This week we present two stories from people who found adventure when on their own.

Part 1: Shawn Hercules is a successful gospel radio deejay in Barbados, but he dreams of a different kind of life in science.

Shawn Hercules is currently a Biology Ph.D. candidate at McMaster University. He investigates the epidemiology and genetics of an aggressive form of breast cancer disproportionately affecting women of African ancestry. After moving to Canada from the island of Barbados, Shawn quickly got involved with Let’s Talk Science and communicating science via social media (@shawnhercules) and most recently co-produced and participated in the first ever "Science is a Drag” show presenting science in drag!

Part 2: Emma Young feels ready for her first real job in science, surveying northern spotted owls, until she encounters some unexpected fears.

Emma Young is a Knauss Marine Policy Fellow with the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Washington, DC. She moonlights as a PhD candidate and science communicator at the University of Missouri - Saint Louis, where she studies avian malaria. She enjoys hoarding plants and shouting about how much she loves science, and she is the founder of Science Distilled, a bi-monthly science happy hour in St. Louis. She tweets @emyoung90.

Episode Transcript

Part 1: Shawn Hercules

So I’m living in Barbados. You know, where Rihanna is from. We actually went to high school together. Fun fact. Anyways, I am fresh out of undergrad and I’m wondering about what my next steps are. Will I go into medicine? Will I stay in science? Like what are my next steps? Can I do both?

I’m just wondering about all of these things so I just take a break from studying and I continue working as a deejay, a gospel radio deejay in Barbados.

I’m quite known and quite popular within the Barbadian community and the Christian community there. Pretty much everyone knows me there.

So I’m going along my way and after one of my interviews on the radio, I talk with this couple. They tell me about this Master of Public Health Program. And though this isn’t directly related to science, I say, “Yeah, this definitely piques my interest,” as it’s somewhat related to medicine and I could go into medicine as a pathway from this.

So I apply to the Master of Public Health program. I get accepted. I finish it. And now I land my first job as a research assistant on a health-related project. I’m really excited. It’s my first office space. I have a cubicle. I have workmates. I have this cool project. I’m really pumped about it as I've always been curious and my curiosity has always led me to try to answer all sorts of questions in science, health, whatever.

Shawn Hercules shares his story with the Story Collider audience at Burdock Brewery in Toronto, ON in October 2019. Photo by Stacey McDonald.

So I’m pumped about it, however, things are not going amazingly in my love life. I have this relationship. It’s been three years and it’s ending pretty awfully at the moment. But with support of my family and my friends, my workmates, I’m making it alone.

So throughout all of this time, I decide to just take a break from it all, because, in addition to all of this happening, I’m also feeling as though I might reach a plateau. Because it’s in Barbados, it’s so small, there are so few options for me to excel academically.

I also am not fully comfortable. I can’t be myself. You see, the person I was dating at the time was a man. I couldn’t necessarily be open about that as a Christian celebrity in Barbados.

So I just got invited to LA and I decide to just step away from all of this and go to LA. Now, I’m in LA. Tall trees, fast, expensive cars, the fashion. People are walking with little dogs in their bags and I’m like, “Oh, my God. I can live here. Why am I still living in Barbados? I need to get out.” I feel stifled and I just need to get out of here.

So I’m standing in the middle of Santa Monica and I’m like, “No. I need to get out.”

So I rush to my hotel room. I turn on my lamp at the computer desk. I pour a glass of wine and I start typing away feverishly looking for PhD programs at UCLA, of course, because I love LA.

I am looking for professors, scholarships, the entire works, and not just in LA. I’m looking in Taiwan, Australia, just to let you know how desperate I was to leave Barbados behind.

Three weeks go by. I’m back in Barbados now. I’m still looking for PhD programs to no avail. I’m exhausted. I’m just looking and finding nothing. Professors don’t really have money for international students, right?

I eventually just give up at this point and I make a simple prayer to God. I say, “God, if I’m going to do a PhD, I’m leaving it up to you. You are going to send it to me. I’m not looking for the right intentions anyway. I’m trying to find a way out of Barbados. But if I’m doing a PhD, I should do it because I really want to and not just to get out of Barbados.

So I'll continue doing my thing and you do what you're doing up there, but I'm leaving it up to you.”

So I’m doing my thing. Three months have gone by. I’m making excellent progress. I’m about to prepare my first manuscript with my workmates. It’s a really exciting time.

Three months go by and I’m at the university in this place I wouldn’t usually be. I randomly bump into one of my professors from undergrad.

We exchanged pleasantries. We’re both surprised to see each other at this particular point. Then we talk about what I’m doing, what she's doing, the work that I’m doing and how much I love it.

And then she says, “Well, Shawn, there's this professor from Canada that I know. Maybe you can exchange email addresses and talk about your next steps, your career, because I know Barbados is quite small and not many opportunities for you to excel academically.”

So I said, “Okay, yeah. Great. Thank you.” So we exchanged contact information.

A few hours after that, I found myself in the same place, actually, and she was there also, both in passing. And we both looked at each other in surprise and we laughed like, “What are you doing here?”

She then told me that the professor from Canada that she was talking about earlier was actually in her office like at that same moment. So she said, “Do you want to chat with this professor?”

Honestly, I was really hungry, like so hungry. I had a lunch date and I had no plans to be going to talk to anyone from Canada, or anyone, period.

So I said, “Yes.” So all these thoughts are going through my mind but I still said yes.

I eventually walked with her. I go to her office, nice, cozy office. Gently lit. There are papers all over her desk that she has to grade. And across from her desk there's this woman with short hair, a bright orange shirt, warm smile and personality. I’m assuming that this is the professor from Canada.

So we gently talked. We exchanged what we’re both doing. I talk about my research. She talks about hers and the amazing project she's working on with breast cancer in black women across the globe.

And I’m thinking, “Wow, this is such an amazing project.”

We continue talking and, at some point, she looks me dead in the eyes and says, “Shawn, I think you'd be a great fit for my lab. Do you want to start your PhD in September?”

I’m like, “What? Okay, yeah. Sure. Do you mean September of next year? Because right now it’s May.”

And she said, “No, this year.”

And I’m like, “What? Yeah, okay. Yeah, sure. Sign me up.”

But in my mind it’s like, “How am I going to do this? How am I going to apply for this PhD program in just four months?”

So it takes me some time. I’m thinking about this because I haven't been at a hard molecular science lab in three years at this point, so it’s taking me some time about if I really, really want to do this.

I finally come to the decision. I send in my very, very late application and I’m very nervous about this. But I eventually get accepted to McMaster University for graduate school.

No, this didn’t just land on my lap, though. I still had to go through the appropriate channels of being interviewed by Dr. Daniel. I still had to send in my grades to be accepted to the, now, most research-intensive university in Canada, and I was so nervous about everything, but we did it.

So now, I’m in Canada and a lot of things are going through my mind. I’m so far away from my family. The food is different. The temperature, I've never experienced winter. All of these things are going through my mind.

On the flip side, I’m also thinking, “You know what, Shawn? Canada, there are endless opportunities there for you career-wise. And you could also be yourself. You can hold hands on the street with whoever you want to. You can kiss whoever you want to. You can do anything without anyone knowing or feeling any kind of shame or embarrassment. No one knows you.”

I remember vividly my first ever drag show in Canada. I just stood in that room looking around and I’m seeing drag queens with the full face of makeup. They're splitting on the floor. They're dancing and I’m like, “What is this?” I was so uncomfortable because I've never been in an environment like that, because I’m coming from the small Christian conservative island and I’m in a room with drag. So it was a very stark difference for me. I just stood there for like about an hour until I fully felt comfortable and accustomed with that environment.

I went from that in 2015 to co-producing and performing in the first ever Science is a Drag show in Canada. I remember, about to step on that stage, and I was covered from head to toe, bedazzled in rhinestones, six-inch heels, a bodysuit, about to lip sync to my fave Robyn Rihanna Fenty.

I felt so liberated, so confident, so comfortable and ready to talk about my science in drag.

So here I am now, this Bajan boy has made it through four winters unscathed. Yeah, I did it.

And my prayer was answered. I realized this, that my prayer was answered, that small prayer I made in LA. I didn’t even notice it when I met the professor, Dr. Daniel, but I noticed it when I moved here. There was one day I was in the lab just doing experiments and it dawned on me that my prayer had an answer and I’m so, so thankful for that.

I can be whoever I want to be. I've learned that the path less travelled is hard but so, so worth it. I've also learned to accept all parts of me: the great parts, the not-so-great parts, the odd and the queer parts, and just being comfortable with myself. This was all done through the support of my supervisor, Dr. Daniel, my lab mates, my friends, and I’m forever grateful for that.

So I've made it through my first year here because of them and I’m about to make it through my last.

Part 2: Emma Young

The summer of 2010, I arrived in the Goosenest Ranger District to survey Northern Spotted Owls. I was there on behalf of the Forest Service. They needed to know where the owls were nesting because they're a threatened species, because the Forest Service cuts down trees. You see where I'm going. So this is where I came in, right? I'm the person who's supposed to find the owls.

I arrived and we're in the tippy-top, smack center of Northern California. It's like grass, trees, rocks, hills and really not a lot else going on.

I'd driven across country from New York for this job. This was my first real big job in college. It wasn't bagel slicing or camp counseloring, which is what my previous work experience was, and I was really excited. You know I was going to put this work into my Biology degree I was getting. Little did I know what I was getting into at the time. A lot of school after college for that.

Emma Young shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Caveat in New York City in September 2019. Photo by Zhen Qin.

I was this badass bitch because I just learned how to drive stick so I could drive the big forest service trucks, which I did. And I got my first pair of cargo pants, which is a very important time for a biologist when they get their first pair of cargo pants. So many pockets. I was just really excited and felt mature. Ready to go. I was going to get NatGeo all up in Northern California.

So on the first day I arrived, I was unpacking in my government-issued, double-wide trailer. Yes, biology is very glamorous. And I was unpacking and I hear a knock on my door. My roommate wasn't supposed to arrive for another two days and I had literally hadn't met a single other person, didn't know anybody so I didn't know who to expect when I opened the door.

I open the door and it's this big redheaded dude who says he… I actually don't remember his name so I'm just going to call him the firefighter, because he says he's a firefighter for the Forest Service. He lives across the street and he'd seen me unpacking.

Before I even had my footing in the conversation, I was like, “What’s happening?” He asked me if I wanted to get dinner that night, down the road in Doris, which is like the nearest human habitation. We are living in, literally, the middle of nowhere. You know, just to get pizza or whatever. I sort of reflexively say yes because it's good to make friends. I didn't know anybody. Didn't want to be rude. So, yeah, we make plans for that night.

I didn't think too much about it. I had like some slight misgivings as he was walking away, because I realized I didn't know if he meant like dinner with a fun group of firefighters, yes, please, or just dinner with him. It's good to make friends. So I had these sort of misgivings, but whatever.

He shows up at dusk as we planned and it was indeed just him in the truck. So I get in and as we turn onto the lonely stretch of highway that connects our outpost to the rest of the world, I see that this road is straight as a pin and through miles of quickly darkening nothingness.

So we turn onto the road and, as he's driving, he starts telling me about himself. He just sort of keeps going.

He was twice my age. He had been in the army. He had been dishonorably discharged for beating someone with a broom handle, so I'm like, “Jesus Christ.” He had spent time in prison. So at this point I'm like, “Fuck. Okay.” And he was a “reformed” neo-nazi.

I remembered how I was this cargo pants-wearing, badass bitch that morning but now I just felt really stupid for getting into his car. You laugh but I was terrified.

So I felt this fear and I knew that I should do something to take control in that situation but I just sort of felt frozen. I just sort of list the facts that… I'm a scientist, right? List the facts just to keep plugged into what's happening.

So nobody knows where I am or who I'm with. I don't know where Doris is so I don't know if he's actually taking me where he says he's going. It's so vacant in the valley and it's very dark at night. There's literally not one person that I can call to come pick me up.

This guy is twice my size easily and I have nothing. No skills to defend myself with. There's a pocket knife in my purse that I don't really know how to use. So those are my assets in that moment.

And I don't really remember a lot of the next hour or so. What I do remember is that we did indeed make it to Doris and we did indeed eat really, really terrible pizza. And my memory kind of checks back in. I had this loop of concepts playing in my head, these facts over and over again. And my memory checks back in when he drops me back off my trailer completely unharmed. He didn't lay a finger on me at all.

I go inside and I lock the door and I kind of slide to the floor, just absolutely shocked to be alive. I thought my murder had finally arrived, and I was fine.

I was appalled at myself, right? Because I thought I was this badass but I didn't even have the self‑preservation to… well, I didn't know what to do in the moment when the moment arrived and then I didn't even have the self-preservation to do something about it when we really got to this restaurant with other people. I was just like, “Okay,” and then got back into his car.

And I just felt like this warm cloak that college had wrapped around me of safety and security and all these good things had been ripped violently away, and the world was big and it was scary and I was an idiot and didn't know what I was doing. So I felt small and I felt afraid and I felt really angry at myself for putting myself in that situation.

I started working for the Forest Service the next night, and I say night because owls are awake at night. You got to go to the owls, so you work at night. What our work mostly involved was driving down these forest roads in the mountains around the valley and we would stop at predetermined call points, as what they were called, because you'd stop and you’d play owl calls out of your truck and you'd wait for a response. If the owl sang back at you, you'd be like owls are here, and then you’d do other stuff later, but whatever.

That's what most of our work was and I loved it. Owls are so freakin’ cool, you guys. I have one tattooed on my back now. It's a whole thing. Everyone thinks it's Hedwig, whatever. It's not. Basic ass owl, whatever. Yeah, I went there. I love Harry Potter. Anyway, whatever.

But sometimes we couldn't access call points because they were on deserted roads that you couldn't drive down anymore. So when that would happen, we would get out of the truck and we'd walk to the call points and bring our speaker with us. And nothing made me feel as small and as insignificant as hiking through this inky black wilderness. I mean, I've never been so remote up to this point in my life.

I've been so excited to explore those mountains when I had arrived just a few days ago in my cargo pants and the whole thing, and now I just felt like I was afraid of the dark or something. In a matter of days I had spanned that transition, so I was having like an identity crisis.

The owls were cool and that kind of kept me on board. Also, I'd driven across the country, right? This was my big moment. I was leaving the nest to do cool things and be a scientist. So I was like, “All right. We got to just buckle down like I'm going to get this done.”

So younger or more inexperienced members of the team, me, were paired with older and more senior members, what-have-you. That's how I met Matt for the first time.

Around the time that I met him, I wasn't sure what to think of him. He was really funny and sarcastic. He always had a baseball hat on. I think he dipped. He had like chewing tobacco, which I was like, okay. So I didn't know what to think of him.

But pretty soon after I met him, I witnessed him chopping the head off of a rattlesnake with a shovel, and I was like, “Damn, Matt. That's cool.”

So I started thinking like he might be a good person to ask about self-defense. I knew that he hiked every weekend alone hunting bears with his dog Banjo. Again, Matt, like that's pretty legit. But I was too embarrassed to be like, “Hey, there, sailor. I noticed you're a cool hand with an edged weapon. Care to show a gal how to stab a man in the face?”

Just girly things, you know. I didn't want to seem like the weak link in our professional relationship. I didn't want to seem unprofessional. I didn't want to seem vulnerable. So instead I asked about self-defense from wildlife.

Basically, he was super excited and he was like, “Absolutely. I know lots of stuff.”

So within a couple of minutes of my request, he was cheerfully teaching me how to shove my pocketknife into the eye socket of a 150-pound mountain lion, an imaginary one, obviously. And it turns out it's really easy. You just stab and you twist and you pop, and then the eye is out. Ladies, listen up.

I was afraid of animals at first. I felt this primitive fear reawakened walking through the blackness of the California wilderness that I have already mentioned. It was just me and Matt and this crackling radio that we had connecting us to the outside world. There was not even cell service. So I felt this fear of being stalked, of worrying that outside the beam of my flashlight there were invisible eyes watching me. It's a very real and very innate fear, and I felt it reawakened.

But, as I said, tamp it down. Got to do your job.

As the summer wore on, I learned what mountain lion habitat looks like. It's very specific so you know where there might be mountain lions, where there probably aren't. Bears are wusses. Black bears are like just total pushovers. Not a big deal at all.

So I started realizing I wasn't exactly afraid of animals because I was the one intruding where they live, and I was loud and clumsy and animals don't want anything to do with that so they just get out of the way.

So as the summer wore on, I stopped looking for eye shine in the dark. But when I would feel nervous, I would hold my knife in my pocket and I would remember ‘stab, twist and pop’ and I'd feel better for a while.

But that stalking sensation never went away. I was really confused because I was like, okay. I know how to use my knife now. I'm out with Matt. I'm not afraid of lions or bears. I should feel in control, but I really didn't. And I couldn't really place why.

Then partway through the summer we were walking to a call point that wasn't accessible by a car, so my favorite. I'm super on guard, like feeling real tense. And my flashlight beam picks up something in the road or the path I guess in front of us that we’re walking down. So I go to inspect and I see that it's a shoe print. Perfect. Recent. As if a person had stood there and evaporated.

And that single, seemingly inconsequential thing, you know that the footprint was leading in the direction we were walking and I didn't see any footprints coming back out. It froze me with fear. I was just like, “Fuck, I'm not afraid of animals in the woods. I'm afraid of people.”

Because, like I said before, animals are predictable. You know what's up. You can get data and figure out where they're at and what they're doing and you can expect how they'll react to you. But the behavior of a person is much harder to place. If you run into a person in the woods at night, the list of benign reasons they might be there is very short. There's hunting, camping, hiking. Those are all kind of interrelated. That's about it, where we were anyway.

And the list of scary reasons is so much longer. And if you ran into someone you really had nowhere… or if I ran into someone, there was no way of me knowing. That really made me feel like prey, essentially. But, you know, push it down. Push it down. Got to keep working. Got to keep working.

And we did know people were around. We'd had training to recognize a meth trash. I'm serious. And marijuana grow operations, both perils of the backwoods and usually involving people who might be threatening you in some way. We had special radio channels to keep in touch with the Forest Service and other folks for our safety, and we worked in pairs, which is why I was always out with Matt. This was all for our safety. So we have all this training but we never really saw anything more definite than that footprint.

A few weeks after the footprint and all this other stuff, towards the end of the summer we had a meeting before work and we were warned to keep an eye out for a station wagon. It had been sighted around the mountain where we were working, our mountains, and it seemed like somebody was living out of it on the old forest roads.

The report really gave me goose bumps because you know this wasn't like a beautiful place that took your breath away. You know you're coming up from San Francisco after a hard week and you want to have fresh air. It was like dry, very remote, not very beautiful, no gushing waterfalls, no beautiful this and that. It was very fire prone. I just couldn't imagine what type of person would want to be up there alone night after night in the dark.

A few days after that, Matt and I were driving to a call point at night and our headlights pick up a glint in the road ahead of us. It's the station wagon, obviously, because of course it would be. So we drive by it really slowly. We're kind of cruising to see what's going on expecting to see a person camped out in the back of it, but it was empty. We sort of paused to radio in our find to headquarters.

While we're waiting for a response, I sort of reach over really casually and lock the doors of our truck. I felt like I was in a horror movie and I was peeking through my fingers waiting for the jump scare, but it was my life.

So we get a response from HQ. The radio crackles and they tell us with no uncertain terms to vacate the area immediately and to conduct no further call points on that route.

I turned to Matt and I asked him where the person whose car this might be if they're not with their vehicle in the middle of the night? I expected him to laugh or brush it off, which is kind of his way. He had a really older-brotherly sort of vibe, but he just looked out into the dark that was pressing in on our truck. I just look kind of wildly around into the trees expecting to see a human shape watching us from the woods, but I couldn't see anything. And I just felt like my foot was dangling off the edge of my bed but I couldn't pull it back under the covers.

I grabbed my knife in my pocket, ‘stab, twist and pop’, but it didn't help.

Then I looked over at Matt. I really looked at him and he wasn't afraid exactly but he was definitely perturbed. I kind of was like maybe encountering people where they shouldn't be in the woods is like a serious thing, right? Matt was taking it seriously. The Forest Service was taking it seriously.

There are all these preventative measures to protect us, so maybe my own fear wasn't this shameful thing that I had to hide all the time. I had been feeling this small, shamefulness around that fear the entire summer, ever since I've been in the firefighter’s truck and I felt so helpless. I put myself into harm's way that day and I'd been carrying that fear and that guilt around with me in the forest, hiding it, and it was so heavy.

But the fear that I was feeling was a natural response to a perceived threat. And that learning that I had done was as concrete a thing you could do is learning how to use a knife to stab and twist and pop.

So I turned to Matt and I said, “Hey, I'm really freaked out by that.” And instead of poking fun at me or teasing or whatever, Matt just told me stories about nothing while we drove to a call point on a different route.

When we arrived, he looked over at me. I think we both knew that I was still really afraid. But I grabbed my knife, I got my ass out of the truck and stepped into the dark. Thank you.