I didn’t become a journalist to tweet. That platform didn’t exist when I started, back in the early 2000s. It would have seemed alien at the newspaper where we used a waxer and X-Acto knives to collage together the broadsheet pages before sending them off to the printer. I know this makes me sound positively geriatric. I’m honestly fine with that.
Of course, I’m grateful that Twitter has allowed my work to reach far beyond the corners of the Northwest where I live, and don’t deny that its megaphonic properties have helped me get new assignments from editors who’d never consider hiring a blue-haired journalist from Oregon. But the way Twitter spreads disinformation, and rewards half-assed work, or no work at all, or gives confounding weight to people who cosplay as journalists — I have lost all interest in participating in it. If it was a party, I would have left my beer and snuck out the door years ago.
I also didn’t become a journalist to talk about the labor economics of the crippled industry, even though I talk about that more than I’d like to. I am required to be a business person in order to stay independent, but I don’t like this part of my reality. I wish news outlets treated freelancers better, but, as they say, you can wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up first. I don’t see that reality changing anytime soon.
It is very obvious to say, but I became a journalist to write. And quarantine has been a major hurdle for me in making the kinds of journalism I want to make. In this regard, I am not unique. Since March, I’ve been mostly at home, reporting very little out in the world, figuring out workarounds to the way I usually do the job. Like everyone, I’ve been trying to figure out how to do it safely, feeling stymied by all the obstacles and my overall lack of movement, feeling confused over what the place of a writes-too-long freelancer like myself is in today’s media climate. What’s my role? What’s my obligation?
As I’ve watched the leaves begin to turn outside my office window, I knew I had to make a choice on a story I’ve been working on for months: I could continue to report it out from the other end of a phone line, or I could go. Go now — knowing that COVID will only get worse, knowing that the places I need to go will soon be difficult to reach as the temperature plummets. So I went for it. Got in the car, drove for two days straight to get what I need to sustain my writing on this topic through what I imagine will be a very long winter.
For days before I left I was wracked with anxiety over this choice, and so much fear. Fear of people, fear of COVID, just general fear. So I set rules for myself. My conversations with people would have to stay restricted to the phone, but I need to see the place that is, like in many stories I do, just as much a character as any person involved. I needed to smell what the air is like in the morning. To see the way weather builds over the Grand Tetons, and feel how wind cuts like claws this time of year. I could feel the story building as I went to look for coffee one morning, only to find that no one here drinks it. Living out the rest of the day from behind a smokescreen of under-caffeination is evident in my notepad, like my knuckles couldn’t even hold a pen right without enough coffee.
Typically when I go on the road, I work from the time I wake up in the morning to the time I go to sleep, jamming days with driving, interviews, scene-gathering, unannounced stop-ins. I come home exhausted, usually, but remembering why I love what I do. I didn’t know what a reporting trip would look like without being able to do what I always do. This time, I’ve been living out of my car for the most part: a cooler packed in the back, a bag of groceries I’ll fish around in as I’m driving. I’ve rented houses to stay in, instead of spending the night with chatty bed and breakfast hosts or in local hotels. This adds to the feeling I’m all alone out here.
A friend recently reminded me that I stick out like a sore thumb in most rural situations I report in, and I think I probably knew that, but forgot. Part of why I’ve forgotten is that I’ve been lucky in the past couple of years to do reporting trips like this with another journalist. Our trips are epic and hilarious, capped off by beers at some of the most random bars in America, and writing sessions that happen sporadically in coffee shops and hotel lobbies. It helps to report in a pair, I think. You can good-cop-bad-cop interviews. Or when things are complicated, or confusing, there’s another brain to dissect it with. This has been a lucky thing for me to experience — creative collaboration. The garage band equivalent for journalism.
But it isn’t how I’ve worked for the majority of my time as a freelancer, and what this reporting trip has reminded me is that my strengths as a writer and reporter often come from the lonely feeling of being far from my comfort, wrestling with big ideas by myself, driving further into wilderness than I typically would, hovering too long at the scene of a crime, jotting down notes that make sense only to me.
More than any writing I’ve done, or notes I’ve taken on this journey, I’ve just been driving. Driving from point A to point B, then doing it again. Driving from character #1’s home to character #2’s. Eating a sandwich on the side of a street, jotting down the kinds of cars people drive. Pulling up to where a horrific thing occurred, listening to a new-to-me Swedish psych-rock album just as the music is cresting, and being inspired all over again. Hitting the brakes when a baby cow needs to cross the road. Seeing notifications pop up on my phone — hysterical, fearful, anxious — and just swiping them away, away, away. Refocusing. On the horizon. On the story. On what I can see and hear and smell and nothing else.
This has been a reminder of the power of loneliness, for me at least, and the endless creativity that can come from solitude, dwelling on a feeling and a story and the energy of a place at a certain moment in time. I want to write something great before my time is done. The world likes to get in the way of that goal.
Hundreds and hundreds of miles of pavement is, for me, an open canvas. Nothing more. It’s funny how I let myself forget that, how even when I was packing for this trip I let my fear guide me. I packed things I didn’t need at all. I packed things just in case, like the camping knife that I use when we’re backpacking, thinking I’d need it. You know. Just in case.
Last night, I was struggling to open a glass bottle of fancy sparkling water without a bottle opener. I found a list of “hacks” online — keys, a tightly-folded dollar bill, the edge of a counter. Nothing was working. But then I remembered that knife. I texted the picture above to my husband — the knife and that oppressive cap. “Survival,” he wrote back.
Survival. For my writing to survive this time, I needed this period alone with the pavement to see a way forward, to remind myself that fear constricts. It’s taken six tanks of gas. And so far, the only fear I’ve had was whether or not I was dextrous enough with a Bear Grylls knife to not stab myself in the hand in order to get a drink.
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I had completely forgotten about layout on physical broadsheets until you brought it up. Strange how memory works. Instantly, I could hear STP's Purple album and smell the Elmer's Rubber Cement we used to paste up the broadsheets for the high school paper. It quickly faded into the smell and taste in the air of Kodak D76 developer. I never covered anything more exciting than a state tennis meet or the retirement of a popular teacher, but your little paragraph at the beginning brought back many fond memories of my very short journalism "career". Thank you.
I find your work incredibly valuable, so it makes me glad that you were able to spend that time you needed to find inspiration. I look forward to what it will turn into.