You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell what’s crazy™
Drastic actions as a result of drastic circumstances.
The phone rings. It’s the station I’ve often said, when the station calls unexpectedly, nothing good can happen.
“Where are you guys?”, the assignment editor says, a sense of stress in her voice.
“I’m in the geographical center of the county,” I respond, realizing where I am is about to make little to no difference.
“What are you doing?”, comes the next inane question.
I look at my photographer in the driver’s seat
He is frowning like a kid who just learned Santa is cheating on Mrs Claus.
A call from the station at this time of day often spells doom.
It’s a call from the police at 2 am. It’s a call from your boss at the end of the day on Friday. It’s a call from your tax guy asking “Are you seated?”
None of this is good.
My assignment editor proceeds proving my theorem, once again, correct.
“There’s been an explosion at an arms manufacturing facility near Hickman County,” she says, her voice a little shaky.
I can hear scanners blaring in the back ground. I automatically know the news room is a coffee pot percolating out of its container.
There is so much crazy there, it is literally affecting us 100 miles away.
“There’s been an explosion at an arms manufacturing plant,” she says again.
That’s a crazy first sentence for any co-worker to utter to another.
There’s been an explosion at the arms manufacturing factory. In the news business, it rolls off the tongue effortlessly. Each syllable hits the air and it commands respect.
When is the last time you said those words to anyone ? Hi how are you? and then followed it up with, There’s been an explosion at an arms manufacturing plant!
I bet you haven’t said that sentence to a friend, a co-worker a significant other your whole life.
In my business those words pop out of your face all the time. It’s as mundane as pass the salt at a Chuckey Cheese.
Some station calls are stupid, senseless, a waste of time. I know this one is not. I immediately know that the story I am working on, an attempted abduction of a middle school girl getting off the school bus, is in jeopardy.
“Yeah I’m in the middle of nowhere about ready to interview the child’s mom,” I say going through the motions, turning a page in my reporter’s notepad, prepared to take directions to an Arms Manufacturing plant a million light years away.
I pause.
There is dead air on the other end.
In the radio business, this is death.
In the assignment business, it tells me there is chaos, and there is no plan, or the plan they have is bad.
I turn to my photog and shrug quietly.
I all ready know, the station’s plan is lacking. It’s a middle school boy, face full of pimples and awkwardness, about to ask out the home coming queen in front of all her friends. It is doomed from inception.
“What do you need?” I say, wondering how far our drive is going to be.
“We’d like your photographer to go to the explosion and meet up with the other night side reporter. We want you to keep working on your story”
I’m confused. The plan feels smooth as a 3 person tango.
I look at my photographer. He appears nauseous. I expect him to start banging the steering wheel with his face.
“So let me get this straight. You want the guy driving me, the guy shooting my story, to now go to another story. You realize I don’t have a camera yet you still want me to interview the mother in the county we are currently in.”
It sounds like a question on jeopardy
Yes Alec, I’ll take brain farts for $200″
This is the point in the phone call where I am reminded that sometimes news makes no sense. News frequently comes with no directions. If there are directions, they probably are printed in Chinese, translated by a Tibetan monk smoking rope on a mountain top.
“Well, we’re going to send another shooter from the station to help you get your interview.”
There is a pause. It’s the same pause of disbelief after Tom Hanks says; “Houston, we have a problem.”
This plan was conceived by people reading the anarchists’ cook book.
The station is an hour away. It’s the height of rush-hour traffic.
“What am I suppose to do for the next hour?” I say calmly, trying to absorb the many and sudden wrinkles of this time bomb exploding in my brain.
Again, there is silence. I can sense mission control doesn’t have the re-entry sequence I need to splash down safely and they are stalling for time.
“Ah, he’ll come and meet you so your photographer can drive to the scene and go meet the other guy to cover the plant explosion.”
I look out my window to see if we are venting anything stupid into space.
I look at my photographer and I roll my eyes. In what universe does this make sense?
This is like playing chess with live crickets.
It’s a shaky plan conjured by inside people who watch news on TV, having seldom touched a living breathing news story, no less one of this magnitude.
“Can you just wait where you are till the other photographer shows up?”
The voice crackles, and fades at the end.
The question is so ridiculous. I wonder if they would ask a female reporter this question. I wonder if I were in a crack neighborhood, would they ask this question.
I can only answer; “Yes.”
It’s breaking news and it’s hard to argue with the assignment desk when they use words like ammunition and explosion and 2 flown by helicopter to the trauma center and one man dead.
Those are all good news words that make you readjust your seat belt and check for new coordinates in your GPS.
I gather my things and get out. My cell phone battery says 31%. I am wearing a suit and exceedingly over dressed for this venue.
We are at a little country store where we had stopped to gas up.
As my photographer begins to back out of the parking spot, headed to God knows what, he pauses.
He holds his smart phone out the window and takes my picture.
I smile. What else can I do?
He waves and drives off.
I am alone.
For the first time in my 30 year career, I have been orphaned by a photographer in the middle of nowhere.
I find myself on a bench in front of a little country store. It’s a speck on the map.
Belch and you are through it. Hiccup and you are in the next postal zone. Blink and you are asking the cows in the next pasture for directions.
The sun is setting and I watch Americana before me.
I’m one part angry and two parts intrigued.
Life is a journey and right now, I am going nowhere, but it’s intriguing.
I look at the sign on the door of the old country store.
It is perhaps the most curious sign you will ever see on a business that is open to the public, a business that sells food and drinks and sundries, a business that is a stone’s thrown from an interstate.
The sign written in black and red magic marker on a piece of paper, scotch taped to the glass says:
“No bathrooms. This building built in 1911, 102 years ago. There has never been a bathroom.”
The unwritten sentiment here is; if your bladder is full, go somewhere else. If you need to use the restroom, hold it.
Ultimately, if you need to use the bathroom don’t stop here! Man, that’s a hell of a marketing plan, isn’t it.
It tells the consumer, go away. We don’t need your stupid money here.
So here I am, Little Orphaned Andy sitting on a little bench outside the country store with the insipid little sign. My bladder is swelling like a sponge left under a dripping faucet.
“You can use the corner over there between those two buildings,” a nice man with gaps in his teeth says quietly.
I look for Alan Funt’s camera crew to pop out of the bushes and say “You are on Candid Camera.”
Nope.
This is real.
It’s like Mayberry with less plumbing.
Next to me are two men. They are out of a John Deere Tractor manual. They are standing in the parking lot, beside the wooden deck. They are talking to a little boy.
I quickly learn the little boy, perhaps 5, is the grandson of one of the men wearing a hat with a Ford logo.
His accent is thick, like maple syrup.
“Oh yes,” the grandpa says, his veins pulsing with Jimmy Dean Sausage. “He has a right big toy tractor collection. All the John Deere’s and others too.”
The little boy smiles. This is undoubtedly a source of pride between the grandpa and his grandson.
I feel the warm setting sun on my face. I am wearing a dark double-breasted sports coat and slacks. I am over dressed for this venue, like sending Navy Seals to write a traffic ticket.
I take off the sports coat trying to blend in.
If only I had worn my coveralls and suspenders. To blend in I might also need a can of Copenhagen chewing tobacco and a Sun Drop Soda.
Instead I’m wearing a white collared shirt, silk tie, and big city grin.
I open my reporter’s note pad. I need to focus on the story I am going to do.
“A mother wants answers tonight after her child is lured away from her school bus.”
I write the anchor lead in to the story.
It sounds good, it sounds hard. On a normal night, this would easily lead the 10 pm show. But this is not a normal night. One man is dead and an ammunition plant is burning somewhere far away.
And here I am, sitting on a country store bench, surrounded by Americana and inhaling the after glow of an Andy Griffith episode.
Just then 3 more Barney Fifes walk out of the store.
“Them folks from Arkansas asked to use the restroom,” one man jokes walking down the rickety steps.
“Didn’t they read the sign?”
The men get in an old pick up truck with no muffler and roar away.
As the golden sun sets over this place lost in time, I begin to pencil in my ideas.
I haven’t interviewed the mother yet, but I have spoken to her on the phone.
I can only trust that someone with a camera will arrive, so I begin writing the news report guessing what she will say.
A suspicious vehicle following a school bus for 5 miles. A bus driver realizing the car is not normal. The child gets off the bus and the man in the car propositions her. The child runs. The car speeds away. Should the bus driver have done more?
Ironically, the story happens only a few miles from this store lost in time.
Surveillance cameras on the bus capture much of the interaction. It’s a good exclusive. The school system public information officer is nervous as a cat on water skis.
“I didn’t know anything about this,” she will say to me over and over.
An hour passes. I watch time slow and the sun set.
I hear about ham sandwiches and getting home to fix supper.
I write a story that I haven’t yet shot.
Then, a news car arrives.
Dust and noise pull into the lot behind it.
It’s as if the 21st century has followed along, breaking into a time capsule lost in this speck of road just off the interstate.
I see the photographer driving. He is angry, his face hard. I can tell the world of news is thick inside the car.
I sit for a moment enjoying the sun set and the slow passage of time.
Here there are no worries beside how many John Deere Tractors you have and making sure you don’t have a full bladder before you enter.
When this ordeal started, I didn’t want to sit on this bench. I was caught up in a typhoon of news, a jambalaya of angst, a cacophony of terrible planning.
An hour ago it was GO GO GO.
Now, I look around and time has slowed and a plant explosion with one dead an hour away doesn’t seem to be that important.
At least not here.
The photographer in the car doesn’t wave or smile. I can tell he is angry, having been jerked out of his seat a few minutes before his shift was about to end.
That’s News.
I will get a mainline dose of it the moment I open that car door.
Strangely, I don’t jump up.
I take a moment and breathe in this moment.
Sunset. Old bench. Country ham sandwiches.
It’s nice. It’s relaxing. There is no crazy plan.
Don’t need one.
There’s only one rule here. No bathrooms.
If you can handle that, then come on in.
Life’s Crazy™