Transcript of Adults in the Room: Mounting Danger

Hi, it's Terry Gross, host of Freshair. Hey, take a break from the 24-hour news cycle with us and listen to long-form interviews with your favorite authors, actors, filmmakers, comedians, and musicians, the people making the art that nourishes us and speaks to our times. So listen to the Fresh Air podcast from NPR and WHYY. In the fall of 2023, Romana Dittalo, a woman calling herself the Queen of Canada, drove into Richmond, Saskatchewan with a fleet of and set up her kingdom in an abandoned school. So the town banded together to get the cult out by any means necessary. My name is Rachel Brown, and in this season of Uncover, I explore what happens when a conspiracy theory lands in your backyard. The Cult Queen of Canada, available now on CBC Listen and everywhere you get your podcasts. From KUOW in Seattle, welcome to Focus, your home for immersive audio in the Pacific Northwest. This season, Adults in the Room. When I was a senior in high school, my best friend Ella Hushhagen and I, heard a rumor. A popular teacher was abusing a boy at our school. Maybe abusing a boy. Maybe more than one boy.

Lots of maybes, zero proof. We told authorities what we'd heard. When they didn't act, we raised hell. And then our friends, parents, teachers, even a columnist at Seattle's biggest newspaper, called us gossip, rumor mongers, character assassins. Our high school turned on us and made us parias. And those abuse allegations against our teacher, they were never proven. We graduated high school in 2000, and since then, Ella and I have the same conversation on a loop. How did this man, who we saw as manipulative and potentially evil, convince the rest of our community to defend him, to celebrate him? One morning during the pandemic, Ella called. I was in my yard pruning the roses. We should find out if our teacher really was a predator, Ella said. If, I thought, why was she even questioning this? Everyone was in denial about them, I replied. We weren't. Ella, you know we did the right thing. She got quiet. Then she said something that hit me in the gut. How can we be so sure? For 25 years, I was positive my instincts were right, and I thought Ella felt the same way. But the past nodded at her, and her question ripped a hole in my narrative.

Today, Ella is a civil rights attorney in Los Angeles, taking on institutions and big companies. I'm an investigative journalist in Seattle. We are the people to figure this out, Ella said. I don't typically say no to her, but boy, did I want to in that moment. Senior year was one of the worst times of my life. The last thing I wanted to do was knock on the doors of classmates and parents and teachers who'd made it so bad for us. If I was wrong about my teacher all those years ago, I wasn't sure I wanted to know. Maybe Ella could sense my hesitation because then she said, Isolda, people think we killed a man. I need to know if we did. We would learn much later. We didn't know the truth. We barely knew anything at all. From KUOW in Seattle, this is Adults in the Room. Episode One, Mounting Danger. I'm Isolder Raftery. Over the years, other classmates said I should look into the volatile events of our senior year. They know what I do for a living, and they want answers, too. I always brush them off. But Ella is different. When I met her, it was like love at first sight.

She was the new kid in my sixth grade class. Tall, gangly, scowling. We hit it off right away, and Ella says she looked up to me from the start. I remember those, What would Jesus do? Bracelets. I, in my head, will often be like, What would Azolda do? She always had a lot of friends, and I was her best friend, so I got to go along for the ride. The truth is, I feel like I'm always following her. Like when she decided to go to Garfield, a big public high school in Seattle Central district, I wanted to go there, too. If you could describe a school as extroverted, Garfield was extroverted. Loud, big and a little obnoxious. It was such a weird, funny place, and we all were just drinking the Kool-Aid. We found our people. We found our people. In Seattle, Garfield isn't just a high school. It's a calling card. Quincy Jones was a Bulldog. Jimi Hendrix, a Bulldog. The guy who designed the World Trade Center in Manhattan, also a Bulldog. There were more national merit scholars at Garfield than the private school Bill Gates went to. We had the best jazz band in the nation, an award-winning student newspaper, and a one-of-a-kind wilderness program that took City Kids scuba diving and mountain climbing.

The program was called Post-84, and it was run by a teacher named Tom Hudson. Mr. Hudson was legendary at Garfield. He was well over 6 feet and nearly 300 pounds. I know this because he loved to tell us he weighed more than one eighth of a ton. He had a voice that purred in a whisper and thundered when he yelled. Mr. Hudson had an inner circle of students, mostly skinny white boys in GORE-TX parkas, looking like a gust of wind could knock them over. Those kids called him Tom. The rest of us called him Mr. Hudson. I had Mr. Hudson for biology freshman year. He was dynamic, entertaining. But once that class ended, I didn't think about him much until July 1998, the summer before my junior year. Mr. Hudson was headed out with six post-84 kids. The plan was to climb Mount Olympus. It's a few hours from Seattle in an extremely remote part of Olympic National Park. The expedition included a 20-mile backcountry hike through the forest and across the Blue Glacier, one of the most studied glaciers on Earth. Most of us had never done anything like that before. Rosie Bancroft was a classmate of mine and one of the few female members of Post-84.

She was the only girl on the Mount Olympus trip. No radios or communication with the outside world. There were seven of us on two rope teams. Ocean Mason was a year older than me. A towering blonde kid who seemed shy at school. In Post-84, though, Ocean exuded confidence. We hiked in for the first two days, so about nine miles each day to the bottom of the Blue Glacier. The Blue Glacier really is blue, which I guess isn't surprising given its name, but this is supernatural blue, electric. When you peer into the cracks, there's a ribbon of neon light at the bottom that glows, and getting there can be dangerous. Ice climbers often avoid the Blue Glacier because of all the cracks on its surface. Mountaineers have more than a dozen words to describe those cracks. Crevasse, moat, berksgrooned. They're mostly just slivers. You can step over them, no big deal, but some are gaping, 15-foot fissures, and others are hidden because snow covers the seams. That's why the post-84 students were tethered to each other with long ropes. That way, if someone stepped into one of those hidden rifts in the ice, the other climbers could hold onto the rope to break their teammates' fall.

This usually works, but not always. We were getting near the top, and I heard a yell. And the person in front of me was bracing to hold the rope, was on the ground, and so I dived down and dug in the rope, but no pull ever came. Mr. Hudson had stepped onto what he thought was solid ground, but the snow gave way under him. He fell 30 feet, the height of a three-story building. Mr. Hudson's backpack wedged into the ice, making it impossible for him to move. He was conscious but dazed and in pain. He pushed snow off his face so he could breathe and yelled up to his students for help. Six teenagers and one injured adult were now stuck in the middle of nowhere. They had no way to communicate with the outside world, and they had to act immediately. If the students didn't rescue Mr Hudson before nightfall, he could freeze to death. They could all freeze to death. You know, you're a teenager. You think you're totally invincible. We didn't really let in how close we were to really being in trouble. The students lowered their most experienced climber into the crack.

He cut off Mr Hudson's backpack and connected him to a rope. Up top, the students assembled a bully system to haul Mr. Hudson out, a bully system he taught them in safety drills. Slow, carefully, the post-84 kids hoisted this man. Remember, he weighed more than one eighth of a ton up over the steep wall of ice and snow. I don't remember it being hard at all. I remember it working exactly like it was supposed to. Mr Hudson couldn't move his arm. He couldn't put his full weight on one leg. He was so hypothermic, he couldn't speak. It's cold down there. It's like a refrigerator, especially if you can't move. Mr Hudson's pack was still down in the hole. The team thought they might need it to survive the night. They He lowered Rosie into the moat to get Mr Hudson's backpack. Ocean stayed with Mr Hudson. He and I huddled together under a space blanket, but there was too much wind. It was just cold. He wasn't hardly talking. Mr. Hudson couldn't stop shivering. Ocean knew they had to do something. We decided to start moving, and so he and I started hiking down, and I short-roped him, so I was holding onto the up close to him because I was afraid that he was going to fall.

The others pulled Rosie and the backpack out of the hole. Then they followed Ocean and Mr Hudson down the mountain to their base camp. The Post-84 team had 10 hours to hike back down to their tents. It was a race against the setting sun. And by this point, Mr Hudson wasn't the only one in bad shape. After the 45 minutes in that crevasse and then the hike out. I had frostbite in most of my toes. I had trench foot. I was walking downhill for 20 miles with a huge pack on because we all split up Tom's stuff. He couldn't carry anything. I just was like, Yeah, this is what we're trained to do. We did great. Yes, the students were in a dangerous situation, but consider how exhilarated they must have felt. These teens gave up weekends to drill a situation like this. Exercises in drudgery for a moment that would surely never come. But now the moment was here, and the students rose to it. They saved their teacher's life. The same teacher who trained them how to survive in the wild in the first place. There's something about that that felt very circular.

Being treated as adults, not just as kids, as people who knew things, who had skills. We were able to do these things that are hard, that are complicated. We were proud of it. Mr. Hudson and the students barely made it down the mountain before nightfall and set up camp. A park ranger stopped to chat with the group. The next morning, Mr. Hudson and the kids hiked to the car. He had recovered well enough to drive them back to Seattle, where the story of the student's heroic rescue started to spread. But at Olympic National Park, the Rangers, the people charged with keeping hikers and climbers safe, had a very different view of the rescue. And I would be the first to hear what they had to say. The Federal Poverty Line decides who counts as poor in our country and what support they get. Being under the poverty line means benefits like food stamps and job training. But did you know that the way the line is calculated hasn't changed in 60 years? And it has way too much to do with the cost of Jell-O. We explain why on the latest episode of Control F, a new KUW podcast that uses data to tell the real story about what matters in our daily lives.

Listen to Control F on the KUW app or wherever you get your podcasts. When school started that fall, Ella and I were both reporters for the Garfield Messenger, the school paper. Her. Zolda and I both worked hard to be messenger groupies. Not groupies, but we wanted... We took it seriously. We'd stay until 10: 00 PM in this big open classroom that, as a journalist today, I can say was a legit newsroom. No it all's arguing, hashing out stories, lots of bravado, and casual cursing. I wore a quasi-uniform, what I thought a real journalist would wear. Clogs, a turtleneck, and sometimes a long black peasant skirt. My ado was Joan Didian. I was a cub reporter looking to prove myself, ambitious and unrelenting. The year before, when I applied to be on the messenger, the teacher who ran the paper told me he didn't want me there. You were the homecoming princess, he said. How serious can you be? So I squatted in his class for the first week. Literally, I sat on the floor next to Ella's desk until he gave in. The Mount Olympus rescue was my first assignment of the semester. It was a straightforward pitch.

Kids save the mentor who trained them. A narrative Mr. Hudson was promoting. He had said that after 30 years of climbing mountains, that was the low point since he almost died up on the mountain. Jonathan Hill was a core member of Post-84, one of those kids who called Mr. Hudson Tom. But also the high point because students who he taught these rescue skills actually saved him. Jonathan skipped the Mount Olympus trip, but Mr. Hudson told him what happened. One of his lines that he had after that was, If something is It's worth learning, it's worth learning well because you never know when it might save you or one of your friends' lives. I would have reported this story as assigned until I went to a party for my dad's work. And there, I stumbled onto my first honest to God scoop. One of my dad's coworkers volunteered in mountain rescue, so I asked him, Have you ever heard of Tom Hudson? He raised his eyebrows and gave me a look like, That guy. He said Mr. Hudson would climb mountains near Seattle on his own, and he needed to be rescued a lot. My dad's coworker had been dispatched to save Mr. Hudson more than once.

This was not a good thing, he said. Mr. Hudson had a reputation with rescue volunteers as someone who took unnecessary risks. You should call the ranger station at Olympic National Park, he told me. Find out what the rangers who were there have to say about the rescue. Ochen recalled seeing a ranger at camp. I remember him talking to Tom. I think he was pissed. I called the ranger station. The guy who answered sounded annoyed. I couldn't tell if it was at me or at Mr Hudson. Then he explained. He said Mr Hudson hadn't checked in with them a protocol for climbs to the Blue Glacier. If he had, the ranger said they would have discouraged him from taking his students up the mountain alone. Just having one additional adult would have made the safety margin so much larger. I think I probably would have, yeah, had probably three adults on a trip like that, especially with a bunch of relatively new climbers with me. That's nick Zgier, the ranger Mr. Hudson talked to at the base camp all those years ago. He still remembers the accident. Nick was doing rounds at the camp when he encountered Mr. Hudson.

He asked how the hike went and was shocked when he heard what happened. The first thought was, wow, really lucky, incredibly lucky. I still remember the surprise I felt on the phone in 1998. Mr. Hudson had sidestepped basic safety protocols on Mount Olympus, and this ranger was mad about it. My Mount Olympus assignment wasn't just a hero story after all. This fueled my ambition like nothing I'd felt before. Mr. Hudson was a demigod at Garfield, but now I had a story that was calling his mythology into question. I thought I was the only one who saw Mr. Hudson's fallibility, but someone else was questioning his judgment, too. Rosie Bancroft was one of the heroes of the Mount Olympus trip. I I liked Rosie a lot. She was loud, with blonde ringlets, and a bust-a-gut laugh. When I started reinvestigating this story, Rosie told me her dad was livid about what happened on Mount Olympus. I mean, Rosie was hypothermic. She lost three toenails to frostbite. Another student got so badly sunburned on the mountain, he was hospitalized. I called Tom several days later. This This is Rosie's dad, John Bancroft. And said, I hope you'll be getting the parents together at some point pretty soon and just telling us what went on.

And he basically said, Well, It was a fairly typical mountain accident, and the kids did a great job of dealing with it. And I thought, That's it? John kept detailed about the Mount Olympus rescue and wrote at the time that Rosie didn't want him to question Mr. Hudson. She said he was in a fragile state after his fall. To John, this was a red flag. You're the kid, he thought to himself. Don't worry about the grown-up. First, we just want to talk about some business things, and then we can talk about an accident that happened this past summer with the POS members and Mr. Mr. Hudson at Mount Olympus. John decided to confront Mr. Hudson a few months after the accident at a public Q&A about the Mount Olympus trip. It was hosted by POS 84 at the REI Flagship Store in downtown Seattle. The audience was mostly parents who admired Mr. Hudson. John remembers it well. I think people already knew that I was really almost a party of one raising questions about this thing. John set up a video camera in the center aisle of the meeting room, facing Mr. Hudson. Decades later, he shared his video with me.

Tom, you want to talk about what that meant? Yeah, let me give a brief introduction, and then we're going to make some slides. That's Mr. Hudson. He stood behind a table, a vision of '90s smart casual, dark crew neck sweater and old khakis towering over the post-84 students sitting on either side of him. He described falling into the on Mount Olympus. I was trapped there by the snow and ice and was unable to breathe for a bit of a period of time. And with the one hand that was free, I was able to move snow from my face so that I could establish a airway, a box of snow off my chest so that I could breathe. After Mr. Hudson finished describing the accident, he took questions. John stood up to speak. So well, I guess I have I have a question about having Tom Hugo as the only adult on the trip, and that's not in any way to minimize the skill that the other climbers have, but it just seems like a trip where something this serious can happen. I guess that question is. Yeah, we were registered. We had a backcountry permit indicating our intent to climb the mountain.

There is a law again. Hudson's response is hard to make out, but he said they'd gotten the necessary permits, and they'd registered with the National Park Service as a climbing party. As for not signing in at the Trailhead, well, it was dark, and it was difficult to see the sign-in station from the entrance they used. Also, sure, more adults would have been great, but the young man who pulled him out of the ice was just as experienced as any adult. We made it clear to all the parents of all the people who were going to that that was the leadership structure, that I was the only adult. Mr. Hudson said the parents knew beforehand that he was the only adult on the trip, and parents who were uncomfortable with that Well, they probably shouldn't have let their kids go in the first place. I don't think we were understaffed. I don't think we were understaffed, he said. I would climb it again with the same leadership. I would climb it again with the same leadership. Questions? With that, the Q&A was over. Thanks a lot. Mr. Hudson didn't think he'd done anything wrong. That worried John.

I was starting to think, I don't want this guy to be teaching and running this post to my daughter, first of all, and then the other kids. I wasn't sure exactly what that would mean. John saw how students and parents loved Mr Hudson. They were almost reverential toward him. That scared John, too. This is a pattern of you're doing wonderful things for kids, and then the next step is always doing bad things with kids. John was uneasy. He'd seen this behavior before. When he was young, John had a camp counselor he idolized who would later sexually abuse him. Mr. Hudson reminded him of this counselor. But in the end, John told me he stopped pushing Mr. Hudson. His daughter, Rosie, loved Post-84 too much, but he still felt uneasy about him. So did I. For one thing, Mr. Hudson really liked practical jokes. One time in my first period biology class, US. In the middle of a test, Mr. Hudson dropped a live tarantula on a kid's desk. The kid froze, and then he screamed. Mr. Hudson laughed and laughed. Another time, Ocean found a dried up deer leg during a post-84 outing and gave it to Mr. Hudson.

Mr. Hudson put the deer leg in his biology classroom. I remember a kid fell asleep during class, and he rubbed the deer leg across their shoulder to wake them up. The kid flicked out, and Ocean felt badly about it. Like any good journalist, I asked Mr. Hudson for an interview for my Mount Olympus article. To my surprise, he declined. Let the kids shine, he said. But then Mr Hudson heard about the more critical direction my reporting was taking, and suddenly, he wanted to see me. The Federal Poverty Line decides who counts as poor in our country and what support they get. Being under the poverty line means benefits like food stamps and job training. But did you know that the way the line is calculated hasn't changed in 60 years, and it has way too much to do with the cost of Jell-O? We explain why on the latest episode of Control F, a new KUW podcast that uses data to tell the real story about what matters in our daily lives. Listen to Control F on the KUW app or wherever you get your podcasts. I was in sixth period journalism when a big kid named Bubba walked in.

Tom wants to talk to you, Bubba said. Bubba was close to Mr Hudson. If you saw one, the other was probably nearby. Bubba and I walked down the long hallway in silence to Mr Hudson's empty classroom. We went to the back into Mr Hudson's small office. He was standing there. His mouth set in a grim line. Bubba shut the door and stood next to our teacher. They looked like a wall of man. Mr Hudson told me not to write anything that suggested he'd been careless on Mount Olympus. He said I could ruin his program. Program. Then Mr. Hudson reminded me once again that he weighed more than one eighth of a ton. And he laughed. Why is that so funny to him? I wondered. And also, why was Buba part of this conversation? Bubba goes by a different name now. Ocean. Did we have Japanese together, too? Yes. Yeah, okay. I was trying to remember. I was like, wait a minute. I know we had a class together at some point. Yeah, that's right. Do you remember that I was writing an article about the Mount Olympus trip? No, I don't remember that. And he dispatched you to come get me out of the messenger room, and you brought me back to his office, which you recall as a tiny little office.

And you were there, and he was there looming over me, and he was telling me not to write the story. And at the I mean, I would have weighed 80, 90 pounds, soaking wet. I was tiny. To have him say all that, I remember thinking, he can't be threatening me. Is he threatening me? He's definitely trying to intimidate me. I just remember he had used you to put me in the room with him. I wonder, do you remember that at all? I don't. I don't have any memory of that. And I'm so sorry. Oh, no, no, no, no. I wasn't saying that to make you feel bad. No, no, no, no. And I know you're not. I just feel just a tremendous sadness and compassion for you in that situation. Ocean has a really big heart, and I wasn't surprised they felt sadness for teenage me. But grown up me does not feel sadness for teenage me, because in that moment, in Mr Hudson's office, something clicked into place. Mr Hudson was using his body and Baba's body to try to get me to change my Mount Olympus story. But he slipped up. Mr. Hudson showed me he was worried what my article would reveal about him, that he cut corners and endangered the lives of students on the mountain.

That's when my anxiety gave way to a sense of total calm. I didn't need to be afraid of this man. He was afraid of me. Grown up me looks back on teenage me with pride and fondness. Like, Hell, yeah. Because in 1998, there was no narrative for girls my age to feel powerful when up against middle-aged men. This was the year everyone blamed 22-year-old intern Monica Lewinsky for seducing the 49 President of the United States. Indeed, I did have a relationship with Ms. Lewinsky that was not appropriate. The year when 17-year-old Brittany Spears wore a bra and underwear on the cover of Rolling Stone. You're really young. What are you, 17? I'm 17, yeah. I'm old enough to be your mother. I don't want to see you in that shirt again unless you have a guess. I'm so glad you're bringing this up. I was so humiliated. The country was obsessed with girls my age, and not because of our brains. We were bodies to look at, bodies to use bodies to intimidate. As an adult journalist, I notice this thing sometimes when I'm reporting a contentious story. Some men will get just a little too close, and it feels threatening, like they want to remind me how much bigger they are.

When that happens, often in hallways, outside school board rooms, or at protests, I think about being in Mr Hudson's office, and I tell myself, They're puffing up their chest to get me to back down. They're scared of me because I know their truth, and I am not going to keep their secrets. I published the article about the Mount Olympus rescue in the Messenger. I wrote that some kids felt ill-prepared. The headline was Mounting Danger. This wouldn't be the last time I'd investigate Mr. Hudson. Senior year, Ella and I would hear secrets about him that we couldn't ignore. Secrets that would cost us friendships and turn us into outcasts. Secrets that would eventually lead to tragedy at our beloved Garfield. Secrets that after 25 years, I'm not keeping anymore. That's coming up on Adults in the Room. In episode 2 of Adults in the Room, Garfield High School is shaken by a scandal. They put out this announcement that was very vague. It was like, Oh, inappropriate relationship with a student. What Ella and I chose to do next put a bullseye on our backs and forever changed our school and our lives. I have no idea what to do about it or who to tell.

I think I was like, this, this is the chance. Adults in the Room is part of Focus, a dedicated documentary channel from KUOW Public Radio in Seattle. A proud member of the NPR Network. Original reporting for this project was done by me as Alder Raftery, Jeanie Yandel, and Will James. An extra special thank you to Ella Hushhagen, without whom this project would not have happened. Our producers are Will James and Alec Cowen. Our editor is Jeanie Yandel. Music by B. C. Campbell. Additional music by Alec Cowen. Logo designed by Alicia Via. Amelia Peacock manages our marketing and promotions. Keo KUW's Director of New Content is Brenda Sweeney. Our Director of Marketing is Mikaela Giannadi Boyle. Kuw's Chief Content Officer is Marshall Eisen. Ever wonder how to keep the memory of you strong for future generations? Artists Jacob Lawrence and Barbara Earle-Thomas have a solution. Assign a loved one to champion your legacy. On the latest Meet Me Here, KUOW's Arts & Culture podcast, Barbara speaks with writer Leilani Lewis about making sure our contributions to the world can still be impactful even after we're gone. To Meet Me Here on the KUOW app or wherever you get your podcasts.