Journalism doesn’t have all the answers, and we shouldn’t expect it to. We shouldn’t expect our stories to solve things for us.

Journalists’ primary role is not to answer the challenges that face our society: it’s to bring light to those challenges, so that those with the proper tools to solve a given problem will know that the challenge exists. In a sense, we’re brokers, we’re middle-men, we’re matchmakers between problems and solutions. But those problems and solutions still have to get to know one another, find the right match. We can’t consummate their relationships, we can just help them find one another.

A couple weeks ago, I pitched a story idea to a magazine whose content I admire. From my perspective, the idea was right up this prospective client’s alley. It fit their unique geographic focus and addressed a new angle to a controversy that’s beginning to show up in more and more states. In the interest of still pitching this story elsewhere, I’m not going to get into much detail about it.

I’m writing because the outlet’s rejection of my pitch centered on the editor’s position that there were too many unknowns in the subject I wanted to discuss. I tried to stress that that’s the noteworthy aspect of the story: this is an unknown situation. It also happens to be one that involves multiple state governments and economies sailing into uncharted waters. They’re trying to develop a strategy for approaching the subject at hand (hint, it involves regulation of an increasingly popular energy resource extraction technique), but don’t seem to be able to because they don’t yet know how much this issue will impact them.

My potential editor didn’t want the story because there are so many questions. Isn’t that the point of journalism? Isn’t part of our responsibility as journalists shining the light on inadequacies in official government? Are we only supposed to do so when we have tidy answers to present? Am I asking too many questions?

If there was another issue at play – the outlet doesn’t like my approach, they don’t trust my ability to complete the assignment, they can’t afford to pay me, or anything else – they didn’t let me know that was the case (and thus, lacking such knowledge or the ability to read minds, I’ll go with what they said to me directly, rather than worry what they *might* be thinking, something I spend too much time doing all across my life).

Perhaps I suck as a journalist. It’s quite possible, and that might be one reason I’m focusing more on my book than on reporting. Actually, this wasn’t my first pitch rejected because there were too many uncertainties. Maybe that says something about my reporting. Maybe I’m not looking hard enough for a story. Maybe I’m giving up too soon before I find an answer. Maybe I don’t belong. It’s tough not to think such things when these sort of situations repeat themselves.

But I also can’t help thinking that one responsibility of journalism is to help identify the “unknown unknowns.” Is it also our responsibility to then make those unknowns known? If it were, I’d suspect we’d get paid a lot more than we are (or I’d hope we are).

It’s such a grind to pitch and hustle. Have I really been spending so many years doing all this work, racking my brains for all these answers, only to possibly have a magazine maybe think about publishing something of mine for a few hundred dollars? Is this really any way to survive?

The ground beneath my feet is so incredibly unstable.

There’s something about this machine that changes my writing, that makes it into something else. There’s something about the way this machine and my fingers interact, about the immediacy and the physicality of words landing on the page that isn’t replicated on a computer screen. It doesn’t quite make sense to me that different tools can produce different types of writing — it’s all still made up of words, after all — but, nevertheless, they do seem to do so.

By the way, this machine wouldn’t be in the condition it is had I not bought myself a birthday gift last year of a tune-up from Portland’s Ace Typewriter & Equipment Company, an anachronism in a town full of anachronisms. A while back, my friend Christina spent a day shadowing the father and son team as part of her research into a bigger project about second hand society (By the way, she wrote a great piece for the New Yorker about Portland’s last book scout). I got to read a version of that piece and know that Ace isn’t intentionally anachronistic the way so many throwback enterprises in Portland can be; instead, the father and son team running the store are just plugging away at their business as they have for decades.

Words gathered chopped stirred and mixed

Their flavor seeps out

In truth, they had all day, just as this text, as all text seems to escape my control.

Before succumbing, I ate across the highway at Ryan’s Wilderness Inn. I sat at the counter and watched a courtroom reality show through the static on a small T.V. What could have been my last meal was a French dip with over-salted, but tasty, au jus. It was served on a place mat depicting a map of the solar system (I think one of my best friends growing up had the same set). The mid-October day unraveled as I ate. Listening to crackle of the snowy TV screen and the waitress chit-chatting with the cook, I marveled at the vastness of the universe from this roadside eatery, just a speck in Idaho’s forests.

I’d left Oregon that morning before swinging across a remote corner of Washington. Along the way, I inched ever closer to my professional line in the sand. I wouldn’t arrive in Missoula, though, without facing the Heart of The Monster.

As I’ve previously recounted, my day began with deer at dawn in a campground on the shore of Wallowa Lake. After a breakfast in Joseph of polish sausage and eggs  drove North through Enterprise (disappointed not to have realized the night before that the Terminal Gravity brewery was there). I left Enterprise along Oregon Route 3, following the road up a slowly-rising plateau until I traveled above the western rim of Joseph Canyon. I entered Washington where the Lewiston Highway becomes state route 129, then decends into — and rises again out of – the Grande Ronde River Valley on a tangle of twists and turns protected only by guardrails resembling white picket fences.

“Discovering” the land

That realization started to emerge about ten miles south of the Washington border, when I “discovered” Joseph Canyon. Having never seen the Grand Canyon and having reluctantly skipped Hell’s Canyon, I was easily impressed by Joseph. Beyond the natural beauty and beyond the fascination I felt for its geology, though, another thought circulated: what was this vast and dramatic and beautiful place like when there wasn’t a road above it, when tourists weren’t stopping at overlooks to peer down into the valleys that used to be the winter home of an entire nation?

Such questions rattle through my head wherever I travel. Here in my own nation, on a landscape so many of us so readily dub “ours,” they take on different meaning. It’s easy for Americans to still perceive spaces like these that contrast so sharply with our cities and towns and farms as “wild” or “untamed” or “unspoiled” lands untouched by civilization. What came before is often unacknowledged, if not out of sight.

In college, I was a history major whose focus – if inadvertently so – was on the articulation and formation of national identities. Even so, I must admit to having little knowledge about the nations and communities that exist and existed within the land we describe as the United States of America. This is true even though I grew up in the heart of the Chumash world and no matter how many times in elementary school we were assigned to read The Island of the Blue Dolphins. Nevertheless, the Channel Islands I gazed at my whole life were the same ones so important to the Chumash. I’ve strolled countless times past the Albinger Archeological Museum and, of course, Mission San Buenaventura, both reminders of one sort or another of what came before, what we’ve wrought upon one another, and what’s been buried by the passing decades. In many ways, though, the Chumash — and even the Spanish who subdued them — were abstract concepts in late Twentieth Century Southern California. The only time they really began to seem less so was after college, when I paid attention to longer and broader historic narratives, or when I worked on stories like this one I did for the about the impact of contemporary development projects on ancient Chumash sites.

Vague Knowledge

Of course, I’ve always known the vague superficial history of American exploitation, subjugation, extermination and marginalization of native communities, but I’d learned few details about specific histories and incidents. More straightforwardly put: I know little about Native Americans and their history aside from the cursory overview given in traditional California public school educations, and whatever knowledge I’ve occasionally picked up through other pursuits since.

Then, a year ago, when I moved from L.A. to Portland, I found myself fascinated by the history of the Modoc depicted at Lava Beds National Monument, a history I hadn’t known, even though it occurred in my home state of California (albeit a corner of the state quite distant from where I was raised). It’s likely I wouldn’t have learned of it had I not been drawn to the monument purely by its geologic appeal.

It may seem naïve to carry a sense of wonder in my discovery of these topics when so much of this history is so problematic. So be it. I can’t do anything to change that history, but I can welcome my broadened perspective upon it. I’ve been fascinated by what I have been able to learn, and by how my knowledge of tribal history has slowly grown as I’ve settled in the Northwest. Such lessons allow me to much more vividly understand the extent to which urbanization and settlement has extensively shifted our world.

Checking Eden off the List

Just ponder that for a second. The source of all creation. Many, many people trace all of humanity to this spot just south of U.S. Highway 12, a nation’s sacred source tucked away in Eastern Idaho and now managed by the park service of another nation. The last remnant of a monster that, months later, would be dwarfed by enormous shipments of equipment meant to squeeze from the ground more of the substance that our nation now prizes so reverently.

I stopped. I looked. I listened to a recording of the tale of the coyote who tricked a monster in order to save all the other living things the monster had devoured. I learned how all the people and animals sprung forth from the defeated monster to populate the land.

Then the recording ended. I watched a mom take her daughter on a stroll, and I saw a car load of retirees stretch their legs in the nearby parking lot, and I took photos, and I enjoyed the sun on the skin of my aching body, and I returned to my own car.

I checked Eden off the list without saying a word.

On this trip, I traveled with the precise goal of connecting with others, joining potential colleagues, establishing professional connections and honing my reportorial skills. The closer I came to Missoula and the more I discovered along the way, though, the further I felt from anywhere. “Isolated” with my thoughts as the landscape unfolded beneath my feet, the more my mind wandered into these sorts of reflections and recollections.

Meanderings of thought

You’ll notice in reading these recollections that I am extensively self-referential and that my thoughts are increasingly digressive. This isn’t an accident, exactly. On this trip, especially at this point, passing through these locations, I barely encountered anyone else. There were few sources to develop. The encounters I did have were simply inappropriate to develop into deep connections, if at all. To do so may have been to force a story that wasn’t there. This might be a reality of a solo road trip. You’re so encased in your car and then, over time, in your head. As you’re recollecting it hours or days or months later, doesn’t it follow that your words will be uniquely shaped?

I’m confident in my abilities and experience as a writer, but I’m trying to do much more reporting, more actual reporting, and I’d like to have done so on this trip. It’s pretty easy to write and to meander without a guaranteed paycheck. What I need to figure out is how to report without one, because I need to keep my journalistic skills as fresh as my writing, even when I’m not sustaining myself. Then I must figure out how to turn that writing, that reporting, that observation and reflection and analysis and curation into something that does sustain me.

I’ve long since encountered that professional line in the sand. Each day that passes, I wonder a bit more whether I ever really crossed it. Have I even properly acknowledged it? Did I skirt it? Did I place it further down the road?

Now, as my resume lingers on potential employers’ desks or in their inboxes, as reporting piles high like scaffolding around as-yet-unfinished stories, as pitches bounce about the ether, and as I prepare for another, shorter journey (this time with a clear reporting objective in mind), do I need to address what I’ve learned about myself and my career on the other side of that line? Do I need to stop asking myself questions, and start asking them of others (my suspicion is a loud, resounding “yes”)?

Do I understand whether I’ve encountered the monster, whether at 30 years old, after college and grad school and years as a reporter and editor and everything else I’ve built up, I’ve found the monster’s heart, whether I’ve found a way inside, to confront it and to spring forth again from within?

SEJ 2010: My journey

For the next week or so, each day I’ll recount some element of my October trip to and from the 2010 Society of Environmental Journalists conference. I’ll combine my recollection of what I saw, experienced or learned, tweets I made at the time, photographs and links to some of the cool things I learned. Check back each day for new reflections, tales and reports. At the end of my updates I’ll post a link to read the story as one narrative (and post a complete photo album as well). Be prepared. This series will include a mix of storytelling styles — don’t expect straight journalism, or complete creativity. In fact, don’t expect anything but a journey.

“The only way out is through,” I thought, pulling my scarf tightly around my neck as I burrowed into my sleeping bag. Admittedly, I didn’t realize when I mumbled this that I was (not quite precisely) quoting Robert Frost. For a week or so, for a variety of reasons, a dear friend and I had been throwing this phrase around. Never was it more true to me than this moment.

Likely resembling little more than a lump of a polypropylene undershirt, two sweaters, a down vest, a pair of long underwear, waterproof gloves, fleece socks and a knit hat, I burrowed deeper into my bag as temperatures outside my tent dropped below freezing. I’d already felt the tickles of a cold coming on before I arrived after dark to Wallowa Lake State Park. Did I really want to push getting sick before the SEJ conference after working so hard to get there?

I’d already paid $16 for the site, after all, a whopping $16. The closest motel was 5 miles back in Joseph and another $70. If I wanted to actually see the lake, I’d have to return once more the next morning.

No, I could do it. Adventurers did this and far, far more everyday, right ? Besides, I had a car with a heater, seat warmers and a reclining seat. I wasn’t exactly isolated (really, it’s pretty ridiculous I even thought the word “adventurer”).

It’s now a few days before Christmas and I’m packing for a holiday trip to my mother’s house. I grab a dop kit and find some cold medicine inside. The discovery reminds me how long I’ve been taking to tell this story. Holding the medicine in my hand, I remember my trip’s first day.

Sixty miles east of Portland, after a brief stop in Hood River for coffee and a bagel, I felt the first hint of a scratch in my throat. Ten miles later, my throat burned. As I progressed further eastward, my eyes watered. My face burned. Each mile closer to Missoula seemed to bring new aches. Pain coursed behind my eyes, but, no, I wasn’t going to succumb. I would battle through. I was far too excited about the conference, about the people I’d meet and the places I’d go and the ideas I’d generate. As the week progressed and after I arrived at the conference, each day I did what I could to set the cold aside as late into the night as possible. Back where I was staying for the event, at the Hutchins Hostel, I’d return to the bottom of a bunk bed in a room I shared with other conference-goers and try, desperately – and unsuccessfully — to muffle hacks and coughs, stringing sleepless night upon sleepless night throughout the length of an event that I’d been looking forward to for months.

Still holding the cold medicine as I walk to my suitcase to finish packing for my holiday trip, I see dark lines stretching across the United States. Rather, I notice lines across a map of the country tacked to a wall in my apartment.

Each line traces a route I’ve driven at some point in my life. The record tells a story as comprehensive and accurate as I can attempt.

The map only documents roads I’ve driven, or ridden along, and it’s at such a scale that the nuances of my trips get lost. I’ve had to guess at routes taken during a few trips because they took place on stretches not charted by this map, or so long ago that I can’t recall their exact path. Nevertheless, each time I return from a journey I look forward to tracing my trips on the map. Doing so is the only reason I keep pencils around my house.

More than two months after I’ve returned from one journey, though, I’ve yet to trace its path. I still haven’t traced my trip from Portland to Missoula and back, and I can’t quite express why not. Perhaps I don’t feel like the trip’s over, like I’ve truly returned. Perhaps I can’t record it until I’ve described it, until I’ve wrapped the journey in words and pictures and recollections that I realize are fading with each day.

Some of you might not be interested in such ponderings.

“Get to the point,” you’ll say. “Tell me about the conference. Tell me what you learned, what you saw along the way, what the latest news is. I only have so much time. Don’t you know attention spans are ever so slight? Haven’t you ever heard of an editor?”

Indeed I do, and I have. As I’ve noted elsewhere, as so many have noted before, though, to truly travel you can’t simply move from Point A to Point B. You can’t experience this world’s multiplicity of dimensions through a straight line.

The truth is, of course, I did wait to write this down. I let the story fester. I let it fall away and apart. Like anyone might, I’ve been making excuses for months now for not chronicling my trip. My terrible cold on the road. Assignments due just upon my return. Job applications. Novel Writing. Story development. Other conferences to attend as a reporter. Holidays. I could think of any number of reasons why you’re reading this now, today, this very second, and only now, but this is the moment, this is when these words take shape.

I’ve also, I’m coming to realize and admit, been utterly incapacitated for months by writer’s block – really the worst I’ve known – despite having felt so inspired, so driven by the conference (and, despite having completed the rough draft of my first serious stab at fiction during NaNoWriMo, which, it should be said, was the only thing to really begin to loosen this writer’s block).

But somewhere in the middle of the first sleepless night of my journey, in that jury rigged tent, as the cold descended — both in the form of my illness and the weather — I wrote clumsily, with gloved hands, in an irregularly kept journal, beginning with the following fragment:

Sometimes I ponder the choices I make, or my difficulty making them. I end up here, in what promises to be a beautiful setting, but aching. I ache with the impact of pride, of love, of adventure.

The first day never quite goes right. Surprises for both the better and worse arise and you’re left not quite certain how to process them.

I’m fighting a cold I refuse to catch, but hearing creeks splash from what seems like all sides. My tent is jury-rigged together – I’m missing a stake so I put a rock in the corner to hold one side down – but outside the stars pepper the sky in such a way that clichés actually serve them well.

Nobody knows where I am (how near or how far). Were I not ill, I’m not sure whether I’d really want them to.

At first it was a bit of a whim. I’ve been working on a complex but often dry assignment. During breaks I’ve read these fascinating – if horrifying – stories about the spill. There are just so many pieces of this story that need to be covered. How could I contribute to that coverage, particularly when the story will have such far reaching impacts on our world?

Then I thought: why not just ask? Who needs help reporting on the spill? Why not offer my services as an experienced reporter who’d be willing to contribute his work, his time, and his energy?

So, who needs help?

Two years ago, when I applied to grad school, I described our shifting environment and its impact on society, politics, economics and culture — let alone life — as perhaps the only great global story. As I did, I had my grandmother’s cousin, Melville Jacoby, on my mind.

As I’ve described before, Melville served as a correspondent in China and Southeast Asia in the 1930s and early 40s. His work appeared in places like Time, Life and the United Press Syndicate at the onset of World War II. Younger than I am now, he was so deeply immersed he reported from the midst of a narrow escape from the Philippines after the Japanese invasion and, during his travels through China, became close to Chiang Kai-Shek. Killed at 25 in an accident in Australia in 1942, he left behind rich accounts of his life in the form of letters, dispatches and photos now in my grandmother’s possession.

As I learned from my grandmother about Melville, I realized he played a central role telling stories about one small part of another great, global crisis. Perhaps the war was more romantic than seemingly glacial environmental changes (though really, they aren’t so glacial) but both crises are the defining milieus of a particular generation. “Like Melville,” I wrote, “I want to chronicle my generation’s response to its crisis.”
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I have some travel credits, some time, and a little cash saved up.

I even have Melville’s typewriter.

If that could get me to the Gulf Coast, could there be a floor to sleep on for the minutes I’m not in the field? Who’s in need of a collaborator? A researcher? An errand boy? A transcriptionist?

Let’s talk. Even if it’s not in the field, how can I help?

Meanwhile, I’ve been honing my own focus on environmental journalism, worked on a few stories and wondered as I did so how this site reflects on me. If my goal is a career exploring our society’s response to environmental pressures and reporting on the stories impacting that response, how clearly am I really articulating it with pictures of my random wanderings, angsty frustrations, or tales of freeway-less journeys through California and Oregon?

Journalistic or not, I missed a post last week. I just spaced on it. Afterward, the whole experiment unraveled on my end. I haven’t posted in a week. Beforehand, I took great care to post every day and, when I knew I might not be able, I prepared posts in advance. Even if I didn’t believe in posting daily, in spilling words into a knot of servers and clients, why not test the limits of that belief one month? I continue to be impressed by the work Michelle Rafter has done to put this event together and to draw such varied writers together, so what do I really have to lose by experimenting alongside them?

Despite my own goals, publicly committing to write regularly could be its own challenge. I don’t necessarily have to make “blogging,” whatever in the world that really means, a habit. Cultivating this site and carefully, diligently crafting  it has long been my underlying goal.

I may not have posted anything for a week, but it’s difficult to say my experiment unraveled. Over the past week, I’ve been spending my time pursuing some seemingly fruitful professional leads. In one case, I’ve been rediscovering the rush of diving deeply into a story I’m enthusiastic to write at the same time as I’ve begun developing a handful of other freelance pieces. Though I won’t discuss what they’re about until they’re published, I’m happy to say the more I look into them, the more confident I am that they’ll be compelling to the public. My increased attention to them is partially responsible for my inattention to the Blogathon, and I don’t regret that. The rush that comes from following hunches and reveling in my curiosity beats just about any intoxicant I’ve tried.

Doing this work, though, isn’t about the rush, as hard as it is to believe. There’s something that happens as a journalist — at least something that’s happened to me — that can’t be avoided. The stories have to be told because the stories have to be told.