Uncool At Any Speed

Note To Self: Drop the family off before you join in on a high-speed chase. Photojournalist Carlos Rodriguez might do well to post that to his dashboard after a fleeing suspect car-jacked his Nissan Cube - with his wife and baby aboard. It happened the other night near Turlock, California. Rodriguez and family were doing some back to school shopping when word of a police pursuit broke over his in-car scanner. Unlike my normal reaction (Unplug scanner. Take to pawn shop. Sell for parts.), Carlos apparently floors it, heading straight for the tri-county high-speed chase with his wife and two month old son in tow. (That's dedication! I think.)  For a few minutes, it's a family adventure - until the intrepid photog catches up and (apparently) pops out of his boxy ride to catch a shot of the approaching suspect. From there, things got hinky:

"There was a split second where I see the vehicle go by, but the suspect wasn't in the vehicle and the next thing I know there was pounding and screaming coming from the inside of my car - I run up and see the suspect throwing the car in gear and speeding off with my car," Rodriguez said.

The mind reels. But as Carlos Rodriguez watched a car-jacker speed off with his young family, he did what any natural born shooter would do: he raised his glass and thumbed the RECORD button. Then he flagged down a cop and told him the man they were looking for was now driving a goofy white Nisssan with precious cargo and a police scanner aboard. Ya know, one doesn't have to be a screenwriting hack or even a cynical lenslinger to imagine how badly this could have gone. After all, three picture revenge thrillers have been built on thinner premises. But luckily... thankfully... mercifully, the true life drama soon concluded.

Brett Phares, the 28 year old tool behind the wheel, pulled over two exits later and let Mother and son safely out of the car. He then cemented his standing among criminal masterminds by running out of gas several miles down the road. (Schmuck!) As for the Rodriguez family, they're happily back together. We here at Viewfinder BLUES Global Headquarters wish them nothing but placid commutes and a plethora of yacht rock to soothe their jangled nerves. That especially goes for MRS. Rodrigue, who might very well have a thing or to say the next time hubby points the family van toward the horizon and proceeds to punch it.

Y'all be careful out there...

The Irene Diaries: Saturday Wrap-Up

There's more I could tell you about Operation Irene and eventually I will. For now, just know that it was an invigorating way to spend a work week - a chance to break away from the soft news I so specialize in and get back to my storm-chasing roots. Weaver led the way this time with his uncanny acumen and limitless energy. Sheeka, too, proved herself quite the storm warrior, doling out cogent facts and commentary each and every time we pointed a camera at her - which was most of the time we were there. Countless live shots, dozens of packages, more tweets. Skypes and status updates than you can shake a dying iPhone at. Was Irene over-hyped? Not my call. But it was the first real hurricane in the age if social media and it all makes me wonder how we'll cover these storms just a few short years from now. One things' for sure: I'll fight to cover these signature whirlwinds each and every time they threaten our shore - if for no other reason than it leads to cinematic situations like this:



It was nearly dusk on Saturday by the time we saw the sun. Even then it was just a glimmer, a five minute break in the haze in which the Western sky exploded. I broke off a conversation with WRAL-TV's legendary shooter Robert Meikle and stumbled toward the orb. Loitering on the boardwalk there, I bathed in its beauty as a bundled figure approached. "That's somethin' ain't it?" I asked him and he agreed it was indeed celestial. We exchanged more warm words about the sun and as I stood there looking at it , I feel the young man staring at me. He leaned in close and with a grin said, "He-e-e-y, you ARE the Lenslinger!"

And that's how I met Ben McNeely.

The Irene Diaries: Saturday's Swath

At 7:30 am, Irene made landfall near Cape Lookout, N.C., some fifteen miles north of the sandy Sheraton we called home. Moving low and slow, the Class 1 hurricane raked the Crystal Coast before taking lives and property as close as the Outer Banks and as far away as Vermont. Within that context, Atlantic Beach escaped unscathed, though that would be difficult to explain to the residents whose neighborhoods were temporarily flooded, whose income was interrupted, whose favorite fishing pier was crippled by the passing storm.

For the members of the press, how you spent Saturday morning depended on who was picking up your expense report. Those with network addresses on their check invariably fared better. Just ask the NBC crew spotted walking out of a backroom with bacon and eggs on their breath - long after Irene knocked out power to the hotel. I'm not saying Sheraton staffers fired up a generator and cooked the big-shots breakfast, but there's a local photog over there with a belly full of Cheez-Wiz and Pop-Tarts who wrote a little song about it. He's humming it now outside the Peacock's sat truck right. Try not to make eye contact.

Then again, maybe I imagined him. It all seems so fuzzy now. What I most remember about the morning Irene came ashore is driving around in it. Sheeka, Weaver and I scoured the island as best we could while eighty mile an hour winds made full grown stop signs wobble and thrum. From a leaning steeple to shattered glass, we collected the requisite evidence of a hurricane on the wane. Hell, we even pushed Sheeka out in the open for some street-level coverage. It was great fun, in a "hey, watch out for flying sheet-metal" kind of way. Later, we hit the beach where great curtains of flying sand granules wedged themselves in places that just shouldn't be explored on a family blog as this. 

But you didn't stop in to hear of gritty under-loins. That kind of thing can be found all over the internet. No, what I hope you expected were tales of deprivation, pithy missives borne of hunger, snark and delirium, great passages of action in which a heroic news team rises above their station by plucking orphans from a kinetic surf. You know, I'd kinda like to read some of that myself, for true hurricane coverage is comprised of hours of boredom punctuated by seconds of totally heinous chafing. By far, the most perilous part of our mission was navigating five stories of pitch black stairwell under heavy load every time we went somewhere. I've never tasted so much flashlight!

But even that metallic taste doesn't capture the true flavor of extended hurricane coverage. For that, I'm forced to cue up a most disturbing vignette, a grainy trek into the very heart of darkness. That's right, I'm talkin' about the trail of destruction spawned by a news crew on assignment, a swath of debris that begins somewhere around the Do Not Disturb sign and extends well past the point of imagination...

The Irene Diaries: Friday Night Lights

By nine o clock, the mood at Molly’s had changed. Gone were the drunken swimmers and sober-eyed cops. Missing too were more than a few camera crews. With Hurricane Irene churning just off shore, more than one affiliate had ordered its people off the island. Those crews moved quickly: no one really wanted to drive their satellite truck over that bridge after dark. Not with the wind howling like God himself had a hemorrhoid. It’s just one of the many reasons Weaver, Sheeka and I had decided to stay put. Irene would strike overnight. We wanted to be here when it did. So we hounded the hotel lady for the safest place to park. Other stations did the same and soon all the TV trucks clung to the old Sheraton like frightened pups huddling under their mother during a storm. Inside Live 3, Weaver and Sheeka worked on a story for the next newscast while the top-heavy truck rocked back and forth on its tires. I, meanwhile, unfurled fiber-optic cable across a parking lot turned tidal pool. At least that’s what I think I was doing. Truth is, my glasses were so fogged up and my rain-suit so twisted I wasn’t sure if I was setting up a live shot or doing the underwater lambada. All I know is that it was raining up my nose and not just because I was bent at the waist wrestling . Up ahead, a couple of strong spotlights lit up my next destination. Molly’s, the beachside bar and grill whose covered patio had become the media’s situation room. Minus Wolf Blitzer, of course.

No, I’m not sure who was the guy outside the CNN truck. Blame it on the rain. Once Irene started spitting ocean water at us, everyone pulled on their plastic. Soon even the glossiest of correspondents got lost in a sea of rain-suited strangers. (Except one. NBC’s Kerry Sanders rocked a giant NBC peacock on the back of his bright yellow coat. It was awesome and I told him so a day later outside a port-a-potty. No law was called.) I pulled my own hood tight and followed a particular strand of the thick black cables running toward the shore. Most of it ran under water at some point and as I shook water off the end of an extension cord before jamming it into a sandy receptacle, I found myself wondering what they talked about in all those middle school science classes I slept through.’ No bother’ I thought as I splashed across the parking lot. I’d swapped my flip-flops for a pair of rubber fishing boots and at the moment my toes were the only body part not wet. Once under Molly’s roof, I fought the urge to shake off like a dog. Had I done so, I would no doubt have incurred the wrath of a Fox News Channel photog and for a slender blonde woman, she looked like she could rip your lips off. Nearby, a local crew took turns taking pictures of each others, their wisecracks and nervous squeals punctuating the wailing wind. It may have been a slow night at Molly’s, but the atmosphere was electric and as I stood there dripping in it, a weary grin appeared beneath my visor.

Whole cooking shows could be built around the taste of a hurricane. I like it best off the rocks, wedged into the stairwell of some concrete hotel with a protected doorway from which to point my camera. That would come later, but for now I’d take advantage of the few minutes I had for before the newscast started and simply soak it all in. This would be easy to do, as I was wet from stem to stern. Back in the truck, Sheeka and Weaver were putting the finishing touches on the interviews we had shot earlier. It wax dry in there and more than a little fragrant, so I chose to stick it out at Molly’s for awhile. With my camera and cables now seeing eye to eye, there was nothing left to do but vedge, something I’m particularly gifted at. Besides, the rain was utterly hypnotizing me. Hurricane rain is like that: it comes down in  cockeyed curtains, whips upward when you least expect and preforms the kind of aerobatics people cough up good money to watch. With the high powered lights pointed toward the pier, the rain put on a performance worthy of a flashback, each buoyant orb its own Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I stood there for a long time, the cackle of the neighboring news crew falling away as I focused only on the falling water, the exploding surf, the tortured wail of the wind. You’d think a hurricane was coming…

The Irene Diaries: Friday Afternoon

Wanna make those camera crews contract? Just add water. That's what happened at Atlantic Beach on Friday, as the outermost rain bands of Hurricane Irene began lashing at the shore. What had been a loose knit confederation of lights and lenses strewn across the Sheraton parking lot was now a clot of photogs and reporters huddling under the roof of the pier-side bar. Sure, it got a little crowded, but rubbing rain-suits with the competition beats still beats setting up a karaoke booth inside a car wash. That's kind of what it feels like to shoot video on the edges of an approaching hurricane. Though to be fair, I've never set up a karaoke booth, in or outside of a car wash.

What I have done is point a TV camera at everything under the cloud cover and for my lack of money, few things are as satisfactory to target as a fishing pier under duress. Yes, what had been our stage just hours earlier was now safe to use only as a backdrop. And what a backdrop! Every time one of those ten feet seas crashed into it, the old pier groaned, swayed and threatened to collapse into the surf. This of course made for a fabulous measuring stick and Sheeka and I spent the better part of both newscasts expecting it to crumble and fall. But even if that waterlogged wooden walkway exploded into a million splintery pieces, not all the camera crews present would have caught it.

Not with all those angry birds flying about. Throw in some words with friends and you got a couple of reasons why grizzled journalists in head-to-toe rain gear were stealing glances away from nature's fury to check their Twitter feed. That includes me! In fact, the biggest difference to modern day storm coverage is by far the wonderful handheld devices everyone seems to be staring at. Whereas you used to feel kind of isolated waiting on a storm everyone else has run from, now it's just another chat-fest. As an insatiable communicator, I love it, but I can't help but wonder when we'll have the first hurricane death caused by electronic distraction. Oooh! That would make for a cool status update! 

'Scuse me, won't you...

The Irene Diaries: Friday Morning

"The news crew awoke before dawn...they put their boots on." Actually, we went with flip-flops. That hussy rainmaker known as Irene was still was doing her make-up off shore, leaving us the better part of a day to pretend to be tourists. But tourists rarely rise before four. They don't rig the business end of a fishing pier in wire and lights in hopes they'll lure in viewers. It's exactly what we did. Taking a stance behind my sticks, I traded gazes with reporter Sheeka Strickland as distant co-workers chortled in out earbuds. Across the parking lot, Chris Weaver hunched over some buttons in our television transmission truck and tuned in the bird.

Bird. That's tee-veese for satellite. Without them, we couldn't beam our signal back to the Greater Piedmont Googolplex. But it wasn't just our homeland we were about to slather in storm warning. No, we were gonna hook up every step-sister station down the line with breathless remotes on the coming or Irene. It sounds tawdry but it's not. Once Sheeka wrapped up our local report, she and I stood down while Weaver dialed up another affiliate. Like magic, new voices poured from the tiny speakers wedged in our ears. Soon a voice would address us directly, tell her we were about to go on air with Susie and Chet, Brock and Sasha, Bert and Ernie. Sheeka blinked away the introductions, until the booming sound of an out of town anchor began mangling every fact they could find.

"Hurricane Irene is barreling toward the South Carolina coast, Streeka Shickland is on the Outer Banks there and joins us from Atlantic City." This went on for hours as Sheeka's image bounced from Phoenix to Florida to Connecticut and back again. At some point I lost track, if not consciousness, of the places we visited while standing on that pier. All I knew is that the bigger the market we beamed into, the cheesier the game-show voice in my headset sounded. Four hours later, we were just about done, which was a good thing since our immediate surroundings had sprung to life. Cops, surfers, carpenters and reprobates milled about the place, each one marveling at the darkening skies and newly erected spotlights. That's when the industrial-strength raindrops began to fall.

It would not stop raining for twenty eight more hours...