You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Taking Risks’ tag.
“You ought to shoot the EAA airshow, you like planes so much!”
“Heh – did the Yakima airshow once. Flew over there in Fifi.”
“Fifi?”
Fifi.
And so of course, I had to explain.
I’m an airplane nut, and years ago was a photojournalist, and any time I could put the two together, I would.
There was a time when a B-17 and an LB-30 (non – combat version of the plane most people would recognize as a B-24) would show up at Seattle’s Boeing field, not much of an announcement, they’d just show up. I went down there with a friend and used up a good bit of the week’s grocery money buying a walk-through tour of the planes. It was a lot of fun… I got some nice pictures – and it was fun to watch and hear the Pratt & Whitneys on the one, and the Wright Cyclones on the other rumble to life.
My wife has said I could start a conversation with anyone, and in this case, I did just that, and ended up chatting with the pilot of the LB-30, who happened to be a United Airlines Pilot living just 30 miles south of Seattle. He gave me his business card.
The LB-30 came back two years later – but with a much bigger friend from Boeing, this being what was then the Confederate Air Force’s (now known as the Commemorative Air Force) mighty B-29, with the decidedly un-mighty name of “Fifi”
Since I’d already seen the LB-30, I figured I’d see what the inside of a B-29 looked like, and used up a bigger chunk of my weekly grocery budget than last time to pay for a walk-through tour of it.
The plane, while huge on the outside, wasn’t made for comfort inside, but utility. As I moved through it, I’d find hand-holds exactly where I reached for and needed them. Definite utility – but there wasn’t a lot cushioning of anything, after all, it was a military plane.
…and as I went forward I saw a leather bomber’s jacket on the map table on the left.
Not just any leather bomber’s jacket – but the one that had the name of the pilot I’d chatted with two years earlier.
And thus began one of my “Only you, Tom… Only you…” stories..
See, this plane had come up to Seattle from Salem, Oregon.
The local CBS affiliate, KIRO, had driven from Seattle to Salem.
They’d gotten on the plane in Salem and flown back to Seattle, videotaping the whole flight.
Exclusively.
From inside the airplane.
It was considered a major coup at the time. They landed, they drove to the station, edited their stuff, and were on the air.
Needless to say, I was down there at the airport shortly after that.
And with that, a most evil and sneaky plan started festering – no – germinating (that sounds healthier) in my mind.
I found myself wondering what their plans were after Seattle -and it turned out they were going to be part of the airshow over in Yakima.
Hmmm….
So the day they were heading over there I went down again, and found the pilot I’d talked to two years earlier…
“Hey, Dick, you got anyone from the Yakima paper covering this?”
(Note: Evil, festering germinating plan being: “I’m planning on doing what KIRO did.” – not because I was brilliant, not because I had permission, but because nobody had told me I couldn’t, and I didn’t know any better than to think I couldn’t just wander down to Boeing field and talk my way onto the only flying B-29 just because I had a camera…)
So I went to the pay phone inside the Museum of Flight, plunked in a few quarters, and called the Yakima Herald Republic, where my friend Jimi Lott had been the photo editor, and asked them if they were covering this. They said yes, they were. So I figured my chances were slim, to none. But about 15 minutes before scheduled takeoff, the photographer still hadn’t shown up, so I called them back and was a little more specific in my question.
“Do you have anyone in Seattle covering this? Someone who’s going to get on the plane and fly with it, shooting all the way?
“No.”
“NOO?”
“No.”
Then I got all young and stupid and just about yelled at the photo editor there for not having a photographer ready to fly back there on the plane…
They didn’t have anyone in Seattle covering this?
They didn’t have anyone in Seattle covering this…
Gad… Didn’t they know what a piece of history this was?
Didn’t they realize they were missing a once in a lifetime event?
Didn’t they –
–the photo editor finally had enough of my attitude and said, “Now what did you say your name was again?”
“Tom Roush…. Jimi Lott’s a friend of mine.”
Jimi used to be his boss.
“Right, so what do you want me to do?”
The light went on…
THEY DIDN’T HAVE ANYONE IN SEATTLE COVERING THIS!
“Well, you don’t have anyone here, right? So here’s what I’m planning on doing… I’m gonna walk out there and see if I can talk my way onto the plane. If I can, I’ll be over there in about 45 minutes or so…. You want color or black and white?”
<stunned silence>
“Uh… Color, I guess…”
“Right. I’ll call you when I’m at the airport.”
“Um… sure…”
I got off the phone with the photo editor, left the Museum of Flight, and walked out toward the plane, which was surrounded by this teeming throng of people, just in time to hear someone yell, “Okay, where’s the photographer?”
And I, Tom Roush…
…who’d driven down there on a whim, and had just convinced the photo editor of a newspaper I’d never seen to buy a picture I’d only be able to take if I could get onto a plane I’d promised the pilot I’d get onto the front page of a newspaper that…
I’d…
never…
seen…
(yeah, I still have to read that sentence a couple of times myself – still working out the catch:22ness of it all)
…called out, “HERE!”
Moses himself couldn’t have parted the crowd any better.
I waved my hand, and “Fwwwwooomp” – Instant walkway. I walked through, feeling simultaneously embarrassed at the attention, and elated beyond words that it was happening.
I tossed my itty bitty duffel bag onto the plane, swung the camera bag up, climbed up, and in 5 minutes we were gone.
They’d started up this noisy little air cooled V-4 Wisconsin motor like my Grampa had on his hay baler – but this was attached to a honking generator. (If you ever saw the NOVA: B-29 Frozen in Time special, it is this generator that broke free and started the fire.) They used the V-4’s generator to run the starter for the number 3 engine. Once that was running, they used the generator on that engine to start up the rest. I could see the tops of the cylinders vibrating a bit through the open cowl flaps as the propellers blew the smoke from starting those big radial engines away.
We taxied out to the runway, and I was treated to one of the smoothest flights I’ve ever been on.
But we didn’t just fly up to altitude, fly over, land… No, we played tag with the LB-30, buzzed a few airfields, and flew past – not over – Mt. Rainier. I hung out the side bubbles and shot up, down, left, right, directions you simply can’t see in a normal airplane.
There was a little stool that you could sit on that got your head up into another little bubble so you could see out the top of the plane. I sat on that and looked out there for a bit – until one of the crew members asked me to let another fellow up – who’d paid $300.00 for the privilege of this flight.
I’d completely forgotten that this might be something people would pay to do, much less be ABLE to pay to do. I got down and was just amazed at where I was and what all was happening. (remember, I’d gone on that $10.00 tour – which had used up a good chunk of my weekly grocery budget.)
As we came close to Mt. Rainier, I asked the crew back where I was if they could get the LB-30 between us and the mountain. They called up to the pilot, he called over to the other plane, and as he flew underneath us, I got some shots of the LB-30 beneath us with apple orchards beneath it
But then, then I got the shot of the only flying LB-30 in the world, taken from the only flying B-29 in the world in front of Washington’s tallest hunk of rock.
And… and it was kind of special…
The next thing I knew we were on approach to Yakima, and we buzzed the Yakima field once and then came in to land. I hurriedly said my goodbyes and explained I had to make a deadline. I found a huge bank of temporary pay phones (this was BC, before cellphones) and called the paper, got the photo department, and got the photo editor I’d gotten all stupid over less than an hour before.
“Hey, this is Tom, I’m here.”
“Here… Here? Where’s here?”
Billy Crystal couldn’t have said it better.
“The airport.”
Exasperated pause…
“WHICH airport?”
Which airport – what kind of a question was that? I mean, I’d just talked to him, I’d told him where I was going to be – where did he expect me to be?
“Well Yakima, of course.”
<more stunned silence… >
…and in a voice tinged with resignation, I heard, “I’ll have someone there to pick you up.”
Ten minutes later, a white Toyota, driven by the same photo editor I’d been talking to on the phone, arrived to take me to the paper, where while we chatted, the film was processed, edited, and then, with a press pass to the airshow, returned to me.
I didn’t really know what to do after the paper went to the printers – so I found a hotel, a Super 8, I think, for $35.00, had some dinner at a nearby restaurant, and went to bed.
The next morning I walked to a nearby Denny’s where I found a whole bunch of Air National Guard photojournalists who were covering the airshow sitting at a table looking at the front page of the local paper.
A picture of an LB-30 in front of Mt. Rainier.
The picture had made page 1.
We talked and laughed and told war stories to each other over coffee, and they, realizing that my car was about 150 miles away, kindly invited me to ride out to the airshow with them. They gave me a press pass, too. I was like the proverbial kid in a candy store. I could go anywhere I wanted. I could get photos of planes I’d never seen before, or since. I could watch the aerial demonstrations of the A-10 Warthog, I could watch things blow up, and I could do it all from in front of the front row.
There was NOTHING between me and the airplanes – in fact, anyone taking pictures of the planes got the back of my head in the bottom of their pictures.
How unutterably cool.
I shot and wandered, and wandered and shot, got sunburned, had a cheap hot dog and chatted with pilots and crew and just had the time of my life, and when they started firing up some of those big engines to leave, I knew it was time for me to head out, too, so I walked into the terminal, found the Horizon Airlines desk, called Jimi to see if he could pick me up at SeaTac, and then bought a ticket back to Seattle for $45.00.
As we flew back, I saw the same scenery as I’d seen coming over, but it was different, and I was different.
Jimi came to pick me up when I got to SeaTac, and we talked and laughed as he took me back to Boeing field and the Museum of Flight where I’d left the Saab the day before. In a few days the paper sent me a check for $35.00 (the same that the Super 8 motel charged me.)
For the price of a flight back and a couple of phone calls, I’d had a weekend to remember, and the experience of a lifetime.
The picture at the end of this story was shot in Grad School – Ohio University, sometime around 1988 or so.
I had a friend and classmate, Johnny Crawford, a wonderful shooter from the Atlanta Journal Constitution, who was truly a lot of fun to be with – but he had this one habit that just got to me after awhile… it was his penchant for saying, “Tom, you ain’t lived till you’ve…” – and then fill in the blank with something that he’d done and he knew I hadn’t.
Understand, he wasn’t gloating, he wasn’t being mean, he was just telling me how cool it was to have been able to do something he had done, and, in his eyes, I hadn’t lived till I’d done one of those things.
Well one day he says, “Tom, you ain’t lived till you’ve shot F-15’s bein’ refueled.” – now of course I knew that he wasn’t talking about F-15’s being refueled on the ground, he was talking about that complicated aerial ballet that means you’ve got two airplanes flying around 250 – 300 mph within about 40 feet of each other, pumping highly refined kerosene from one to another at a rate of about 6,500 pounds a minute. This is enough fuel in one minute to run your average family car for a year.
Uh… Yeah…
Eventually I got a little tired of never having lived – so I needed to figure out where I could find a refueling base, because that’s where I’d need to go to get onto a KC-135 refueling plane to take that shot that was going to ensure that I lived. I went to the library, and checked out a book about the military, and it gave me the location of all the bases in the United States. And funny thing, but there was a base with a KC-135 wing 68 miles away, the 121st Air Refueling Wing of the Ohio Air National Guard.
Hmmm…
Now anyone who knows me knows I am just plain dangerous with a telephone. My wife says I can talk to anyone, and sometime I just end up sweet talking my way into things that even I end up baffled at once everything’s all said and done. She once complained that I could get into a 20 minute conversation with a telephone operator. (She was wrong… it was 45 minutes, and I did, actually, the telephone operator used to be an air traffic controller when Reagan was presi – well, that’s not important right now). So about 3 telephone calls later, I’m on the phone with the PAO (public affairs officer) of Rickenbacker Air National Guard base, in Columbus, Ohio. I explain to him that I’m a grad student in photojournalism at Ohio University and that I’m working on a story on the Air National Guard (partially true, well, I was starting it – and a picture was worth a thousand words, right?) and was wondering if there was any chance of getting up on a refueling mission to take some pictures. So – after talking about that and security and stuff for a bit, he suddenly said, “How’s next Tuesday?”
Next…
What!? –
It had to be harder than this…
It just had to be.
Nope. Tuesday it was…
Plane took off at 10:00. We’d be refueling some Missouri Air National Guard F-4 fighters who were on a training mission. I had to be there 2 hours earlier, which meant I had to leave an hour before that, and so on. I borrowed a car from a friend and found the airbase, talked my way into see the right people, made the right introductions, signed the right paperwork, and out the door I went, still completely baffled… It just had to be harder than this…
One of the things to understand about military planes is that they are generally not built for comfort, so the plane was loud. This being an Air National Guard plane – the same folks had flown this same plane for years, so to them it wasn’t much different than you or I driving down to the store to get a quart of milk. However, they’re going a little faster, they have 4 engines pushing them along, and the store’s a lot further away. At one point, I was up in the cockpit and the navigator did some calculating, and noticed that if we continued at the rate we were going, we would be late to meet the planes we were to refuel, and since we were the only gas station around, us being late could easily mean those flying jet fighters would fly about as well as crowbars, and that’s not good. So he saw we were going 300 mph, and told the pilot to bump it up to 330. The pilot reached up and wrapped his hands around the 4 throttles and – well, ‘bumped’ them up a bit. I had no idea a plane that big, could accelerate that fast at that speed. I was watching the airspeed indicator, and we went from 300 to 330 in a blink. I was very glad I’d been holding onto something when he did it or I would have ended up in the back of the plane.
We got to the refueling zone – and I was told that the way the refueling is done, is that the pilots of the tanker, and the pilots of the planes needing the fuel fly directly at each other, the tanker flying 1000 feet higher. When they get close, they both head in the same direction – so, say the tanker I’m in is flying east. The planes needing the fuel are flying west, toward each other, and at a given point, everyone heads north, so that the F-4’s are below and behind the tanker. Our call sign was Pearl 07. Theirs were Misty 41 and 42.
The weird thing, for lack of a better word, about all this is that it was happening in three dimensions. I mean, if you’re here on the ground, and you point to something, your arm is generally parallel to the ground or close to it, because whatever you’re pointing at is usually on that same ground, or close to it. When I saw these planes – I was in the back of thfe tanker, looking out the back – and they were swooping in from the right, and they were off to the right, and down. Not just ‘over’ but ‘down’. One of the planes was leaving what looked like a white smoke trail, and I heard over the radio, “Pearl 07, Misty 41, I’ve got a fuel leak, returning to base…”
I don’t know about you, but a fuel leak you can see at 300 miles an hour must be a pretty significant fuel leak… He left.
Misty 42 came closer – into what they call the pre-connect area in the back of the plane, and just stayed there for a bit – I was amazed at how big the thing was, and had the widest lens I had on my camera (a Nikkor 24mm ) – I was framing the shot when Gus (the boom operator) said, “Misty 42, forward 50” – meaning he needed to come forward 50 feet to get into the area where the boom could connect. Now I don’t know why I wasn’t expecting much acceleration out of that plane – I mean the plane can go twice the speed of sound, for crying out loud – but when he came forward that 50 feet, it was like he’d been shot out of a cannon, and then he stopped, parked right where he needed to be. Somewhere in there, just before he hooked up I reflexively squeezed off a shot, and that was the only shot I got that was worth anything – after that he was just too close.
He took 3,000 pounds of fuel, I don’t know why I remember that. He wasn’t there very long, and then, since Misty 41 had already left, Misty 42 peeled off in ways I’ve only seen in movies – and there just isn’t a comparison to seeing it in real life, as opposed to seeing it on a screen, where, no matter how much they try to show the three dimensions of what’s happening up there, it’s still a two dimensional screen. It just doesn’t cut it. It was so, incredibly, cool.
We turned back east and headed back over Illinois, Indiana, bits and pieces of Kentucky, and finally made it down out of the wonderful sunlight, down through the clouds, and into a rainy Ohio afternoon.
We debriefed, I headed back toward Athens in my borrowed car with an exhaust leak, and stopped at a Burger King on the way to get a late lunch while I had the color film developed next door. What I didn’t know is that this particular film developing process didn’t use fresh chemicals for each batch of film. They used them until the film didn’t come out good anymore, and then changed the chemicals.
Guess whose film was the last one through that batch of chemistry? The prints just didn’t look quite right. It turned out that the film, though developed, was simply not printable in color, the three colors (cyan, magenta and yellow) didn’t develop at the same rate – and there just wasn’t a way to color balance all of the colors at the same time. After a lot of thought and frustration (considering what I’d gone through to get this picture) I ended up out of pure frustration printing it in black and white.
This, surprisingly, was a dang good idea…
Of course, by now it had been a long day, lots of driving, lots of flying, and because of the car, lots of carbon monoxide, and now I had to go to the darkroom on campus to print the pictures. Of course, it was always a social event because there were 50 enlargers in the darkroom, and everyone was working on their own images, and every now and then, you’d go out into a finishing area and look at them in white light instead of the orange safelights, to see what the thing really looked like, wash it off, spot correct dust, etc…
…and, if you had a particularly good one, you might find yourself examining it a little longer out there where other people could see it, if you know what I mean…
One of the things in that original image was that there was this huge black area in the bottom right of the picture, part of the inside of the plane that that wide lens caught. I was trying to figure out how to make the picture work without cropping too much, and yet that black area just sucked your eye right down there when one of my classmates walked up and saw the picture.
“Wow! Cool picture! Who take that?” (he was from China, and this is how he talked)
“I did.”
“No, Tom, you not take that picture, don’t joke… Who take that picture?”
“Seriously, I did.”
He could see I wasn’t joking – honestly, by that time, I was too tired to joke.
“Okay, fine… Where you take that picture?”
… but I wasn’t too tired to string him along a little and mess with him…
“Missouri.” (understand, Missouri is three states west of Ohio, easily a day’s drive)
“Missouri? No, Tom… You joking again. Where you take the picture?”
“Okay, I’ll be more specific… 26,000 feet above Fredericktown, Missouri.”
There was a look of consternation on his face, and finally resignation as he realized I wasn’t kidding.
“Okay Tom, you not joking this time… When you take the picture?”
– This one was like feeding a straight line to a comedian, and the only thing I could do was the last thing he’d expect.
I looked at my watch.
His eyes got real big, then he just threw up his hands and gave up. The thing is, at the time he asked the question, I’d taken the picture about 6 hours ago – so the most logical thing to do was to look at my watch and find out how to answer his question.
I was so hoping Johnny would come by so I could tell him I’d lived. He did, later – but the reaction from my classmate was the best.
That said, below is the shot of Misty 42.
Misty 42 – an F-4 flown my the Missouri Air National Guard. Photo by Tom Roush – from an Ohio Air National Guard KC-135.
…and just recently I found a video that someone else had taken that’s pretty accurate for what it was like.
The above shot would have been taken just before the video starts.
PS – years later – I got back in touch with him and sent him this story.
His response: “Tom, you have Lived!”
🙂
Heh…
MSN had this question on their website awhile back – and I had to answer, “Uh, yeah.”
Years ago, I was working in Tacoma Washington as a photojournalist when I saw smoke coming from the south… Not just a little smoke, but a huge amount of it – forest fire size. I checked with my editor, and they cleared me to go shoot it. I filled up the tank of the company’s Corolla I’d been assigned, and headed south.
Thing is, to get there (Morton) from Tacoma was about an hour and a half or so, so I wasn’t able to go instantly, but I followed my nose and eventually came across a sign spray painted on a 4 x 8 sheet of plywood:
← Forest Fire
– it had an arrow pointing left. I took that road, and drove for miles on a logging road laid through the forest like a broken suspender. Finally came to a clearing with a pond where a helicopter was dipping water – I got a few shots of that with a 50 mm lens because it was quite literally right in front of me, then just as he pulled out – an aerial tanker shot out from behind a hillside in the distance – dumping his load of red fire retardant onto the fire. It was amazing, hillside… smoke… tanker… red stuff… I swung the camera up and got the picture – but because I still had the 50mm lens on, it was a teensy bit of an image – I’d needed a telephoto for that, and that was still in the case in the back seat of the car.
So I did what’s normal for firefighters, ambulance drivers, cops, and journalists, and drove toward the flames.
I kept seeing signs for the tanker trucks, and the trucks themselves, often feeling them before I saw them, rolling earthquakes coming down the mountain to refill themselves with more water from wherever they could get it.
The newspaper I worked for had radios in all the cars, and they worked on a repeater system, a lot like cell towers. You’d grab the mike, push the talk button, and wait for the chirp to tell you the repeater was in range, and then you’d start talking. If you were out of range, you’d get the obnoxious “braaap” instead of the chirp. By this time all I heard was “braaap.” I was on my own. I made it around the edge of this box canyon and was heading up a ridge. The next turn would have put me on the hillside that tanker had hit. It was around this time that the car started handling a little differently… Mushy in the rear end, drifting to the right. (toward the box canyon).
Uh oh…
This was followed by the sound and sparks of the rim of the wheel hitting the sharp rocks on the road that had flattened the tire.
I couldn’t control the car very well, the rim wasn’t giving me anything in the way of traction, so I had to stop – in the middle of a hill, flaming box canyon down to my right, smoldering hillside up to my left. I tried to change the tire – but given where I was, any tanker truck careening around the curve down the hill would see me at the last second, before there was too much time to avoid a collision….
And… That would make the forest fire a bit worse.
This would be bad.
I squeezed the car off to the side as far as I could, and hit the ground with the dedication and intent of an Indy pit crew.
Except, they jack up on level concrete.
I didn’t have that.
They have these pneumatic insta-jacks.
I didn’t.
They have air wrenches.
I had a big bent wire with a socket welded to the end of it.
I was jacking up a company car, on a hill, with a flat, so it was hard to even get the jack under there, and once I got it up, it desperately wanted to fall off. Most of the things that I would have used to brace the car to keep it from rolling were on fire, so that limited my options a bit. Understand, at this point I was feverishly working on getting the car into the air, had my back to the canyon now, so all I saw reflected in the car fender was embers.
Oh good…
The smoke was getting a little thicker, and to say that there was a touch of urgency in my actions might be considered an understatement. My main concern at that time was being hit by an out of control tanker truck – well, the forest fire was a bit of a concern, too. I wasn’t in it, mind you, but any place I could run to avoid a collision with the aforementioned truck was also on fire.
Right…
Oh, the other thing Indy pit crews have is tires with air in them. I’d gotten the spare out of the trunk – and it was then that I discovered that it was low. Not flat, but low enough to keep me from driving the car very fast on this or any road, much less a dirt one with sharp tire eating rocks on it.
At this point, it was quite clear that getting photos of the forest fire was rather secondary to me getting myself out of there.
So if it isn’t clear yet, I’m in the middle of a hill, on a dirt road, smoldering canyon to my right, hill to my left, road up ahead turns left out of sight, and since the road wasn’t wide enough to do a three point turn, the only way I could get out was to back out down the hill on an almost flat tire until I could find a spot to turn around. So I did that, backed up for about ¾ of a mile – then drove far, far slower than I wanted to as I was getting out – leaving the smoldering hillsides in my rear view mirror.
What I didn’t know then – at least until the next day – is that among all the burning stuff was some poison oak. I was wearing contact lenses at the time, and whatever was in the poison oak got into them. The next day – I only had to put the contacts in and I felt like my eyes were on fire. Ended up going to a clinic then to get things taken care of, but enough of the oils in the poison oak had gotten into the soft contacts that they were completely shot.
So: did I get the picture and did it make the paper?
Well, I got pictures. Not the dramatic ones I wanted, but I got something , but the most important bit was that I got out.
Part 2…
I had to drive quite awhile on that tire – remember, it’s not completely full of air – so the car’s lurching about as I have to drive slow so as not to overheat it and blow that one, too.
Eventually I found a gas station in Elbe, and filled up the (by now) very hot tire there. As I left, I saw an absolute herd of emergency vehicles heading the other way.
Knowing I had to get the film back to the paper, I tried to reach them on the radio: “Braaaap” – no go. I found a payphone. No go. Every number I called at the paper was simply unavailable and I couldn’t reach them by radio.
Then I heard on the scanner that this was a fatal accident, and the paper generally wanted images of fatal accidents, so I kept trying to call, and eventually gave up and chased the State Patrol and the aid cars and the various official vehicles. They left the main road and headed down a gravel forest service road at high speed. I stayed glued to them, because otherwise I’d be completely lost. I heard the EMT’s talking to each other on the scanner, “Who’s that in the little brown car? Is he with us?” “Nah, he’s not with us, must be some sort of vulture from the media.”
Oh good… I was a vulture.
We all got to the scene of the accident – and it was striking how innocuous the road looked. It didn’t look like you could kill yourself on this road, but someone drove their last mile here. It swept gently left, then gently right, and as it was gravel, you could see exactly what had happened. The fellow was going too fast, and started sliding on the left turn, then finally caught it, and overcorrected too late when the road swung right. The truck was on its side in the middle of the road and by now it was getting quite dark. I should have been back at the paper hours ago.
I was living at home with my folks at the time, and knew that they’d be worried if I didn’t show up and didn’t call to tell them why. I was trying to figure out how to do that when one of the staters walked up to me and asked if I could take some photos of the accident scene for them. I saw my chance: “Sure – as long as I can talk you into calling my folks and letting them know I’m okay… – just – when you call, don’t immediately identify yourselves as “hi, I’m Sgt. Smith from the Washington State Patrol and I’m calling about your son, who’s at the scene of an accident…” – that would freak them right out…
Call ‘em – let ‘em know I’m okay – and I’ll shoot what you want. Deal?
“Deal.”
So I shot, then headed back to the car, and drove as fast as I could to get back to the paper to process the film of the forest fire and accident. Of course, I didn’t want to drive so fast that I’d see the same Staters again.
I kept hitting the microphone switch, waiting for the little ‘chirp chirp’ that told me I’d hit the repeater, because once I’d hit that, I knew I’d be able to talk to the paper.
It took about 30 minutes of fast driving before I got a chirp, and 10 more before I got it reliably. Once there, I got through to the chief photographer, who told me to call him when I was closer – I’d missed the color deadline, we’d see if I could get there in time to do the black and white deadline.
By the time I got to – let’s call it ‘civilization’ – I’d missed the black and white deadline, too, so what this meant is that the photos I’d taken would never see print.
When he knew where I was, he told me to just head home – which saved me about 40 miles of driving.
I went home, and got there somewhere between 9 and 10 – and took the contacts out and crashed.
Part 3
Next day – when I put the contacts in – all the oils from the burning poison oak were like red hot pokers in my eyes – and it was almost impossible to see – and for a photographer, that’s kind of a bad thing. I went to a clinic where we decided the contacts were a lost cause, and that if I was ever near a forest fire again, I should do what I could to stay upwind of it.
It seemed like a good idea.
Is there a moral to this? I didn’t think of any while writing this – but I feel I need to tie it all together somehow.
Well, I suppose there’s several morals:
- Be prepared. This might sound like a little Boy Scout thing – but there’s a lot of truth to it. Make sure you’ve got air in your spare, make sure you’ve got a jack handle. I know of one person who decided that to get better mileage, he’d dump the spare and the jack, “because he had roadside assistance on his cell phone”. That just wouldn’t have worked out there.
- Make sure the folks who care about you know where you are. It’s just not cool to make people worry unnecessarily.
- When shooting forest fires… Shoot from the upwind side.
…and stay away from the poison oak. It’s nasty…
(c) Tom Roush 2009
Tom Roush's Blog 