Dune Boy

Back in 2013, the sand dunes of Michigan City, Indiana swallowed a six-year-old boy. It took rescuers nearly 4 hours to dig him out of 12 feet of sand. It was a phenomenon that scientists hadn't studied in-depth. But Facebook recreational naturalists were on the case.

In this episode of Endless Thread, producer Grace Tatter and host Ben Brock Johnson go down an internet rabbit hole and bring bring us an explanation of what happened, the coexistence of miracles and science and even the including the six-year-old boy who's now an adult.

"We're pro-portal and we're pro- tree hole," Ben says. "Basically anywhere there's space, we want to explore it."

Show notes

___

This content was originally created for audio. The transcript has been edited from our original script for clarity. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.

G: OK Ben.

B: OK Grace.

G: Let's play some word association.

B: My favorite. Let’s go.

G: I'm going to describe a beach for you. OK, so close your eyes maybe.

B: Love it. OK.

G: So you can picture like, turquoise water that turns into a deeper blue where it meets the horizon. Let’s say it’s a cloudless, sunny day.

B: Hey, Grace, can you, um, can you, pass me the Pina colada?

G: Gentle waves lapping on to a wide ribbon of pristine sand. And then dunes, dotted with green beach grass, rolling down the coast for miles and miles. What are some words that come to mind? You’ve already given me a few.

B: You know, like a beach commercial, Grace's nightmare vacation with her colleague. Um, yeah, that's a, that's what I got.

G: Maybe peaceful, idyllic.

B: Yes. Absolutely. Peaceful, idyllic, Pina colada. Yep.

G: And, if you had to guess, where do you think this beach is?

B: Oh, maybe, Southern Portugal, the Caribbean. You, you pick Grace. Wherever you want to go, I'll be there.

G: The beach I have in mind is actually — believe it or not-- in Indiana. Did you even know that Indiana has beaches? I feel like a lot of people don’t. And so it’s hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean. That turquoise water is Lake Michigan. And the beach is at the foot of the tallest dune in our newest national park, the Indiana Dunes. It's called Mt. Baldy.

B: Okay. The only thing more confusing than having a beach in Indiana is that Indiana also has a place called Michigan City. So this is all very disorienting.

G: There’s a lot going on. I visited recently though and can confirm, it is a pretty peaceful place. Or at least, it seems to be.

(scary/foreboding mux)

Erin: Normally it really is just a pile of sand. But once dunes get disturbed and start moving then they can bury anything in their path.

B: This took a turn.

G: Oh yeah. Mt. Baldy is on the move. It's eating up parking lots. And bathrooms. And it once even swallowed a little boy. I'm Grace Tatter.

B: And I'm Ben Brock Johnson

G: And you're listening to Endless Thread, lurching to you from the shore of WBUR, Boston's NPR Station.

B: And today's episode.

G: Dune Boy.

Erin: It was a hot day, actually. It was the first day that we actually got a full round of complete data. And I remember we finished, you know, somewhere around like three o'clock and we were so happy.

G: This is Erin Argylan. She's a geoscientist. And I recently talked to her at the Douglas Nature Center, the gateway to the Indiana National Dunes in Gary. Back in 2013, she was a professor at Indiana University Northwest. She was seven-and-a-half months pregnant.

B: Which is pretty pregnant, we would say.

G: Yeah. So, Erin was packing up for the day when she and her students saw a big commotion.

Erin: and I'm thinking, 'no, we just finished, we got all of our data. Like it's been a great day. No, no, no interference.' I could see from quite a far distance that she, the people were extremely agitated. They were digging. She, you could tell from the body language that everybody was really flustered and it was really chaotic. They were screaming that, Their son had been buried in the, in a hole and he was in the ground and it just looked like sand. So it was a really chaotic situation. And they said he had been buried alive and 'get help and dig, dig, dig.'

B: Wow. This has gone from beach to absolute nightmare in a matter of minutes. This is wild.

G: Yeah, it's pretty scary stuff. The little boy's name was Nathan Woessner. He was six--years-old. His family had driven to the dunes from their home in Central Illinois. And they were climbing up to the top of Mt. Baldy when the grown-ups looked back Nathan was just  gone. Vanished. There was no visible sign of him at all.

Grace: Like if you didn't know, if there was no commotion, you wouldn't, nothing would've looked amiss about the dune?

Erin: No. It just looked like sand again and some people liked to say right after it happened that maybe there was a little divot in the sand, but honestly, you can have so many ripples and bumps in sand. I would not have thought that anything was out of the ordinary.

G: OK, Ben. Vanishing six-year-old. Large sand dune. What are your theories?

B: Hmm. Well, as the parent of two six-year-olds, I would start by guessing that they immediately got themselves in into some sort of pickle. A vanishing six-year-old, large sand dune. I mean like, maybe like part of the dune, some of the dune sort of like collapsed and covered him up or something. That would be my guess.

G: OK.

B: You know what I mean? Like when a pile of sand can like slip down and, you know what I mean, from the top.

G: Like a mudslide, but a sand slide.

B: Either that, or as again, as the parent of six-year-olds, I would guess that they like saw a sign for popsicles and were immediately drawn to that sign or something, you know what I mean? They, they like sensed snacks in the area and then just ran directly towards the snacks.

G: So despite being a dune expert, Erin was just as much at a loss as you seem to be. When it comes to possible theories for the missing six-year-old. You mentioned a sand slide. I don't know if that's actually a thing. Think about digging a hole in dry sand. What happens?

B: Mm. You're not, you're usually not very successful. Um, 'cause like there's nothing Is it just sort of like, keeps filling up, I guess. Um. You know, it's just not really, like if you're at a beach and you're digging a hole like a beach where there's water, so be it. But if you're just digging in sand, it's, you're not gonna, it's not gonna go well.

G: Exactly. Because, sand doesn't just crater, right? Like you need to pack it down with some water to get it maintain, to maintain its shape. But the Woessners were high up on Mt. Baldy. It's really tall, it's like 12 stories tall. So they were far away from the lake. The sand where they were was totally dry.

B: 12 stories tall. That's – wow OK.

G: They don't call it “Mount” for nothing.

B: I guess not.

G: Have you ever seen the movie "Lawrence of Arabia?"

B: Mm. Only parts of it when my father-in-law is the one controlling the television, and I can't stop him.

G: Maybe, I don't know if one of the parts that you have seen is the scene in which a little boy gets sucked into a dune in the desert.

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA sound of kid getting sucked into a sand dune 

G: It's very dramatic. And sad. Except for dune scientists like Erin, they've always made fun of it because something like this is supposed to be impossible. People just don't fall into dunes or get sucked into dry sand. So Erin couldn't understand how this was happening.

Erin: Nothing was making sense in my mind. I often say, 'yes, I have a PhD in environmental and earth sciences,' but all of a sudden I feel like everything I knew just failed me because I couldn't make sense of thinking that there was a child that was buried. And so far down that. It would've collapsed on top of him and looked like nothing.

Grace: Was there a part of you when they were like, he's in there, was there a part of you thinking like, nah, maybe not. Maybe he's hiding someplace else because this just seems so unlikely?

Erin: If I were a six-year-old kid, I would think it was really funny to hide behind something and make people look for me. So it did definitely cross my mind that maybe he was hiding somewhere and that was of course what we were hoping for.

G: But he wasn't hiding. He was down there. They dug for Nathan for nearly four hours.

B: I will say this is the kind of thing that immediately turns my stomach, Grace, right? If someone get buried alive, usually digging for four hours that is usually not a story with a happy ending.

Erin: When I left that night, they said it was going to be a recovery, not a rescue. And anyone that I talked to that experienced people being buried in sand from digging holes or anything like that so that people just do not survive.

CBS News: Absolute miracle. That is what a deputy coroner is saying about a six-year-old boy who survived the collapse of a sand dune in northern Indiana. . . 

G: When they finally found Nathan, his body was cold. According to news reports at the time, first responders couldn’t find a pulse. He had to spend several days in the hospital. But a few weeks later, he was totally fine. His parents told reporters that he didn't even really remember what had happened. Erin saw the news on TV, and was, of course, immensely relieved. But no less confused.

Erin: I called many other scientists and everyone said, there's no way that can happen.

G: Some people suggested, 'oh, he must've dug a hole, and then fell into it.'

B: I mean, six-year-olds do be digging holes for sure.

G: Yeah, but the hole Nathan fell into was more than 11 feet deep.

B: Yeah. The six-year-olds don't have the attention span for 11 feet. I don't think.

G: Yeah, I would say it's beyond the scope of even the most prodigious six-year-old.

Erin: If you wanna dig in dry sand and get deep enough to fully bury a person, you really have to go like at least three times as wide. So to get that deep, we would've. He was found more than 10 feet down, so it would've had to be like a 30 foot wide hole. And we had been there all day. So there was just no way that somebody could have actually dug this hole.

G: So the scientific community was not super helpful.

Erin: I was asking everyone and they said it just didn't happen. And I was there and it did happen.

G: But then Erin saw a post from a non-scientist on the internet that cracked the whole case open. More on that after the break.

[Sponsor Break]

G: OK. Before the break, we had just gotten to Erin finding a lead after scientists and scientific journals yielded nothing in her quest to figure out a six-year-old boy got swallowed by a dune. And, Ben, this is where the Internet comes in, lest you think that I forgot that this is a podcast about the Internet.

B: You would never. I'm ready. Let’s go online.

G: OK. So Erin sees a post from a woman in Oregon.

Dina: I'm Dina Pavlis, and I, I don't know how you want me to, like what kind of title you want me to give you? 

G: The reason that Dina is struggling to figure out what title to give me is because Dina wears many hats. She's an author. She also has a radio show called Beyond Your Front Door. And she's a volunteer interpretive park ranger at the Oregon National Dunes. But, one thing she is not, technically, is a scientist.

Dina: So, I'm definitely a recreational naturalist, which is a new term I learned from somebody I interviewed who calls himself a recreational naturalist. But, um, when I moved here, I knew that I wanted to volunteer on the organ dunes. So literally the. Day I moved here, so my husband came up later 'cause we were selling our house in Washington. But I came up right away and my father had moved here In the interim, he retired. And so I came up to stay with him and I literally drove into town, threw my suitcases into my bedroom at his house, and drove down to Reedsport and signed up to volunteer as an interpretive ranger. I said, great. And they said, great. We're so excited to have you. And I said, I'm so excited. Give me all the info so I can learn. And they said, well, we don't really have anything. 

G: So Dina wrote her own book, called Secrets of the Oregon Dunes. And she started sharing facts that she learned about the dunes from park rangers and scientists on a website called ALottaSand.com.

B: Oh man. ALottaSand.com, which by the way I think is now available for $15 if you want it. Just saying.

G: And who wouldn't want that domain name, especially if you're really into dunes like Dina? But the reason that it's available is because Dina did migrate her content from ALottaSand.com to Facebook.

B: Huge mistake. Huge mistake.

G: Neither Erin or Dina can remember exactly which post Erin saw that inspired her to reach out to Dina, but they know it was about a phenomenon that people in Oregon call tree holes.

Dina: was about, I had found, I don't, I don't know if the post that she saw was one where I had stepped in a tree hole or where my dog had dropped a ball down the tree hole, but they're very, very deep. I can never. See, or even with my dog's ball throw or find the bottom of them. So, you know, I would probably was some post I was putting up that was informational for people.

B: So, wait, there's a thing in Dunes called tree holes? This is --  I've never heard of this.

G: Yeah. And Erin hadn't heard of this either, like this post from Dina about these tree holes, the very idea of their existence was a big deal to her. But for Dina-- although she finds tree holes in absolutely everything about the Oregon dunes to be really, really cool--they were not.

Dina: I guess I never thought about it as a marvel because we always all just knew like, 'oh, this is a tree,' you know, we called them tree holes. The Oregon dunes have buried forests, so anywhere that the coastline here is flat, that sand blows in from the ocean and it pretty much buries anything in its path, which originally was forest. And so when you're walking on those dunes that I was saying are, you know, 20 feet, 200 feet tall, whatever, you know, anywhere within there, you are probably walking on the tops of trees. You are walking on a buried forest. 

B: Something about this is magical to me. It’s rare that you think about the history of geology while you’re in it you know? But when you think about it so much of the landscape we experience is totally different. What is now a dune used to be a forest. How do these tree ghosts exist inside the dune?

G: What happens is that the trees decompose underneath the sand. But the inner bark decomposes more quickly than the outer bark. Creating a kind of a straw.

B: Whoa.

Dina: It's like a stove pipe hole. Now the trees here are not massive, so your body isn't going to fall in and get swallowed. In fact, I've never heard of anyone. Being swallowed in the organ dunes here. Um, but you might, your foot might go in like up to your knee and then usually you'll just like fall forward into soft sand. So it doesn't really hurt. Um, and so, but you can't see them. There's like a, the sand is covering the top, the sand is covering like the top of the hole. And so it's your foot breaks through that is what happens.

G: Dina was not the first person to document this, either. Finding Dina led Erin to a story by the writer who wrote "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," Ken Kesey. He lived where Dina now lives in Oregon. And he wrote a novel about the dunes there called "Sometimes A Great Notion."

Erin: And in that story, a little boy falls into a hole in a dune, and I believe it's his uncle who says, 'well, you fell into something called the Devil's Stove Pipe.' And that's what happens when a dune buries a tree and then the tree decomposes and leaves a hole.

Grace: Oh. So somewhat like way back when they had figured this out.

Erin: They had figured it out, but it wasn't in any scientific literature. So that's what's so funny about just communication and information. It's in a novel, in a different location, similar scenario. It makes sense, but it doesn't become an acceptable model until you do the science, improve it here.

G: Dina's post,  and what was just kind of common knowledge among the recreational naturalists of Oregon, was enough for Erin to develop a pretty good hypothesis and do the science.

Erin: So kind of went back to the basics. Went up on Mt. Baldy, found a couple of these kind of circles that looked like limbs coming to the surface, and then just with a paintbrush and a trowel started excavating them. And as I started excavating the limbs, there were a couple places where I could see complete holes and I could stick my hand into the holes. You could feel kind of the mushiness on the inside of the limbs. And so that seemed like the path that we needed to head down.

B: So this is kind of wild to me. Like all these people in Oregon like knew about this thing, right? And then an actual scientist learns about it, and then they go and start sticking their hands down holes in the dunes. This is wild.

G: Yeah, nothing is real until a scientist sticks their hand down.

B: Nothing is real until a scientist sticks their hand in some mush.

Erin: We went up on Mt. Baldy after a really bad October storm, and we were able to see this, these limbs that were exposed on the surface. And I walked backwards saying, well, if this is a limb, I would expect the trunk would be around here somewhere, and my foot went into an eight foot deep hole. You could see how a small child could easily fit into something that size. So, there must have been a thin veneer of sand over the top of it. I never saw it. And then when my foot stepped on it, boom, I went in. It was moist enough I think, in that hole that it stayed open for a little bit, so we were able to measure it. But less than an hour, once they start to dry out, then they fill in pretty much like an hourglass, which is exactly what happened to Nathan when he went down into the hole. He disturbed it and everything just collapsed on top of him.

G: So, this helped Erin and other scientists learn an important part of Mt. Baldy's story.

Erin: What we discovered is you have to think about Mt. Baldy as it was like an open forest, right? So imagine that you had a forest on top of a dune and everything was stable because of disturbance at the shoreline, the shoreline has had more erosional power than depositional power, so there's not enough sand to keep nourishing it. So over time it's just been eroding and it kicks the sand up on top of that forest. What everybody thought was just a ginormous sand dune actually has an entire forest inside of it.

B: This is so cool to me. It's such a fascinating idea.

G: Erin and her colleagues were even able to find pictures of the forest that used to be at this beach.

Erin: We learned that it takes about, you know, about 70 years for an oak tree to decompose. So that was about right. We went back to the 1939 aerial photos. We're able to see where the trees were in the 1939 photo, and then those trees have been buried, obviously close to 1939, shortly after. So plenty of time to fully start that decay process.

G: And so Nathan's fall and miraculous recovery, and then Erin's digging and discovery of Dina's Facebook post, led to this whole big study of Mt. Baldy, and how it formed. Which is really important, because the more we know about Mt. Baldy, the more we know about how to protect it.

Erin: So now we get Lidar every three years and we can map out how the entire dune is moving and changing .

G: Lidar stands for light light detection and ranging, and it basically uses lasers to help scientists measure distances.

Erin: And that's been really, really important because it's now continuing to bury infrastructure. It's buried the circle part of the parking lot, so they've had to restrict people from going over there. It's encroaching on the bathrooms that they have over there. So they had to decide are we gonna move the bathrooms, abandon the bathrooms? Are we going to put money in and make new bathrooms? So we've been using the maps of Mt. Baldy to — they made the decision to abandon the bathrooms and take the structures down before they get buried again, so we don't have this issue in the future.

G: After I talked with Erin, I drove to Mt. Baldy and saw with my own eyes. That bathroom is a goner.

B: Oh no.

Erin: So now the park is super proactive about 'let's map all of our infrastructure. Let's take it outta the way of the path of the moving dune.' Because of their mission. They don't do active like moving of the sand. Like they're not gonna just go ahead and use a bulldozer and move it. They have to let nature do what nature does.

B: Did you very gingerly and carefully hike Mt. Baldy?

G: I did not, because it's closed.

B: Oh no.

G: I know. Well, but for one thing, people tromping on the dunes, even gingerly, might disturb the grass that keeps the dune from moving and eating bathrooms and highways. For another, there's the whole hole thing.   There is still a trail that goes by the base of the  dune to the beach. And it goes by a big sign where the old trail used to be, warning people not to climb.

Grace: I feel like they could have even scarier signage, to be honest. Like the hole the guy's — a person is falling into doesn't look that deep, just looks like they're tripping. I feel like you could really deter people a little bit more by showing someone like buried in sand, but maybe that would be too unsettling.

G: Even if I didn't get to climb to the top of Mt. Baldy, I did get to walk along on it, onto this pristine beach, where the forests and the dunes meet Lake Michigan.

Grace: And the lake looks perfect today. It's like that turquoise-y green, like from an ad for the Caribbean or like a Sandals Resort. It looks unreal. But then you look to the right and there's a huge  nuclear reactor, which kinda sullies the vibe, the peaceful vibe. I wonder if they're worried about that getting buried by sand.

G: Because of the research of Erin and her colleagues, the park service has more information about how to protect this landscape for generations to come. But, as evident by Dina's post, something doesn't have to be published in a scientific journal to be a scientific phenomenon. There's real value in recreational naturalists spending time in nature, and noticing what's around them, and then sharing what they've noticed.

B: Yeah, this sort of reminds me of this idea of like community science, right? Like this idea that, you know, everyone can be a scientist or at least contribute to science by noticing things and and talking about them and, you know, quote unquote surfacing them for real scientists to do their work, 'cause scientists know a lot, but they don't know everything. That's, that's part of science, right?

G: Exactly. Yeah. And not to toot our own horns, but I feel like that's something that we do-- y'all do on the show, like helping people learn about things like slime old, then they might. You know, notice something that no one ever has before. That could be like a portal to more scientific discovery.

B: We're pro-portal and we're pro- tree hole, basically. You know, anywhere there's space, we want to explore it.

G: Right! But Back to Nathan. He still doesn't remember much of what happened. He talked to the local news around the 10th anniversary of his fall earlier this summer. He's going into his junior year at a Christian high school. For him, his fall is less about science, and more about spirituality.

Nathan: I'll just be casually thinking and then, or like about something and it'll come to mind and it just reminds me and it gives me hope that there's a plan in that I'm meant for something.

G: And look, science and miracles can co-exist. Erin as you remember was pregnant when Nathan fell into a hole and this all began, and now she has a 10-year-old daughter.

Erin: She doesn't wanna go to Mt. Baldy because she says this is the dune that eats children. And for a while she thought it was like a, a bedtime story and I was like, no, we have to. This is a real scientific thing. It was a really scary experience and we are just so lucky that Nathan was rescued and that the first responders just didn't give up and they found him, and that again, the doctors responded appropriately and he's fine because when I left that night, they said it was going to be a recovery, not a rescue. There were so many miracles that came together that day. And it would just be a disservice not to learn from it and use it as a lesson about human interactions with the landscape.

B: Well look, grace, I think this is a happy story because a six-year-old survives a fall and a scientist discovers a new phenomenon and a whole bunch of people realize that where this dune is, There used to be a forest and understanding that history is good. So the story of Dune Boy to me, I don't know if it's spiritual, but it's certainly interesting.

G: Yeah and Mt. Baldy is lurching toward the highway, but not

B: Very slowly.

G: Slowly and it comes in peace. We can figure out how to coexist with it.