A friend had asked me about being a reporter. I had said it was negative and I wanted to get out of it. Over the 6 years, I had to learn and know things that I normally never have wanted to know, the dirtiness, dishonesty, things about peoples’ lives, government sausage making. Ick.
I was so looking forward to my last day of work, August 9, 2006. The company I'd sold my paper to had already closed my office in my town and I had been commuting 10 miles to their headquarters. I was not fond of the commute, parts of it were dangerous. I was heading in early to get a jump on packing, and so it was about 5:30 a.m.
I came upon a crash scene. Officials were diverting traffic, which a normal person would be happy to go around but I was a reporter, if for 8 more hours. I told the fireman that I was a journalist and I needed to get some shots. He waved me ahead and told me to stay 200 feet away from the workers. "It’s a bad one," he said.
Channel 8 and Channel 13 were already shooting video. I had to jockey for position. At 4:30 a.m. conditions had been foggy, the TV freporters told me, and an 18 year old girl had been zooming to work. She lost control of her small car, it skidded and flew and flipped then wrapped around a tree 100 feet into the woods. She was thrown from the vehicle and killed instantly. Rescue had a very hard time extracting the car and a very hard time finding…all…of her.
We stood around for an hour, the TV reporters and me, waiting for the shots we knew we had to get. The white sheeted body being pulled from the trees, loaded into the truck, close ups of the wreckage. The car was so wrecked there was nothing for the tow truck to hook onto and it took a long time. It was long and boring and took a while so when it got close to when things emerged from the woods, we couldn’t help but get animated. We scuttled forward while shooting with extreme zoom, trying to get the shot we knew our editors wanted.
All the while I kept thinking about the quiet of the pre-dawn morning, how the girl was probably singing and driving and wondering about her next class- she was a USM student. And how suddenly her life was gone, and all that was left was a crushed car and three media journalists trying to get a shot that would represent her last moments by a bloody sheet and a hanging fender. My shot I submitted was finally of long strands of grass hanging off the inside mangled wheel well as it was slowly winched on the truck bed.
I got to the office about 8:00 and my peer editor had heard the scanner and was about to send me out. I told him I got the whole thing already, including shots and quotes. He is really ghoulish and gets a gleam in his eye even thinking about car crashes. He jumped up and pumped his hand in the air! "Yes! That’s great!" He looked at me askance, and asked "Do you want to call the family?" We had to get a quote from them. I looked hard at him and I said, "I’ve gone 6 years without having to make the call to a grieving family and I really don't want to go out with one on my last day."
He made the call. The family is Iranian and most of the older members don’t speak English well. John kept asking the same thing over and over, each tme louder, "How do you feel?" I cringed over in my corner, hoping for tomorrow to come. Things like this affected me too much, but equally I was afraid of the day that they wouldn’t affect me, that I’d become like him and it was just another day at the office.
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