I don’t think it’s fair that one of the most poignant comments I’ve ever heard about living in the moment was spoken by a second billing character on The Office. But most of the mental scar tissue that comes from working in a television newsroom leaves a person with a lifeboat of unintended consequences.
I used to have this keychain. A knickknack I picked up in a place I know not where, or so it would be written in a more poetic blog than this. Like all keychains, its real purpose was to express the personality of the person who owned the keys it chained. That’s really a lot to ask out of a keychain, when you think about it, but mine served its purpose well. . A cartoon picture of a cow in the middle of a grassy pasture, with the caption “Outstanding in the Field” written across the bottom. For a guy who truly appreciates the value of a good “man walks into a bar” joke, this was comedy gold.
It bears repeating. Forty-three and single. It’s all starting to make a bit more sense.
I had been working in a television newsroom in Sioux Falls for just shy of three months, and on election night 1993, I found myself on the outskirts of a small town called Vermillion, many miles and a world away from my home away from home, the television newsroom. For everyone playing “Alma Maters of the Broadcast News Anchors” bingo, you’ll want to check your cards for Vermillion, because this is where Tom Brokaw went to college. Vermillion is the home of the University of South Dakota… if anything served as a barometer of the excitement level of this election cycle, the fact that I had been cooling my jets for more than five hours awaiting the results of city council and sheriff elections in a town whose sole claim to fame (I don’t count the National Music Museum and neither should you) is that Tom Brokaw reached legal drinking age here should be an indicator. It was not going to be a blip on the national radar. It was hardly going to be a blip on South Dakota radar. I would venture a guess that it wasn’t going to be a blip on Vermillion radar, and it was their election results I was gathering, but I was by far the newest of new kids on the news block. The Sioux Falls races, such as they were, were being covered by the lifers at the station, and anything involving state legislature races was being handled out of the Pierre bureau.
There is not a Vermillion bureau. There is not a Vermillion office. What there is, however, is a Vermillion repeater tower. The Sioux Falls market covers the entire state of South Dakota except for Rapid City. The Sioux Falls market also extends into small swaths of Minnesota, Iowa and Nebraska, so the owners of the television station I worked for had long ago installed repeater towers so the station’s signal could reach into the various corners of the market. Vermillion sits on the southern border of the state, along the Missouri River, and was the most logical place to plunk down a tower, since we could also stake our claim to the greater Valentine, Nebraska metropolitan area.
By 9:15, election results safely in hand, I headed out of Vermillion proper with my treasure trove of sound bites from the new sheriff, council members et al and made a beeline for the tower, which sat a few miles outside of town. The roads, of course, did not have names. The way you get somewhere in a rural area is to follow directions that go something like, “drive until you see the grain elevator, then take the wider dirt road to the east of the Tscetter’s sorghum field.” If you don’t know what a sorghum field looks like or who the Tschetters are… well, that’s kind of your own problem. It is also worth noting that a Dodge minivan is not the best vehicle to use on these roads, especially in the rain. It was, of course, raining.
I found the gate to the chain link fence surrounding the tower on the fourth driveraround and after unlocking the extremely rusty padlock, pulled alongside the base. There was a small shed, not much bigger than an outhouse, and I understood that I had found the “edit station.”
I assumed there would not be cake. A portable meth lab, though, seemed a distinct possibility, as I wondered when the last station employee had ever set foot here. The McGovern era was my bet. I reflected that the phrase “edit station” was a gloriously inappropriate euphemism, because after pulling the chain to turn on the single exposed light, what I saw was a wooden table with cigarette burns and a missing leg, a folding chair and a videotape deck so old that I honestly expected to have to wake up a hamster or two to get it running. My instructions were as follows: “When you to the edit station, see if the deck works, plug your camera into it and feed us your raw video.”
The deck, of course, did not work. Natch. I think the fact there was any electricity at all was a big W for the night. I found myself running back and forth from the cell phone in the van (the concept of a cellular phone as something you could hold in your hand was still at least three years away) and through the rain back to the console I had plugged my camera into so that I could feed my video back to the station. It was raining pretty hard by now, but at least there was also a lot of lightning. Airtime was about twenty minutes or so, an amount of time that would seem luxuriously languid in years to come, but on this night, the producer was getting nervous.
I feel this is important to reiterate – she was nervous about not having the video and bites from the city council races in Vermillion, South Dakota. That said, deadlines are deadlines… you don’t get to choose which ones you care about missing, so if she was nervous, I was nervous. The rain was pounding on the roof of the news car so loudly I could barely hear master control shouting at me to confirm they were getting the feed. As the rain finally began to slacken, I left the car again to make sure the camera was still feeding properly.
That’s when I began to hear the mooing.
What sounded like the worlds angriest cow had wandered up to the tower through the open gate. I began to understand that perhaps there was a dual prupose to the sign on the gate, the one that said “this gate must remain closed at all times.” Perhaps they weren’t just trying to stave off the rural homeless. My new bovine friend had ambled into the… I’m going to call it a parking lot, but it was just the somewhat smoother dirt at the base of the tower. Bessie… I had immediately dubbed her Bessie… didn’t seem pleased at all with her current lot in life, and judging by the fact that a large meatpacking plant was less than fifty miles away, I didn’t think it was going to get much better. I suppose I could understand her current weather related discomfort. I’ve been caught in the rain with a leather jacket too.
I have a habit of fingering my keychain when I’m stressed out. Caught in a lightning storm, feeding apparently life changing city council sound from the home of the University of South Dakota (go Coyotes!) and confronted a very angry and for all I knew sexually frustrated cow, I was… wait for it… outstanding in the field! The keychain had become reality.
Of course, the video made it safe and sound. My prospects of continuing working in a television newsroom would extend for at least another day. The rain finally stopped, and even Bessie finally wandered back into the pasture. On her own, I might add. I wasn’t touching her for any amount of money. I drove my way back into what now seemed like the Paris of the upper Midwest and called it a night. In the grand scheme of things, it hardly registered as noteworthy. When your news career includes two state executions, tornadoes and hurricanes too numerous to count and at least one police officer who enjoyed dressing up as Raggedy Andy and trolling the internet in his off time, angry cows and stories where you didn’t even yell at your producer but were just handily perturbed don’t register on your personal Richter scale. I haven’t thought of it in years.
I’ve been looking for a photographer this week. For the time being, and perhaps for the foreseeable future, or perhaps permanently, my shooting days are in my rear view mirror. along with my days of working in a television newsroom. A friend of mine connected me with a reporter friend from her own “good old days,” and for about three hours, it was like being in the newsroom again. Talking to fellow reporters is a cathartic experience. There’s very little like a newsroom. For started it’s like being in a no-fly zone through which the human resources department has no hope of penetrating. Think of the most obscene, insulting or inappropriate behavior or comments you can imagine and then don’t bother. It’s already been said, loudly and often, in an open newsroom, and most likely by the nominal adult in charge of the place… the news director or executive producer. When you live in a world where nothing matters but filling a slot with a story, any story, no matter how good, bad or indifferent, that becomes your baseline for what acceptable behavior is. Yes, there are shining examples of brilliant writing, exceptional reporting and occasionally admirable standards. However, as I’ve mentioned previously, while “get it first, get it fast, get it right,” is the mission statement tacked on the wall, once you start eliminating words in reverse order of importance, what’s left at the end is “get it.” Any number of off-putting behaviors can be excused if you make slot every night. It’s why reporters date people like nurses and detectives. There are very few people who get the necessity of gallows humor, letting off steam and results based performance that is compressed into minutes or seconds. Nobody dies if we get it wrong, of course, but it’s fun to think they might. That’s why working in news is a permanent vacation – as difcicult and stressful as it is, the secret is that we know it’s mostly harmless. Yes, there are real risk from the outside world, more so every year as more people decide that a reporter on a live shot is a great target for theft, assaults and worse. Most crews in San Francisco won’t leave for a story without armed security accompanying them, and this is scandalous in what it says about the world we live in now, but the nuts and bolts of the job itself is that it’s about air. That’s where the stories come from and that’s where they go when they’re finished. There are very few consequences to our misdeeds because at the end of the day, literally at the end of the day, all of our punishments are self imposed recriminations for something that exists, at best, as air.
Still, for three hours, I got to reminisce about every bit of bad behavior that one is capable of in a newsroom environment. It reminded me that I’m so far removed from being the person that enjoyed that life that it was like looking at the world through the wrong end of a telescope. I looked at the life I’ve had for the last ten years, and for all the good times I had, what bothered me is that I couldn’t quite figure out how I’m going to look at it ten years from now. What are the stories I’m going to recall from that period?
More so… what of today? This shaky middle ground and the work I’m trying to begin… to begin again… what is it all about? Is there, in fact, anything I can do to recognize what is new and exciting in the middle of what only seems tenuous at best? Can I see a good thing for what it is without having to wait for time to pass? I hope so, because while I like fond memories, I’d rather have those memories today, without waiting for them to fade into sepia.
That’s what was on my mind, playing on a loop while rehashing the greatest hits from those days working in a television newsroom and finding common ground with a person I had never met. I found myself thinking about the night at the Vermillion tower. The urgency I felt, and the wrath of God I was channeling towards my producer, a master control operator and a random cow that just wanted to get out of the rain. It all seemed to matter so very much at the time. I truly hated everything about that night, and now it’s an experience I wouldn’t trade for anything.
So I think Andy Bernard got it right when he observed, or a writer observed for him when putting the words in his mouth, that it’s a shame we can’t recognize the best days of our lives when we’re still having them.
