David Abel: Adventures & Misadventures - Cuba to Cape Cod (To in the Whale!)

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David Abel was standing on the finish line of the Boston Marathon when the first bomb went off, fifteen steps away. He filed the story, kept filming, and spent the next year inside one of the most private and devastating human stories the city had ever witnessed — the Richard family, who lost an eight-year-old boy, a seven-year-old daughter's leg, a mother's eye. Later he was deported from Cuba for writing the truth. Later still, he made a film about lobster fishermen and right
whales on the edge of extinction. And then a man got swallowed by a whale — and Abel made a feature film about that too.

David is an award-winning journalist at the Boston Globe, a professor of journalism at Boston University, and a documentary filmmaker whose work has been broadcast on PBS, BBC World News, and the Discovery Channel. His films have won a Jackson Wild Award — the Oscars of nature filmmaking —
a national Emmy nomination, and an audience choice award at the New Hampshire Film Festival. He is one of the most quietly extraordinary storytellers working today, and this conversation covers the full sweep: Havana, the marathon finish line, a whale's mouth, and the North Atlantic right whale's race against extinction.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction — David Abel, journalist & documentary filmmaker
01:38 From philosophy to journalism — the reporter with elbow patches who changed everything
04:02 Milan Kundera, a question as a bridge, and the decision to become a journalist
06:45 Mexico City, the Zapatistas, and learning the ropes of reporting
08:22 Cuba: six months reporting under Castro — and the night state security came knocking
11:59 Deported in a Soviet Lada — filing the story with a wiped computer
13:54 The Miami Herald byline that blew his cover
17:58 Life on the Boston Marathon finish line when the bombs went off
22:25 The Richard family — a year inside the most devastating story in Boston
24:49 Losing an eight-year-old boy, a leg, an eye — and how a family chose to give back
28:07 How telling that story became a way of healing — and led to his first feature film
32:56 Entangled: the North Atlantic right whale and the conflict with the lobster industry
35:59 Vertical buoy lines, entanglement, and an industry caught between commerce and conservation
38:24 Death threats, a rebuttal film, and $82 million in new federal funding
43:41 In the Whale: lobster diver Michael Packard swallowed by a humpback for a full minute
46:57 Inundation District: Boston built a new neighbourhood at sea level. Against its own advice.
51:01 What's next — finishing the films and a children's book about saving a sea turtle
55:37 Call to Adventure: swim in a waterfall — Salto Baiguate, Dominican Republic
58:06 Pay It Forward: a Boston community 5K, and a plea not to be complacent about climate change

What You'll Learn:
• What it was like to be expelled from Cuba by state security — and how writing for the Miami   Herald was what gave him away
• How standing on the Boston Marathon finish line on the day of the bombings reshaped his entire  career and led to his first feature film
• Why the UN report on losing a million species sent him looking for one whale to tell the story of   all of them — and what entanglement in lobster-fishing gear is doing to North Atlantic right whales
• What happened when a commercial lobster diver was engulfed inside the mouth of a humpback whale for nearly a minute — and how he came back from that
• The story of Inundation District: how Boston built an entire new urban neighbourhood on landfill  at sea level, after its own climate scientists warned it not to
• Why $82 million in new federal funding for right whale protection may be — in part — the direct
  result of Abel's reporting and filmmaking

DAVID ABEL | Journalist, Filmmaker & Professor of Journalism
Website: davidsabel.com
Boston Globe: bostonglobe.com/about/staff-list/staff/david-abel
Boston University profile: bu.edu/com/profile/david-abel
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/david-abel-02905011
Films: Entangled (nature filmmaking, Jackson Wild Award); In the Whale; 

ABOUT DAVID ABEL
David Abel is an award-winning reporter, documentary filmmaker, and professor of the practice in journalism at Boston University. A longtime staff writer at the  Boston Globe, he and his colleagues won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News for their coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings — coverage he helped produce while standing on the finish line when the bombs went off.
He has covered war in the Balkans, unrest in Latin America (including a deportation from Cuba for his reporting on Castro's government), national security in Washington, and for more than a decade has focused on climate change and conservation in New England. His documentary Entangled —
about the entanglement of North Atlantic right whales in lobster-fishing gear — won a Jackson Wild Award and was nominated for a national Emmy. His film In the Whale tells the story of lobster diver Michael Packard, who was engulfed in the mouth of a humpback whale and survived. He is
also working on a children's picture book, Lost and Found, inspired by his son's discovery of a cold-stunned sea turtle on a Cape Cod beach.


For full show notes and links, visit: adventurediaries.com/go

Transcript

[CHAPTER: Intro — David Abel, Journalist & Filmmaker — 00:00]

[00:03] CHRIS: So that is us live now.

[00:10] CHRIS: David Abel, welcome to the Adventure Diaries. How are you?

[00:15] DAVID: Great. Thank you for having me.

[00:17] CHRIS: Excellent, thank you. It's a pleasure and I've been really glad to secure your time today. I've been really excited about this conversation — particularly around some of the environmental and natural world content we'll come on to. Before we do, a quick introduction for those who may not know you. You're an award-winning journalist, a long-standing writer for the Boston Globe, and you've done some incredible documentary work. I want to touch on the film Entangled — about the plight of the North Atlantic right whale — and the remarkable story behind In the Whale, the Michael Packard story about being swallowed by a humpback. You've also covered some powerful human interest stories, particularly your coverage of the Richard family in the aftermath of the Boston bombings. Plenty to unpack — but to start, do you want to give us a brief introduction in your own words about how you got into the world of journalism and documentary filmmaking?

[CHAPTER: From Philosophy to Journalism — How It All Began — 01:38]

[01:38] DAVID: Sure. Getting into the world of telling stories for a living — first of all, it's a privilege and a great honour. I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do when I was in college. I studied philosophy and political science, and I like to say that left me with a hunger to repair the world but no actual skills to do it. I moved from the Midwest to San Francisco after college, where I started writing poetry and working on a novel. After a while, that felt too solipsistic — I needed to reach beyond myself and learn how to tell stories in a different way.

A confluence of events brought it together. There was a visit to San Francisco by the Russian ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky — some people thought he might be the next leader of Russia, before Vladimir Putin took power. He gave a speech full of racist, bombastic language, and at the end a man went to the microphone — shaggy hair, old blazer with elbow patches — and asked the most piercing questions.

[04:02] DAVID: That left a real mark on me. He was a reporter for the local newspaper. And around the same time I was reading a novel by the Czech novelist Milan Kundera — the central idea was that in a democracy, journalists occupy a rare and privileged position: they can ask very personal and exacting questions of anyone, from public officials to the homeless. Kundera described a question as a bridge to understanding, and that resonated with me deeply. So I applied to journalism programmes, did a master's in journalism, then started working at a newspaper in Mexico City for about a year — writing about protests against what was then a very authoritarian government, until I was almost ready to join the Zapatistas.

[CHAPTER: Cuba, Deportation & Reporting Under Castro — 06:45]

[06:45] CHRIS: On the study of journalism — do storytelling and journalism go hand in hand, or are they very distinct disciplines? Some journalists just report facts, but your work really tells the story, especially the human interest angle. Where did that come from?

[07:08] DAVID: Journalists come to the profession for different reasons. Different stories serve different purposes — some require deep narrative arcs, others are simply about holding power to account. For me, what makes a story compelling is so often found in the detail. To rise above the ordinary, a story has to help us understand its characters deeply.

[08:22] CHRIS: Rolling back to your time in Central America — did I read that you were deported from Cuba for your reporting?

[08:37] DAVID: Yes. After Mexico I ended up in the Dominican Republic for about six months — there was a kind of coup d'état on my family's pepper farm, which is a very long story. Then I went back to journalism, though there was a brief moment where I seriously considered staying on: I had a star fruit tree in the front yard, access to horses, a shiny red motorcycle, and every morning a woman brought me a freshly brewed smoothie with a kiss on my cheek. But I had just started a career as a reporter, and that felt like my path.

I ended up going to work for my first newspaper in the States, in South Florida, covering a small community on the edge of the Everglades — a really instructive experience watching how human beings can radically transform a wild landscape.

[10:34] DAVID: After about a year covering the police beat, I was yearning to go back to Latin America. It was the late 1990s and there seemed to be an opening in Cuba. I went with a girlfriend for a week — Americans technically weren't allowed, but journalists could get authorisation, or in practice didn't need it. The Cuban government, however, was happy to receive American tourists but not American journalists. My girlfriend and I hatched a plan to quit our jobs and move to Cuba. She backed out. I went alone, and spent about six months reporting from a place with no freedom of speech — where people went to prison for offending government ideology.

[11:59] DAVID: I did that until I succeeded in upsetting the government enough that they had enough of me. I'd left, come back to write about the first legal Christmas celebration and what was then the 40th anniversary of the revolution. I was in the country less than 24 hours when the police found me, put me in an old Soviet-era Lada, and drove me to the airport. I was still able to file my main stories — I'd done many interviews the night before — though they put my computer through a machine that erased everything on my screen, and I had to rewrite furiously to meet the Christmas deadline.

[13:54] CHRIS: It didn't sound like anything particularly explosive — were they just paranoid about the American perspective? Being American alone was probably enough, I imagine.

[14:15] DAVID: It wasn't so much that I was American. The problem was that I was writing stories unflattering to the government. I wrote about an elderly couple in Santiago de Cuba running the first independent library there — circulating books the government had banned. I wrote about independent farmers refusing to sell their produce to the government cooperatives, which was illegal at the time.

I was once hauled into state security headquarters — summoned by a note, made to wait three hours, then brought in front of large men in green military uniforms with epaulettes who described themselves as Cuba's equivalent of the FBI. The man behind the desk was smoking a cigar, blowing the smoke in my face, pounding his desk and saying "Son mentiras" — "These are lies" — as he read back my stories. He also asked why I wasn't visiting their beautiful beaches.

[16:42] CHRIS: Were these published in Cuba or back in the States?

[16:51] DAVID: Back in the States. I'd started writing for the Boston Globe — but I think what first caught the Cuban authorities' attention was a piece I wrote for the Miami Herald, which is considered an enemy of the revolution, particularly under Fidel Castro. My agreement with the Herald was that they wouldn't run my byline, but one day they made a mistake and published it. After that, I noticed my things being searched — books moved, all kinds of strange things.

[17:58] CHRIS: It's mad that it becomes a story in its own right. It sounds like a scene from a James Bond film.

[18:06] DAVID: Not quite as glamorous. I wasn't wearing Armani suits or drinking martinis every half hour. But there were a lot of beautiful women.

[18:24] CHRIS: Have you been back to Cuba since?

[18:27] DAVID: Unfortunately, no. I was essentially told I couldn't come back — though I hope the statute of limitations has now expired. My wife and I have talked about going and taking the kids. Things have eased up somewhat compared to how they were. But my chief concern is arriving with my family and being sent away — and I don't know how to test the waters without losing the trip entirely.

[CHAPTER: Boston Globe, National Security & Covering 9/11 — 19:27]

[19:27] CHRIS: How long have you been with the Boston Globe, David?

[19:33] DAVID: I started writing for the Globe in the late 1990s and moved to Boston full time in 1999. I've been a staff writer there for many years. Just last year I took a position as a professor of journalism at Boston University, so I now essentially have three jobs: teaching, writing for the paper, and making films.

[20:08] CHRIS: In terms of the stories you've gone after — have you naturally drifted towards natural world subjects, or has that been more circumstantial?

[20:34] DAVID: I've covered all sorts of things over the years. After my deportation I moved to Washington and covered national security issues and the Pentagon, including the war over Kosovo. When I moved to Boston I covered a wide range of beats — academia, poverty, terrorism at the Boston Marathon, the attacks on 9/11 in New York and Washington. And then, as our climate began changing in a very marked way, I began covering the environment. For more than a decade now I've covered all kinds of environmental issues for the Globe, and the through-line of that coverage has been climate change.

[CHAPTER: The Boston Marathon Bombing & the Richard Family — 21:56]

[21:56] CHRIS: Some of your short films are fantastic. Could you tell us about the Boston Marathon work and the Richard family? Is that the piece that won you the Ernie Pyle Award?

[22:25] DAVID: Sure. About ten years ago I was on leave from the Globe doing a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard — where you essentially get to study anything you want. Around that time I was being encouraged to experiment with video in my journalism work. I was fortunate enough to take a class on the grammar of filmmaking, and for my final project I was making a short film about the first little person to run the Boston Marathon.

On the day of the marathon, I was with her from very early in the morning and was standing on the finish line waiting for her triumphant crossing when a bomb exploded fifteen to twenty steps from where I was standing. Then a second bomb exploded. If you've seen any footage of the aftermath, you've probably seen some of mine from that day.

I wrote an eyewitness account for the paper and then spent the next year covering the aftermath — how it affected so many people in our city. The family affected most severely was the Richards. They lost their eight-year-old son to one of the bombs. Their seven-year-old daughter — I recently had a Zoom call with her and I'm helping her with her college essay; we've stayed in touch all these years — lost her leg. Their older brother, who was eleven at the time, was physically unharmed but has had to live with what he witnessed. The mother lost sight in one eye. The father lost some of his hearing.

[25:49] DAVID: I spent about six months following the family, leading up to the first anniversary, and wrote a long narrative about their journey throughout that year — eventually back to the marathon, where they chose to try to turn a horrible experience into something positive by giving back to the community that had given so much to them.

[26:37] CHRIS: That's fantastic — not just as journalism but as a human story. And to hear you're still in touch with the daughter and helping her all these years later is really something. How did that year take its toll on you?

[27:20] DAVID: It was an incredibly difficult story to cover. When I recount it, I still have to fight back tears. It left a deep imprint on me and on the city. It also led to my first films. I made a short film initially — 25.7 in Twice the Steps — about the subject of my class project, and then continued following her because that film didn't quite have the right ending. That led to my first feature, Undaunted, when I actually ran the marathon the following year with her and nearly collapsed at the end after carrying a camera the entire way.

The short answer is it was an incredibly difficult year, but telling the stories of how people came together, how people coped with their injuries, the investigation and the trial — all of those things were a way of dealing with the trauma I'd experienced. Being able to serve some role in the community was a way of helping me heal.

[29:35] CHRIS: How is the city a decade on? Is the anniversary difficult?

[30:04] DAVID: I think the city is strong and time heals a lot of wounds. Obviously some wounds will never fully heal — particularly the very real physical wounds many people still live with. But things change and relationships grew in a lot of ways out of that experience. For me personally, having grown up in New York, I'd always found Boston a harder city to belong to. But that day was when I really felt this was my city — the place I belonged.

[31:20] CHRIS: If there's one thing you'd like people to take away from that body of work, what would it be?

[31:36] DAVID: I had an upfront seat to how some of the bravest people in the world dealt with some of the most searing pain. That's probably what I'm most in awe of.

[32:33] CHRIS: Incredible work — and the recognition through the Ernie Pyle Award speaks volumes for that.

[CHAPTER: Entangled — The Plight of the North Atlantic Right Whale — 32:56]

[32:56] CHRIS: Moving on — Entangled won the Jackson Wild Award, which is essentially the Oscars of natural world filmmaking. What inspired you to delve into the story of the North Atlantic right whale?

[33:33] DAVID: A few years ago the United Nations released a report suggesting we are likely to lose more than a million species by the end of this century. I wrote a front-page story about it for the Globe, but the words didn't seem to match the enormity of the findings. I began thinking about how to tell a story of that magnitude of loss — and landed on the idea of one species: a charismatic megafauna that human beings identify with, like a great whale.

Around the same time I was writing about the plight of the North Atlantic right whale, which inhabits the waters off the New England coast where I live. Numbers were plummeting and many scientists feared — and still fear — this great whale was on a path to extinction if nothing changed. One of the leading causes of premature deaths was entanglement in fishing lines, specifically the vertical buoy lines that run from lobster traps on the sea floor up to surface buoys. These were entangling whales and other marine mammals, seriously injuring or killing them.

[35:59] DAVID: This gave me a way to tell a story we'll see more of: the conflict between a vital conservation concern and a vital commercial interest — the lobster industry — and how government is trying to navigate that balance.

[37:07] CHRIS: [resumes] The statistics at the time of filming were around 400 whales. It looks like the population has now dropped to just over 300, with roughly 70 presumed reproductive females. That documentary is unfortunately coming to bear. What was your experience of the conflict between the fisheries and the conservationists?

[38:24] DAVID: There's no question the conflict is heated, and since the film broadcast I've felt that tension directly. I've received death threats. The lobster industry created a rebuttal film they titled The Weaponisation of the Right Whale, suggesting our film unfairly damaged lobstermen — when I think we went out of our way to reflect fairly on the potential dangers of over-regulation and any regulation's impact on fishermen. Nobody wants to see the demise of this vital part of our economy and culture. The question is how to stop the damage from vertical buoy lines to a species that nobody — including the lobstermen themselves — wants to see disappear.

[40:25] CHRIS: The impact on the wider ecosystem of losing these animals is not to be underestimated. And you did a piece on the US–Canada conflict over the waters too — both sides always have an argument, and it's about finding middle ground. All the while, the whales remain at greater risk. Is there anything people can do?

[41:56] DAVID: Just today, as it happens, the federal government announced an historic amount of money — $82 million — set aside to promote the protection of North Atlantic right whales. I believe that's partly a result of the pressure from reporting and films like ours. When I first started making the film in 2019, there were an estimated 419 right whales. The last estimate was fewer than 340 — and we'll get an updated figure shortly. There are fewer than 70 breeding females. But this funding will hopefully lead to new technologies that make vertical buoy lines unnecessary. That's the hope.

[43:31] CHRIS: Do you feel you've contributed to that government response?

[43:39] DAVID: I hope so.

[CHAPTER: In the Whale — Michael Packard's Humpback Story — 43:41]

[43:41] CHRIS: On the same theme — In the Whale, the Michael Packard story. I can't believe this actually happened. Do you want to give us a synopsis?

[44:13] DAVID: It's actually a feature-length film. In a couple of weeks we're releasing two films I've been working on for the past two years. One of them is this extraordinary story about the last remaining commercial lobster diver on Cape Cod, who, two summers ago on his third dive of the morning, was heading down to search the sea floor for lobsters when his world went completely black and he was engulfed in the mouth of a humpback whale. He was inside the whale for nearly a minute, saw his life pass before his eyes, and was then literally spat out — thrown out at the surface, shot into the air fins first according to the eyewitnesses, because of the air pressure that expanded in his dry suit.

I've spent the last two years making a film about what happens to a human being who goes through one of the most frightening experiences imaginable and then gets thrust into the international media spotlight — and how he comes back from that as the limelight fades.

[46:52] CHRIS: What city is this? [referring to the second film]

[46:57] DAVID: My city — Boston. Despite having more climate scientists per capita than almost any other city on the planet, and despite many of those scientists telling the city it might not be wise to spend billions of dollars building an entirely new urban district at sea level on landfill hard on the coast — right in the bullseye of rising sea levels — we did it anyway, and we're still doing it. The film raises the question of environmental justice: who should have to pay to defend this neighbourhood, built long after we all knew about the dangers, and who should eventually foot the bill when the flooding comes. The film is called Inundation District.

[47:33] CHRIS: That's a follow-the-money story if ever I've heard one.

[48:07] CHRIS: Where can people see In the Whale? Has it been publicly screened?

[48:19] DAVID: We had one work-in-progress public screening at the Provincetown Film Festival on Cape Cod. The full film will be released at the New Hampshire Film Festival in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in less than a month. And we're hoping to bring both films to an international audience — so if anyone in Scotland wants to fly me over, I'm happy to talk about either film.

[49:37] DAVID: I should mention there's also a Scottish connection in Inundation District — I went to Glasgow for the film when COP26 was there, so there are two scenes from Glasgow in it.

[49:48] CHRIS: That's my home city — I'm sitting there right now. Did you get much time in Glasgow?

[50:32] DAVID: It was mostly centred around COP26, but I did get around — I took some morning runs through that beautiful park in the centre of the city, all the bridges over the river, the castles. I was very impressed.

[CHAPTER: Climate Change, Children's Books & What's Next — 51:01]

[51:01] CHRIS: The city is full of parks — a Victorian legacy. Very beautiful. So what's next for you, David?

[52:23] DAVID: Right now I'm focused on getting these two films over the finish line. But I'm also working on two children's books, one of which is about climate change — based on the true story of my six-year-old son discovering a cold-stunned sea turtle on a beach on Cape Cod.

These endangered Kemp's Ridley sea turtles are increasingly washing up on our shores in late autumn. As summers last longer and waters stay warmer, the turtles no longer get the signals they used to have to head south in time, and they get stunned by the sudden cold — making it difficult to swim, forcing them onto beaches. The book is called Lost and Found, all about my son's experience rescuing a sea turtle.

[54:18] DAVID: We're about midway through illustrating the book, so hopefully next year.

[CHAPTER: Call to Adventure & Pay It Forward — 54:25]

[54:25] CHRIS: Good luck with that — keep us posted. I've got a little girl who's a keen reader so I'll be watching for that. Right, two closing traditions: the call to adventure and the pay it forward. Your call to adventure is your opportunity to suggest something for the listeners — a trip, a place, an activity, a person — anything to get people inspired and outside.

[55:37] DAVID: One of my favourite things in the world is swimming in waterfalls. Whenever I'm travelling I love to find a hike that ends with a waterfall and a pool — just hanging out in the cold water as it showers over you. In the most beautiful places I've ever been, those are often the most beautiful moments: not just admiring beauty, but actually feeling it. That's my call to adventure.

[56:28] CHRIS: Do you have a favourite waterfall?

[56:33] DAVID: One that comes to mind is in the Dominican Republic — Salto Baiguate, I think it's called. Nobody around, tropical green water, really warm. Just magical. I also remember a hike near Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, in a national park, where there's a series of seven or so waterfalls. Really beautiful.

[57:38] CHRIS: We've got no shortage of waterfalls and cold water in Scotland. Thank you — great suggestion. And the pay it forward?

[58:06] DAVID: Something specific: my wife runs a wonderful organisation that brings together children from all over Boston and gets them to do something they never thought they could — complete a race. In a couple of weeks her annual 5K is coming up. She creates community and gets people to dream about things and do things they only thought were possible for other people.

The other is a broader message: don't become complacent about what we're doing to our atmosphere. This summer alone we've seen devastating floods in Libya, fires in Hawaii, wildfires across western Canada, unbelievable deluges in Greece, record heat across Europe and Spain, and the North Atlantic running at off-the-charts temperatures. The evidence is right in front of us. We need change.

[01:00:31] CHRIS: Very important — thank you. That brings us to the end of a fantastic conversation. We've covered your life in journalism, the Boston bombings, the right whales, being swallowed by a whale, and what's ahead. Thank you for your time today, David. It's been inspirational and phenomenal.

[01:00:59] DAVID: My pleasure. Thank you for taking the time to share my story.

[01:01:04] CHRIS: You're welcome.