she would say like, "Oh, and and again, I'm so sorry." So, I had my whole little like, "Don't worry about it." spiel ready. But she really didn't.

She just uh she took her time trying to get all her things back in her purse and then she she got up and left. I got to boarding school. I had this really cool story to tell that no one else would have had. Mhm. But the more I told it sort of the more uncomfortable I got because a lot of people's reactions were like yeah, what a crazy woman and what was she thinking and I started to kind of feeling bad for her. I kept thinking like what would it take for me to feel that scared that I would actually bite someone.

Mhm. And I've I had at that point never been that scared in my life. I mean, how do you think about her now? There's a kind of almost like fondness there. Isn't that funny how sometimes when you get stuck in a situation with someone, especially something that's hard or long, that stuckness makes you feel like you're comrades almost or like you were Yeah. You shared something. Yeah, and we shared something very unusual. It was just a very bizarre set of circumstances. Leticia Lemon talking to Tobin Low, who's a producer on our show.

[singing] Our program today was produced by Dana Chivis, who also produced Amon's story in act one and Eileen's story in act two. Ira Glass edited the show. The people who put together today's program include Pia Berend, Cassie Howley, Valerie Kipnis, Adrian Lily, Seth Lind, Molly Marcello, Andrea Marks, Katherine Raimondo, Stone Nelson, Nadia Reman, Isabel Rule, Ruby Schwartz, Alyssa Ship, Ike Swis Kandaraja, Christopher Swetala, Daphne Toles, and Diane Wu. Our managing editor is Sara Abdurrahman, senior editor Nancy Updike, our executive editor is Emmanuel Berry. Special thanks today to Katherine Hancing, Michael Bustamante, and Matthew Steinberg.

Our website thisamericanlife.org where you can stream our archive of nearly 900 episodes for absolutely free. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks as always to our show's host Ira Glass, who mysteriously took off for a few weeks, then I ran into him behind the counter of a Starbucks. He seemed happy. Part-time job. I'm David Kestenbaum. Ira will be back next week with more stories of This American Life. Let's get lost, baby, and take our own time. That's the love.

We never ever want to get burned. Take our own