For decades Peter Breslow roamed far and wide for NPR covering disasters, profiling newsmakers, and even climbing Mt. Everest. Breslow was a senior producer for All Things Considered and Weekend Edition. His new memoir, “Outtakes: Stumbling Around the World for NPR,” chronicles many of these stories including his close encounter with a rattlesnake.
PETER BRESLOW: So I went to Florida. I profiled this guy, Bill Haast. He was on the Gulf Coast. He extracted venom from the world's most poisonous snakes. We get there, and there's sort of this maybe four-foot-high wall, and he just sort of jumps right over it. And so we're in this kind of pit, and it's the one spot where the snakes roam free. You know, there's a snake coiled up, and I've got my shotgun mic, you know, I'm very tentative, getting close and come on, come on, come on. We can get closer. And he kind of goads me. And you know, if you listen to the piece, you'll hear this rattling, which gets louder and louder and louder, and finally, you know, this snake has had enough, and then you just hear this thud. And you know my little spongy windscreen is then dripping with rattlesnake venom.
KUNM: You have a lot of great stories in here, but I love the one about climbing Mount Everest in 1988 and then going back to basecamp to file stories using a satellite phone.
BRESLOW: I mean, now I bring a sat phone, it's the size of my laptop. Back then, it was this gigantic piece of equipment powered by a generator in a hut at base camp. Base camp is at 17,000 feet. The mountain is just over 29,000 feet. And my goal on the expedition was to get to the top of this segment that's called the North Call, which is just over 23,000 feet. Actually, I did it twice, and I was always producing stories about the climbers and the strategy and profiling people, but then when it came time to file them, I had to go back down to base camp. How could you have a better job than to get paid to climb Mount Everest? So you know, it's like a dream.
KUNM: I loved one story you had about you and Scott Simon covering a prisoner exchange between warlords in Afghanistan.
BRESLOW: Yeah, this is a great moment. This is very soon after the invasion, the U.S. invasion. It was freezing cold, and we ended up in the yurt of the brother of the warlord who we had interviewed. We warmed up, and then it was time for the prisoner exchange, and they realized no one had any paper to write the names down between the two Mujahideen groups. And Scott had his reporter’s notebook with him in his back pocket. But Scott has an endless supply of them from the [Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists], because he does a lot of volunteer work with them. So he offers up the notebook, and they take off in their jeeps with 50-caliber machine guns on the back, and these grizzled guys with their AK-47s clutching the notebook and not realizing that the logo on the front of the notebook says “We're here. We're queer. We're on deadline.”
KUNM: I just love that story. That was hilarious. You have a lot of stories where you do find humor, but some really poignant moments as well. Is there one that sticks with you?
BRESLOW: The last time I was in Afghanistan, which was 2017, I did a story about the Miraculous Love Kids music school. It was just a, you know, this island of niceness and compassion in a rough part of the world. Of course, this was before the Taliban returned. This guy, Lanny Cordola, who played with the Beach Boys and Guns N Roses, and he became interested in in that part of the world, and he ended up forming a musical group with a lot of street kids, most of whom were girls, young girls. There was this one girl who we profiled named Mursal. So Mursal was pretty impoverished, and she and her two sisters would sell trinkets on the street, and one day, her two sisters, who were the older sisters, went one direction. Mursal went the other. There was a suicide bomber. Her two sisters who were killed. Marcel survived. Lanny heard this story. He was working in Pakistan with some musicians there. He ended up in Afghanistan. Started collecting guitars and instructing these kids. So we did a profile, and they did a collaboration, which people can find online, actually, with the Beach Boys and with Brian Wilson, who sent vocals over to mix in with their singing and guitar playing. Love and Mercy is the song, and it's I still get chills when I hear it. Of course, after the Taliban came, they were successful in getting almost all those kids out of Afghanistan to Pakistan. I still keep in touch with Lanny, and they're still doing collaborations with other musicians from Pakistan now.
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