Link me, baby!

My boss at WDBJ has his own blog, Stop and Smell the People, where he talks about everything from his occasional, daily thoughts to memories of covering past winter Olympics. A few days ago, I gave him some prints of photos I made in the newsroom, using my trusty Leica M3 and 21mm f/2.8 Zeiss lens, including one of him at work. It's a tribute to the Leica that the picture of him was a complete surprise; he had never noticed I shot it. Well, he popped it and another into his blog, and it looks great, in my humble opinion.

Personally, I'm just happy he gave me a photo credit...

About the snow...

Snow still clings to the ground in patches and piles, a continuing reminder of the weeks of bad weather that began before Christmas, despite a few blessed warmer days recently. I've been meaning in all the weeks since that first storm to write some of my experience, but also have kept waiting for the pictures to show some of it. There are more to come, but now I have the story of my commute...

Normally, my drive to work from Lexington to Roanoke is like what you see above: often early, often in the dark (it's hard to make a picture of that -- though the wag in me is tempted to post a black rectangle). There are a few cars, usually more trucks, and quiet smooth hours running at speed on the interstate, occasionally interrupted by bits of debris and dead deer. But the snow changed all that.

My bosses at WDBJ, warned by the meteorologists, anticipated the big storm in December. They reserved rooms in a neighboring hotel, and cautioned me to pack a bag. I was skeptical -- any number of hyped storms have fizzled in past years here -- but became a believer when, on Friday afternoon, the storm rolled in and the snow fell in a continuous curtain. By the end of the six o'clock news, it was beginning to seriously accumulate, and when we adjourned to the hotel, travel was becoming difficult ... even down the short run to there from the station.

By morning, the 4-wheel-drive vehicle I borrowed from the station was well buried in a foot of snow, and the drive back was an adventure. Traffic on the highways ground to a halt, trapping thousands. I spent a second night at the hotel, to my wife Jennifer's increasing jealousy. Trapped in the house with five cats and two children, she envied my quiet nights spent in a soft double bed without company.

By Sunday evening, the snow had stopped falling for a full day. Roads were clearing, those trapped and then rescued -- having spent the night in ad hoc shelters at fire stations and high schools -- were setting out again. Roads in Roanoke were clear, though narrowed to the lane or two the plows could clear, but easily passable. It was time, I thought, to head home.

The temperature remained cold, so the snow had to be moved aside. Still, I drove out 581 and onto Interstate 81 easily enough. Things were moving well, with two de facto lanes of traffic moving in each direction, hemmed in by berms of snow. As I passed mile 156, about five miles north of Roanoke, I was amused to pass a snowplow that had slid off the highway into the median and been abandoned.

Then, with horrifying, inescapable certainty, the traffic began to slow ... and then stop. I imagine this was how it started on Friday, everyone thinking that they would start up again shortly. Maybe, if things remained slow, they would get off at the next exit. How far was that? Five miles? Ten?

We sat. I began to worry. As I left, people in the newsroom had questioned how clear the interstate was. Maybe I should take Route 11, the old two-lane state road that follows the highway, weaving back and forth under and above it as it goes. But I was confident; how bad could it get? Time passed.

But, soon enough, we began moving again. I was right. It wasn't so bad ... until it stopped again. After a while, I began making pictures.

Note the rear-view mirror: you can see the cars stacked up behind me. Looking forward was all but impossible for the trucks. Exits were miles away. There was nothing to do but be patient, creep forward when we could, relax and listen to the radio when we couldn't.

Across the median, there was no backup on the southbound lanes. It was a mystery; I have never learned the solution. Nor have I ever learned the cause of my delay. We would slow to a stop, wait some period of time, and then finally start again. Sometimes we would inexplicably run back up to proper highway speeds, and then some miles down the road -- usually just long enough to give me confidence that it was over -- the brake lights would flash on and we would rapidly decelerate to a stop again. Sometimes we would creep forward, a few miles an hour for a few miles, and then settle into another wait.

At one point, I looked out my window to see some orange peels tossed into the snow piled up against the guardrail separating me from the median. An earlier driver, stopped in the same spot, decided to have a snack. There wasn't just one piece; it was the peel of an entire orange. He had sat there long enough to completely peel the fruit ... and probably eat it too.

I never did find a cause: no wreck, no fishtailed truck, no piles of snow spilled out into the road ... nothing. Well, there was one stalled truck in the left lane once, but that was all. Oddly insufficient for all the stops and slows, the waiting and the creeping forward.

In the end, a drive that takes some 45 minutes on a good, normal day took some two and a half hours. It wasn't frustrating so much as ... absurd.

And when I came home, I found this:

That's some 22 inches of snow burying the house, car, driveway and yard. There was no getting in or out, even in the SUV (we tried some time later, repeatedly ramping it up on pile of snow, backing off, and rushing forward to a skidding stop again). Entrance and escape was finally brought by Cliff, the fellow who mows our yard, showing up with his tractor and a plow some time later. But I was home at last...

About Al Haig...

I was surprised and saddened to hear this morning of the death of Alexander Haig, former Secretary of State among many other, highly respectable and important jobs. (And probably the one in which he had the least influence on history, as compared to Supreme Commander Europe -- where one Army officer once told me the Europeans thought Haig "walked on water" -- or Nixon's Chief of Staff, to pick two others.) I had the pleasure of a week-long trip with him to Moscow in 2000.

We were election monitors (a title more technical than real in my case, as my wife, Jennifer, and I were primarily spending our time making pictures for the group that sent us, the Jamestown Foundation), along with a number of others, including journalists Roland Evans and Michael Barone, and former DCI R. James Woolsey. It was quite an experience to be "inside the bubble" with a crowd like that. I still have the white, red and blue pass that marked me as an official observer -- it was like having an All Access Pass to an entire country.

Haig took to calling me "Mr. Snappy Snap" as Jennifer and I kept popping up with our cameras. All I could think of was how Navy pilots don't really have cool call signs like "Maverick" or "Ice Man" (as in "Top Gun"), but rather often silly and embarrassing ones, usually drawn from some event, like "Goofy Foot." (It's true; check out the technical advisors and pilots on that movie's credits some time.) I knew that I was lucky to be among this crowd and in this situation, for fear of having "Mr. Snappy Snap" forever printed on my nametag and locker somewhere.

But the greatest moment came at the end, at baggage claim at New York's JFK Airport. Haig's aide, "Woody" Goldberg, had gathered his luggage on a cart as the rest of us had collected ours, and Jennifer and I were turning (talking with Goldberg, as I recall) when we heard a voice call out, "Mr. Secretary!" A Customs officer had recognized Haig, and was beckoning him to the rope to let him bypass the regular check. As he turned to the opening, the officer noticed us clustered behind, and asked, "Are they with you?" With a quick glance in our direction, Haig answered yes, and we all sped through. I have never, before or since, felt so important.

The Day the Snow Storm Broke...

I don't know the future, and I don't know how to predict the weather (there's a half-dozen guys where I work who get paid a lot more than I do for that), but I do know a rolling panic when I see one.

The snow is falling again here, and it would be a picturesque and delightful sight but for the fact that it's the third time since a massive Christmastime storm brought the area to a standstill, closing the interstate for tens of miles and stranding thousands. Meanwhile, a larger low pressure system is approaching to strike in two more days. What will it bring?

On Facebook, a friend described a woman busting into his downtown store saying "there is potential for 3 or even 4 feet of snow." Another friend, who labors at the city's public works department, said they were getting calls from people asking about a possible 30-inch snowfall -- a figure he could find no source for. Nor could I. A quick trip to the station's most recent forecast warned of a "big low pressure system," but said nothing of massive snowfall. As a matter of fact, I sensed a reluctance to even predict snow at all, as the temperature line falls so close to us. (Should it move north, we get slushy rain.)

This is like James Thurber's "The Day the Dam Broke," but with lower temperatures. I envision increasingly jittery crowds slowly gathering into a great flow toward the Kroger's, washing over the milk and bread aisles like a great tide. Quickly, toilet paper must be bought!

Well, I'll be packing an overnight bag again this weekend as I head to work, just as I packed one last weekend (unused) and packed one in December (two nights in a hotel next to the station, and even getting to there and back was a struggle), because I don't know the future. Welcome to my World in the snow...

Haiti and Me...

I'm often asked if I miss being a news photographer in Washington, or if I wish I was covering a particularly exciting story, like the Obama inauguration. The answer is almost always: No.

An inauguration -- to take an easy example -- is a giant, complicated and generally uncomfortable affair. Security is high, and the access to almost every aspect of the event is very limited and extremely controlled. The chances of making a picture of interest or importance, let alone one that could be considered in some way unique, are microscopically slim. Covering a Big Story, especially in Washington, is almost always long, tiring, frustrating and futile. No, I don't miss it at all. As a matter of fact, I can often be found comfortably seated before the TV in my Lexington home, chuckling at the pack of photographers when they appear in cutaways.

However, now and again, there's a story I do wish I was on. Usually it's unexpected, exciting and quickly breaking. I find myself obsessively collecting information and details -- the internet is a great resource for this, the dealer to my information crack habit -- though I have no outlet whatsoever, and I imagine how I would cover it, what gear I would use, even what it would be like to be there.

Right now, the Haiti earthquake is that story, a perfectly agonizing combination of the Big Story -- the top headline in every outlet -- with the fact that I have some experience with and knowledge of the place. I ache to go down there and be the journalist of my fantasies...

I was in Haiti just over a year ago, in November of 2008. It was the first chance a group from St. Patrick church had to go to our twin parish in Fond Pierre since the political and security systems completely broke down some four years earlier.

While I had some pictures of Port-au-Prince, it wasn't the focus of our journey, just a way station on the way into the mountains to the east. The only picture I found in my computer from there -- digitized from film shot on an old Rollei twin-lens reflex camera -- was of the dog at Matthew 25 house, "Boss."

He is of an unspecified breed -- tan and sleek, with those pointed ears. I don't think I saw another type throughout the trip. He ruled comfortably at the house in its Port-au-Prince neighborhood.

An email to Josh Harvey, chairman of the Haiti committee at St. Patrick, said that Matthew 25 survived with minimal damage, and its collection of supplies as well as neighboring soccer field made it a central collection point for locals needing medical help. NBC stumbled upon them a couple of days after the quake struck.

We spent only one night in Matthew 25 after arriving, getting up the next morning for the day-long drive into the mountains. It's a journey that, in linear miles, would take only a couple hours in the US, and is notable now for the improved condition (at least before the earthquake) of the main highway, under construction to deserve that name thanks to EU support.

Any distance out of the city (and in many neighborhoods in the city), construction quickly reduces to cobbled-together wood frame structures. These are generally one or two-room homes for entire extended families. When our four-wheel-drive vehicle became mired down in the deep ruts in the road, just outside of Fond Pierre (fortunately), I paused to make a picture of this house overlooking the scene. It is a typical home.

Given the opportunity -- an opportunity few get -- building does step up to a cinderblock-like construction, covered with plaster. The church at Fond Pierre, being rebuilt when we visited after the old church's roof threatened to fall in without benefit of earthquake -- shows how it was done. Here we see two of the workers with their diesel generator, used to power an arc welder with which they joined metal beams to attach the new roof.

Behind you can see the concrete and block construction, typical of the buildings in Haiti. This is what was asked to survive the 7.0 quake. Frankly, I'm surprised as much survived as it did -- I would have expected virtually everything in Port-au-Prince to collapse like a castle built of children's blocks.

I include the above picture -- aside from the fact that I just like it -- to show the finished, plastered wall of the school that stands adjacent to the church. (Both do still stand essentially undamaged, according to Fr. Jean Louis Malherbe, the parish priest.) The school serves over 300 children, and thanks to the efforts of the Rockbridge-Haiti Medical Alliance now has a nurse and small clinic.

Medical services, especially in the countryside, are virtually nonexistant in Haiti in the best of times. Statistically, there are only 2.5 doctors for every 10,000 Haitians. (Yeah, read that again, and remember that most of them are concentrated in urban areas.) In Fond Pierre, it was a day's walk to the most meagre medical facility.

Also, I wanted to show -- and I originally shot the picture to capture -- those chairs. Oddly graceful, with a charming, handmade coarseness, they seem to summarize so much about Haiti. They're cobbled together from whatever is at hand, but assembled with a certain care and love, especially those tiny, child-sized ones. I both wanted to figure out how to get one and bring it home and how to get a consistent supply, as I am convinced they would sell well and expensively in artsy shops in America.

I like to think that, if we can simply lift from their shoulders the crushing burdens of corruption and insecurity, grinding poverty and deforestation, just long enough to take a breath, the Haitians could do to their economy and infrastructure and lifestyle what they did, in a small scale, with those little chairs: pull together what they had at hand to make something useful and more comfortable and, in the end, truly beautiful.

Here we see a teacher using the under-construction church to get above the children after Mass (said in the open air of the school courtyard while work on the church continued). He holds a bag of candy -- leftover Halloween candy brought by a member of our group. Candy is not a rare treat there ... it just doesn't really come at all.

The children wear their school uniforms, which is why they all look alike. The uniform is the only "nice" clothes they generally have. A T-shirt and shorts, often without shoes, is daily wear. Smaller children are commonly seen with just the shirt, or nothing at all.

Again, note the construction technique, revealed before the plaster is put over it, and imagine a building like that receiving a good, sharp shake.

Above, the school's principal holds his 1-year-old daughter as they watch an amateur show of sorts that sprung up after Mass.

Below, we see children at Mass...

And some pictures from another day. I believe this was after a parish meeting, called for our benefit. In these pictures, you can see the homemade pews in the school courtyard, drawn up to make the temporary church.

I find the boy above particularly symbolic at this moment. Many children in my pictures have a curious, if uncertain, openness to them -- as seen with the girls to the left in the first picture -- while others are openly amused. (After all, remember that we were the first "blancs" to arrive in four years; it was as if the freak show had come to town.) But this boy seems deeply suspicious, as if working out what my angle was.*

I can imagine Haiti and the Haitians are metaphorically looking at the world this way. They're happy for the help, no doubt, and more than hopeful for more. And it is my opinion that we need to look at this not as emergency relief alone, but as the sudden, swift start of a long, hard haul to help bring Haiti up from its current state of grinding survival, staggering from moment to moment rather than in any way growing or improving.

But we should have no illusions that the Haitians will -- or should -- take our help and our "recommendations" and march forward as directed. As time goes on, we need to keep helping, but we need to do it with a certain understanding. Let us recall that this is the only slave nation to successfully rebel and become independent.

I hope to return to Haiti, and I hope to be of some help, as time goes on. The story right now, the story that gets a journalist all juiced up and ready to go, is the earthquake and its immediate effect and recovery. And, hell yes, I wish I was down there covering it, not because I revel in human misery or imagine some great glory, but because I'm at heart a journalist, and when things happen, newsworthy things, things that make people pause and look and wonder what happens next and what happened to cause it, I want to be there.

But most of all, I want to watch what happens next, after we move on to the next political race and the next troop movements in Afghanistan and the next Hollywood star breakdown, and the people of Port-au-Prince and Fond Pierre are left to their lot. And, maybe, in my little way, I can help...

*Well he should be suspicious, of me (for, let's face it, I'm all about getting good pictures, especially in the moment of making them) and of those like me, who arrive in his town announcing -- like in the old joke about Washington -- that we're here to help them.

Out Standing in My Field...

This probably falls under my "Welcome to My World" category, but I like putting the punchline before the story...

Yesterday was another early morning at the station. I find myself (actually, quite contentedly) on a regular cycle of doing the editing for the Saturday, Sunday and Monday morning shows, requiring I get there a good couple of hours before they begin. These are the early morning shows -- you know, the ones that come on before the network's early morning show? So the workday starts at 6 a.m. on the weekend, and at a mind-numbing 4 a.m. on Monday. However, the set up here is to explain that, on the weekend, I then often go out and shoot a couple of stories in the afternoon to fill out my 8 hours. (You'll recall that, in the fall, it was on this shift that I became the festival king.)

Yesterday, after some snow and ice-induced quiet (more on that to come, when I get the pictures scanned), it came again: three stories. First, the declaration for city council by a candidate with a name even Dickens would have been embarrassed to make up: Goodpitch. (It's for real.) Then a swing by the Civic Center, where while it's under 20F outside, they're holding the Home and Garden Show -- some quick footage and a couple of interviews. And then -- and this is where I've been heading for two paragraphs -- a local county was to have a groundbreaking ceremony for a new Hospice building.

Hospice, for those of you fortunate enough not to know, helps people who are terminally ill at the very end. It's a great service, and even though I would have covered the event with dedication anyway, I did want to get this to help out.

However, by that time I was running about 15 minutes late, and was somewhat unfamiliar with its location. Luckily, I got a Garmin GPS unit for Christmas, and with a quick input of an address, I was off at high speed with a female voice telling me where to go. (And yes, that is a familiar state of things for me.)

Still 15 minutes behind, the GPS tells me, "Address at left," and it does look like what I expected: an empty field. However, there's something I don't expect. The field is totally empty. It is a barren landscape, not a soul in sight. No ceremony. No ceremony winding down. No confused and irritated hangers on telling me I missed it. Nothing.

Across the street (as the directions in the press release had said) was the sheriff's office. I pulled over there, parking in a spot on the end of a row of carefully reserved parking places, for various captains, lieutenants, investigators, etc. All empty. I thought I'd ask there; maybe the Hospice people had taken shelter from the cutting wind. But, while the outer door was open, the inner was locked. Did I mention all those reserved spaces were empty? Apparently the sheriff is closed Saturday.

Past the field (still empty) and down a cross street, at the bottom of a long, gentle slope, was the county nursing home. I drove down there. There were cars in their lot, but the door in was locked as well. I saw an old man dozing in a wheelchair through the glass, but the reception desk was clearly unattended.

At this moment, I think of a tradition I learned shooting stills that I call the "Editor's Frame." This is a picture you shoot that will never be used. It's usually a wide angle view of the event you're covering, meant to show the editor (who will later complain about your other pictures not being close enough, or not a good angle, or some such thing) just how horrific the situation was. As I walked back to the car, I decided to do the TV equivalent. If nothing else, I told myself, we would then have some stock footage of the location should someone want to do a story on the new Hospice.

I pulled out the camera and began to walk back up through the field, up that long, gentle slope. It was a longer trudge than I first thought, through the still gusting, icy wind, and this really was a big, empty field. Acres and acres of it. I shot long pans of the place, the only feature being short, crunchy, brown, dried grass for hundreds of yards, until that nursing home at one end and a line of scrubby trees marking the property line. It was like standing in the tundra, alone in that empty ground, me in my black duffle coat, giant Panasonic slowly swinging from side to side.

It was only when I was back in the car and driving to the station that I wished I had taken out my Leica and made a picture using the self-timer. (Though, I don't know where I might have set it.) It would have been a remarkable image, that flat open ground from frame edge to frame edge, my dark figure poking up in the center.

We left messages, but I don't know what ever happened to the ceremony. Welcome to my world...

Gawd help us Owl...

So, when on my commute, I will often scan through the FM radio stations before giving up (I inevitably give up, although one decent or intriguing song may slow me for a moment) and either turning on my iPod or pushing in a book on tape. However, lately I have come across a pop song called "Fireflies." This opens with what must be the sappiest lyric in musical history: "You would not believe your eyes/if ten thousand fireflies/lit up the world as you fell asleep." In went the book on tape.

Unfortunately, this is the hit song of the moment, and every experiment with the radio led back to "Fireflies," which only took me to the next, cringe-inducing lyric: "'Cause I'd get ten thousand hugs/from ten thousand lightening bugs." Quickly moving on to the next chapter in the book, I could only think of P.G. Wodehouse's Madeline Bassett, who believe the stars were God's daisy chain and "every time a fairy blows its wee nose a baby is born." Who was the lyricist on this thing, a 12-year-old girl of unique naivete for our time, trapped in a crush on the middle school poet? (Advice to that girl: give it up; he's gay.)

Here's the killer: it's a really catchy tune. It drills into your brain and takes up residence there, to the point where you find yourself humming the chorus later that day.

But about that chorus ... the lyric work becomes somewhat less saccharine, but makes no more sense. "I like to make myself believe/the planet Earth turns slowly." (It kills me to admit it, but I'm singing along as I type that.) I couldn't resist. In a quiet moment at work that day, I did some quick algebra. The earth's circumference at the equator is roughly 29400 miles, and it takes 24 hours to rotate. Rate x Time = Distance. (And so to all you who said, like the character in "Peggy Sue Got Married," that high school math has no purpose. And I just did a search; hard to believe that scene's not on You Tube.) Anyway, quick, easy math shows us traveling at roughly 1,037 mph, due to the rotation of the Earth. I hate to think what quickly is to this guy.

Okay, at this point I'm being obtuse and picky. I know they're talking metaphorically, describing a wish rather than a reality, but now the lyrics are making me crazy. It reached the point where I positively looked forward to the one bright spot in the words, a description that reaches for a kind of American trash version of Asian poetry: "A fox trot above my head/A sock hop beneath my bed/A disco ball hanging by a thread." But then another unfortunate image popped up. Just before that delightfully post-apocalyptic (or perhaps pre-apocalyptic, depending on the state of that thread and the height of the disco ball above our protagonist) vision of the disco ball, my mind filled in an image of David Letterman's late, great Larry "Bud" Melman finishing the triptych with, "A party in my pants!"

By the end, even the lyricist is begging, "Please take me away from here," though I'm sure thousands of distraught teens, with parents who don't understand them and lives destroyed by some humiliating moment in the lunch room are singing along on their tear-stained pillows. But I am unfortunately hooked by the tune, and now actually listen to the whole damn thing when it comes on. Gawd help me ...