Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Welcome. Here's your paddle.

Before I begin the story, I'm going to do this backwards and tell you what the moral of the story is. The moral of the story is that no matter where you work, which paper you work for or what towns you cover, you will always find some kind of drama. Good or bad, it's always going to be there.
I'm working in a different office for a few weeks until the company hires two new reporters for this particular paper. It means three things for me. First, it means that it's going to take me about four times as long to get to work in the morning because I'm working in a different town. Second, it means I get a break from the two Hell-towns I cover at my office. Third, it means I leave the drama of those two towns and come to the drama of these two towns.
It took me three hours to get to work this morning; it's only supposed to take forty minutes, and that's without traffic. It takes me ten minutes to get to work at my regular paper, so you can see why I'm a little extra cranky today.
But the reason it took so long was because of the road and traffic situation. There is only one road getting into the town in which I'm filling in. One road. There are three roads that converge onto this road. Two of the three were closed due to flooding.
This is what happens: In the same weekend, your state governor ends up in the hospital because he wasn't smart enough to wear a seatbelt on the high way and several towns get buried by a northeaster. So this northeaster comes in and one of the towns I'm covering right now was almost completely under water. It was bad. Really bad.
So I went today to the refugee building where they evacuated almost 300 people to. It was lined with cots and plastic bags of clothes and sleeping bags and people who just looked like complete zombies. I can't even imagine sitting in a room like that with hundreds of other people just waiting to hear if I'd ever be able to go back home or not.
So between flooding, a governor who's in the hospital, and coping with people who are associated with the town I cover and the Virgina Tech incident, it's been really hectic around here. Drama is in every town, no matter where you live, no matter what town you cover, no matter what paper you write for.
Harry Truman said, "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." This is what reporting is about, folks. It's about covering the drama in a way that doesn't completely kill your Bullshit Goggles. It's about going to cover the hard stuff and talking to people who have found out they just lost everything except the clothes on their back.
On that note, happy writing.

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