654: The Feather Heist
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From WBEZChicago, it's This American Life. Our glass is off this week. I'm Sean Cole. So there's this guy who's been on our show a few times now, Kirk Johnson. He's this extraordinary person. In his early 20s, he went to Iraq and ran rebuilding projects in Fallujah for USAID after the invasion. He saw that Iraqis who worked for the US military were being threatened and killed because of it and weren't getting asylum in the US. And he was outraged. So he single-handedly launched a campaign which changed US law on this. And for years after, he championed these cases, saving thousands of people's lives. It was beyond difficult, an extraordinary stressful job. And so to decompress, Kirk took up fly fishing, which is where today's story actually starts. It has nothing to do with Iraq or refugees. It begins on a river in New Mexico. Fly fishing, just in case you don't know, you're using this special lure that looks like an insect. That's the fly, floats on the water. Kirk makes his own flies out of things like rabbit fur. So taking parts of one kind of animal, using it to imitate another kind in order to catch a third kind. So Kirk's on the river with this guide, a guy named Spencer Syme. This is back in 2011. And at one point, Spencer reaches down to fetch something out of his tackle box. Here's Kirk. And I caught this really colorful flash, really beautiful looking fly and asked him what it was. And he pulls this thing out. And it's a salmon fly. That is, it's used to catch salmon. Kirk had only ever seen trout flies, which are kind of brown or gray. But this thing was intricately tied together with bird feathers and silvery thread, maybe an inch and a half long, kind of a moth-sized peacock, like an impressionist's version of an insect, or a dream about an insect. And it's got these emerald and canary yellow and ruby-colored strips from feathers of these exotic birds, maybe a 10 or 12 species in total.
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