Inked

I have several quotes taped to my computer at home, all of them centering around the same theme:

"Never confuse movement with action." -- Hemingway
"It's not like you don't have a choice because you do - you can either type or kill yourself." -- Anne Lamott
"Write first, edit later." -- (Probably Seth Godin)

and finally

"Inspiration is for amateurs." -- Chuck Close

It's easy to find excuses not to write. Cats nosing their way onto my lap, a house that desperately needs to be cleaned, the potato soup that's calling my name from the kitchen cabinet. I'm out of coffee, I need to go to the bathroom, my phone is ringing somewhere in the other room. And all of those are just within the last five minutes. Not even to mention the digital distractions of Facebook, Twitter, local news sites, emails from six years ago I thought Google had deleted when I deleted them but now I'm glad I found them because they're infinitely fascinating. Then I decide I can't write if I'm hungry, and I for sure can't write without a third cup of coffee, so I head to the kitchen, where I'm interrupted by a cat, then another cat, then my soup exploding all over the microwave that of course needs to be cleaned RIGHT NOW otherwise said soup will cement itself for all eternity. (Seriously, all of this just happened to me.) As I'm cleaning that, I notice how dirty the kitchen floor is, the living room floor, the counters, the sink full of dishes, all the cat toys everywhere, and by then it's too late.

Four hours later, the house is clean but the page is blank. I crack open a cold one, run a bubble bath, congratulate myself on the clean house and promise I'll do better tomorrow on the whole writing thing. That's how it goes, right?

The hardest thing to communicate to my interns at the Indy is that writing is not some magical thing that beret-ed and bearded people do in coffee shops between crosswords. Writing is work, hard work, most often accomplished without a stroke of genius and most often accomplished by inserting butt into chair and staying there for a few hours, churning out crap work, typing when you don't feel like it. "I get to my best work in the fourth paragraph," I told my last intern, Brian, and I swear his eyes got wider. Good thing I didn't mention that sometimes it's the fourth page. "But I know that 95% of people will quit if they don't churn out a brilliant first line or a brilliant first paragraph, and if I can push through those first three paragraphs, I'll be better than that 95% of people who quit."

"The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case." -- Chuck Close

My editor, Jeff, often says to me on sunshiney Thursday afternoons at the office, "I don't feel like working today." But you know what? No matter how many times he's said that, I can't recall a one that he's actually gotten up and left, no matter how tempting it might seem when looking out the window.

Writing crap is never a waste of time, although it might feel like it when the house is a mess and you haven't yet brushed your teeth today. If you want to write, you have to write crap to get to the good stuff. No writing exercise is a substitute for your neurons waking up, yawning and stretching, packing a Thermos and briefcase and heading out onto those little neural pathways in your brain that make our actions into habits. You can't write if you don't practice, and you can't practice if you don't write. This is the hardest thing for writers to overcome.

I got my tattoo in a shitty, hole-in-the-wall tattoo place off Canal Street in New Orleans. I waited two hours for a tat that took 10 minutes, and I didn't feel like explaining myself to anyone sitting around me or to the tattoo jerks who kept repeating the same four words over and over again, with an emphasis on "amateurs." The meaning isn't immediately obvious, I guess. I get it. But I needed the phrase on more than a Post-It note stuck to my monitor. I need to be able to see it when I'm getting distracted, when I feel like I'm going in the wrong direction, when the thought creeps into my head that I could be doing other, more constructive things right now. I needed it five years ago when I was struggling to write my thesis, amassing research that went nowhere, afraid on those late late nights that my thoughts and opinions had no meaning to anyone but me. I still feel that way on a daily basis. No one is forcing me to keep going. But I know I have something to say, and my tattoo reminds me that the only way I'm going to get to say it is if I sit down and get to work.

WWI Gear

WWI Gear, a photo by meagan.porter on Flickr.

I am a notorious hater of museums, unless they involve dinosaur bones, then I'm all in. We went to dozens of them in New York, and now with in-laws who live in Washington D.C., there never seems to be a shortage of them to visit. I've probably been to every famous American museum you could think of by default, and I don't mean to sound ungrateful, it's just the idea of walking around and looking at stuff isn't really in my top ten. And don't even get me started on art.

I'm a tactile person. I have to physically handle things to be able to experience them. If I can't turn something over in my hands, hold it closer to my face to examine it, smell it, look at it from different angles, it might as well be a picture on a TV screen to me. It's not real until I can touch it, experience it. And museums, with all their artifacts behind glass and guarded, don't seem real to me.

The new exhibit at the Pioneer Log Village in Reedsburg is not like that. I visited recently with my intern Brian to do a preview article on the hard work volunteers have put into the exhibit, which was about to premiere the next weekend at Reedsburg's Loyalty Day. Maybe it was the fact that the Barb, the Historical Society President, didn't mind opening the cases for us so I could get a better photo without reflecting off the glass. Maybe it was because it was just the three of us, with no other guests elbowing in on our experience. Or maybe it was because these were all items connected to my home town, to people I knew, histories for which I had some kind of reference, not just facts and dates on a page like in history class.

Sure, there are some items behind glass. But there are many items in the new exhibit (and the Village itself) that you can actually touch, like old military uniforms donated by local residents. Barb knew the story behind almost every item, could reference who donated it and where it came from. And I was blown away by how many items there were, different items the volunteers had been rescuing from dark and cobwebby boxes over the course of a few months.

Brian and I spent longer than we probably should have at the exhibit. We were supposed to be working on a story, taking photos, talking to Barb and gathering information. We shouldn't have stayed there longer than a half hour or so to avoid imposing on her time and ours. But I just couldn't help it. Every time I turned around, there was something more to look at, something I hadn't seen before, something my photographer brain wanted to capture from every conceivable angle. To say that the exhibit is well put together is an understatement; not only is it extremely professional but it encourages the kind of exploration (read: time-wasting) that kept pulling me back in that day. And who could ask for a better host than Barb, who volunteers so much of her free-time revitalizing the Log Village and gave us so much information and access that day that I just couldn't tear myself away.

The exhibit is only a small part of the larger Reedsburg Historical Society Log Village. The grounds are beautiful, and each cabin and building is full of artifacts from Reedsburg and the surrounding area. I spent a great afternoon there with my dad a few years ago, exploring each of the buildings. The site is one of Wisconsin's hidden gems and well-worth the trip if you ever have the chance.

Thoughts from a Plane Crash

Accident Scene, a photo by meagan.porter on Flickr.

At the scene of an accident, it's not a good sign when the frenetic pace slows, firefighters begin lifting off their helmets, paramedics draw farther away. The plane, bent in wrong directions like a broken bone, was laying where it had crumpled and came to rest against the side of a storage shed.

I was standing in tall grass between Jeff and a rusted out washing machine when a fireman approached us. "It just dropped out of the sky," he said with a combination of astonishment and exhaustion.

His voice dropped off. "They've passed," he said.

We don't respond to accident calls often. I don't know how to succinctly explain it - other papers like to publish accident photos from time to time, and it always gives me a bad taste in my mouth. It's just not nice.

The plane crash was different. There was no debating whether or not we were going to respond, no looking up addresses while questioning if it was worth our time to drive out there. A plane crash. I sprang up, haphazardly predicting what I needed to bring to the scene like gathering possessions to rescue from my burning home. Jeff was already out the door. Nate the intern trailed behind.

We drove like maniacs across town, and it seemed like everyone with a police scanner was headed in the same direction. I called my dad. "They're trapped," he said, relaying what he heard on the scanner. "They've started CPR."

We parked behind the VFW Hall and a man in a station wagon was telling a guy with a baby stroller that he had seen the whole thing. "Go talk to him!" I yelled to Nate, struggling to keep up with Jeff.

I felt blindly pulled like a magnet toward the accident scene, ignoring fences and driveways. Jeff led us the long way along the road, scolding me for trespassing. "That's private property," he yelled behind him.

As we approached the scene, a sheriff with a white handlebar mustache and brown uniform was pulling police tape across our path. My stomach dropped.

The sheriff looked up and saw us. "Did you get a good picture yet, Jeff?" he asked, lifting the police tape so we could go under. "I know you won't get in the way."

As we approached the scene, the reporter part of my brain started to take over, filing away facts and details, making lists. The red barn and red fire truck standing stark against that clear blue summer sky, calm and still. The plane, looking fake like a movie prop, wrong in the scene before us. Firemen swarming everywhere. The jaws of life.

Jeff, with a surprising knowledge of airplanes, relayed technical details to me as we stood several yards away. "That's an ultralight," he said of the plane in front of us. "You're more secure in a Ferris Wheel." We stood back, trying to decipher what was going on in the scene before us, trying to make sense of all the people and objects that had converged in this ordinary trucking yard. The only thing that was obvious, the thing that later played through my head over and over, was the moment when all of the emergency people gave up, slowed down, and stepped back.

Back at the office, my adrenaline still pumping, I flew into reporter overdrive. I got on the phone and called every person I could think of who would have information, an ultimately useless task as the tragedy was still new. No one knew anything, least of all me, and I had no idea what to do next.

I didn't go to journalism school, but I don't think there's standard procedure for handling a tragedy. I put off writing the front page article until a few days later, forcing myself to talk to those involved, forcing myself to go over the events one more time. As a reporter, I have always felt that my responsibility has been to make things make sense, and more than my grief over the event itself, more than my disbelief, more than the images playing over and over in my head, I think what bothers me more than anything right now is an overwhelming feeling of inadequacy. I can't make this make sense. I can give you the facts. I can describe what happened at the scene. I can provide photos. I can find things out. But I can't make them make sense. I just can't.

Additional photos from the scene are linked from my Flickr earlier in this blog. A full write-up of the story will be available in this week's Reedsburg Independent, on newsstands Wednesday and in subscriber mailboxes on Thursday.

Reflected

Reedsburg's Veterans Memorial, a photo by meagan.porter on Flickr.

Maybe I'm getting a little sentimental in my old age, but I'll admit to tearing up a bit last Monday at the dedication of the new Veterans Memorial in Reedsburg.

It really seems like not so long ago that Jeff and I went to the groundbreaking. It was one of only a handful of events we've ever covered together, and I was only an intern at the time. The speakers then focused on a grand vision for that tiny corner of Nishan Park, and I had a hard time picturing it. As they stood there with their ceremonial shovels, posing for photos, the completion seemed so far off in the future, still a someday, still a dream. Three years later on July 4, the Memorial was finished.

I've visited my future in-laws in Washington D.C. a few times now and have hit up most of the touristy monument stops in the area. But I have never been moved the way I was last Monday, viewing the Reedsburg Memorial in its finished state for the first time. The glossy black granite panels display scenes from the US's past and current conflicts and fittingly, they also reflect the viewer. I went back early on Tuesday morning to get some shots of just the Memorial, including the photo above that I put on the front page later that day. Sitting on the warm cement in the exact center of the site, the environment was calm, quiet, meditative, the Memorial and flagpoles looming above me, stretching into the sky.

I grew up in Reedsburg, and I constantly marvel at how working for the Indy gives me a totally different perspective on my humble hometown. In the last three years, we've covered every fundraising effort for this Memorial, every Vet Fest, every raffle, every donation, and the Packer Tailgate that came to town last year just to name a few (of many) off the top of my head. Had I been just a citizen, I might have been too wrapped up in my own life to notice what was going on in that corner of Nishan Park, and how the citizens of Reedsburg were tirelessly working to make that dream a reality.

I've had very few profound moments in life, where everything seems to move slowly, where time stops, as though the world is in a vacuum and centers on that one moment. The last time was the June 2008 flood, walking away from Pineview Elementary, clutching my flood clean-up kit. This time the experience was positive. On Monday, a few hundred people came together to welcome this Memorial into the community, listening to speakers, exploring the grounds, celebrating the hard work and dedication of so many people. On Tuesday, I was fortunate to be able to spend some time with the Memorial, taking it in, observing and photographing and experiencing the stillness of the place. It was a privilege to cover this story over the past three years and to see the Memorial come to fruition.

More photos on my Flickr.

Beneath a Hayfield

Intern Nate, a photo by meagan.porter on Flickr.

I know I love my job but once in awhile, I have the opportunity to cover a story that reminds me exactly why. Last week was one of those opportunities. The photo above isn't me, by the way. It's a candid of the Reedsburg Independent's intern, Nate, who had the distinction of being the last person to stand in this hole before it and the equipment inside were sealed for two years. But more on that later.

Leon's enthusiasm was infectious the first time he called to tell me about the EarthScope project, an ambitious endeavor to bury seismometers every 60 kilometers across the United States in order to create a 3-D model of the Earth's mantle. They had just poured concrete beneath his hayfield outside Loganville, Wisconsin, and they were set to bury the equipment in four weeks or so. Leon called again last week and said, weather permitting, they were all set to finish the project.

I could go on and on about the project itself, but I did that at length in my article for the Indy this week. What I aim to document on this blog is the experience of takin' pictures, what I did, how it felt, what I learned and what I can do better. The behind-the-scenes kind of stuff, which is why I chose the photo above. In it, Nate looks how I felt that day - absorbed in a project, on the scene and in the moment.

Despite having done a few hours research, looking at charts and mission statements, I had no idea what to expect that day when we headed out there. I had little clue how to prepare myself or my intern for it; as we drove out to the farm on hilly and windy country roads, all I was able to tell him was, "This is going to be so cool. No, really, this is so cool."

The weather was gorgeous that afternoon on the Statz's farm, a bit overcast, the bluffs sprawling as far as the eye could see. Everything was green and growing, reaching toward a blue sky and early summer sunlight. The EarthScope equipment was alien in the middle of that hayfield, a deep hole with tools strewn within arms reach of the man standing inside. Adjacent to that was a solar panel, metal and glass but like the scenery around it, also stretching toward the sky.

We absorbed the scene, all of us - friends, family, and neighbors of the Statzs, my intern and I. Nate and I circled around, taking pictures, taking notes. We were there about two hours and on the way back, we agreed that there was no way it could have been that long. Four kids were running around, peering into the hole, asking dozens of questions. I envied them; I have always been intimidated talking to expert-y people, afraid I'm going to annoy them with my ordinary, non-genius person questions. But those kids held nothing back, making my job infinitely easier.

It is rare and exciting to meet people so engaged in their work. The two field engineers who showed up that day spend two months on the road, almost every day in a different place, two weeks at home or what counts for home, then back on the road. Bob told us that he had maintained that routine for most of his life. But you could tell that, standing in a hole in the middle of a hayfield in Wisconsin, there was nowhere else he'd rather be. I felt the same way.

It's been over a week since we were on site. I finished my article and edited photos that same day, accidently losing track of time and staying late to get it done. It was easy then to report back on the story, but I am still finding it difficult to put into words what I felt that day. Maybe no words suffice, but it was one of my favorite experiences I've had as a reporter, and I feel privileged to have been asked to cover it.

Head to my Flickr for more photos from this story.