Sewell’s sticks

I arrived in Chicago yesterday in a gigantic, red, gas-guzzling 1985 GMC Suburban that is emphatically not the vehicle I left Barstow in. It is now parked on the street across from my new apartment with a dead battery, but at least it got me this far.

Alas, my luck ran out with Lucky, the sky-blue Escort wagon. She carried me, most of my possessions, and the boy I’m leaving behind in Barstow — who came along to make sure I got safely to my new home — 1,000 miles to Fort Morgan, Colorado, before giving out in a dramatic manner. (more…)

It’s 5 a.m. and I haven’t been able to get to sleep despite trying for several hours. Of course, there’s no particular reason for me to go to sleep at any particular time these days, other than for the sake of propriety and in order to not feel like a sluggard. I have been unemployed for a week now. In another week, I will shove all of my wordly goods into my long-suffering Ford Escort wagon (again) and drive nearly 2,000 miles to Chicago, where I will be once again starting over in a new life.

The new life, this time, is graduate school at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, where I’m hoping to hone my skills and learn new ones, make some connections, and hopefully rekindle my excitement about my chosen profession.

I hope this is the right thing to be doing. It has come home to me these last few months that I don’t have all the time in the world. I’ll be 27 in a month — the age when the rock stars die — and there’s only so much time left when I will still be hungry enough to uproot myself for a new prospect, chasing a chance at glory or just a good story to tell later. I might want to settle down one day, gather moss, get married, even reproduce.

I will honestly miss Barstow — the bleak expanses of desert, the run-down motels of East Main Street and truck stops in Lenwood, and the people — especially the people. But it’s not the place to stay long if you want to make a career, not my career anyway. A few years ago, it would have been ideally positioned. I would have put in my year here and moved up to one of the bigger papers “down the hill,” as Barstonians call everything below the Cajon Pass. But those papers have all been shedding reporters like snakeskin, and the ladder that was once readily available is not there now.

So here we go again. Once I arrive in Chicago, I know I’ll be excited and interested in the new scenery, projects and people I will find. But right now I’m allowing myself the luxury of being tired, a little bit melancholy and a little bit dubious about the future.

Today is my one year anniversary of being in Barstow, or at least, of working for the Desert Dispatch. You can congratulate me, slap me upside the head and call me a fool, or buy me a drink.

In the latest round of bad-news-in-the-news-biz, the San Francisco Chronicle and Seattle Post-Intelligencer may soon be out of print.

Like everything else in these past few months, it seems to be a sign of more hardships to come — but how quickly we get used to hearing about hardships. Most of us, I think, take it for granted now that there will be more and more bad news every week.

At least all the bad news about newspapers gives reporters an excuse to write for an audience that still reads them and cares what happens to them — other reporters.

The death of print media is sad, as most deaths are, even of old and tired creatures. But I’m still young enough that I don’t feel the need to cling to the past. I’m not going to yell, “Get a horse!” at the world, the way people used to in the early days of the automobile. We need to stop wringing our hands and learn to adapt.

Reporting isn’t going away. In the future, we may have online media centers rather than the traditional print/radio/TV divide. I don’t know how the market will pay for the people who will staff those media centers, but if there is a need and a desire, there will be a way. If I knew what that way might be, I would be a rich woman.

In the meantime, only the dedicated and the crazy and those who, like me, are in love with lost causes, will stick around the news biz. This is certain, though — I’m not going anywhere.

I remember last New Year’s Eve very well for several reasons, not least of which is the brawl I almost got into with some party crashers who showed up at my friend Brian’s annual New Year’s soiree and began pushing people around. But more importantly, I remember that the idea of Barstow germinated that day.

I was working for the twice-weekly paper in Molalla at the time and itching to move up to bigger and better things. I browsed through the jobs posted on JournalismJobs.com after work on New Year’s Eve and came across an opening for a reporter at a daily in Barstow, California. There were several things that immediately attracted me. It was a small paper and therefore attainable. It was a gritty-sounding desert town, which reminded me of my youth in Tucson, for better or worse, and the ad had a scrappy and slightly humorous tone. I liked the look of their Web site. I decided I would compile my clips the next day.

At Brian’s house that night, I told an acquaintance that I was thinking of applying for a job in some Southern California town called Barstow, which I had never heard of until I saw the job posting.

The acquaintance knew about Barstow. He had been stranded there once for three days in the middle of the summer.

“Oh, God,” he said. “Don’t go to Barstow. It’s a terrible place.”

Terrible places have interesting news, I reasoned, and I sent my clips and resume out the next day.

I spent New Year’s Eve in Barstow this year. It’s not a terrible place. I have been as happy and unhappy, in alternating stages, here as I was in Portland or Molalla or Tucson, and as much as I probably would be anywhere. It’s true what they say; wherever you go, you take yourself with you, although I do find that a change of venue sometimes brings new clarity and certainly offers new experiences that can improve your underlying state of being.

I didn’t try to fight anyone this year. I did drink tequila and listened to some drunken love advice from a stranger. The people of Barstow are a good bunch to spend New Year’s with. They are straightforward, friendly, and they love to party. I had thoughts of going to Vegas, but in the end, I’m glad that I rang in the new year in the place where I spent most of the old one.

I like New Year’s resolutions. They appeal to the half of me that is a Type A personality, and they give it ammunition to bludgeon my irresponsible other half.

I think 2009 is the year of the pragmatic optimist. We know that we are screwed but have hope that something better can come out of it. We are not slaves to dogma. We’ll try whatever might work. I think those facets of the national psyche contributed to the election results in November. Obama spoke about change, but he also seemed level-headed, practical.

So 2009 is a year for me to be hopeful yet pragmatic as well. I will focus one honing the skills I already have, paying attention to detail, and not accepting “good enough.” I will concentrate on some of the facets of adult living that still elude me after more than eight years of taking care of myself, such as preventative maintenance rather than putting out fires. I will get my oil changed and make dentist appointments. I will keep my sights on the big picture but focus on the details in the meantime.

Not the most lofty of goals, but if I can keep to them, 2009 will be a good year.

Happy New Year, y’all.

I woke up this morning, for the first time in ages, with no feeling of panic. Why? Because I am no longer the only reporter in Barstow.

Since our city editor left the paper three weeks ago, I had been left to fill the news section of the paper every day on my own. Photos, articles, crime, city, education, military, everything. By the end, my brain was in so many different places that I thought I would go insane.

Of course, every newspaper in the country is pretty much short-staffed right now, but putting out a daily paper with one reporter is pretty extreme even considering the current state of journalism.

But this week, our two new, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed reporters started on staff, and I suddenly found myself with room to breathe again. Not only that, but I moved over to the city beat, which, despite being less action-packed than the crime beat, also carries a little less stress. Or at least involves less odd hours and less people on drugs calling to yell at you, I imagine. I’m not sure yet, but I imagine that will be the case.

It feels good being able to breathe again.

In a post about a year ago, I wrote about my grandpa, John Robert “Bob” Sewell, and his claim to fame, a tombstone in Disney’s Haunted House. At the time, he was still alive and well, and the tombstone was a joke between him and the other Disney employees who worked on designing that ride back in the day.

Grandpa Sewell died yesterday morning. I hear it was peaceful. He was a good man, and many of my early impressions of what constitutes a happy existence came from him. When I was very small, we took family trips to his ranch-style house in little Rainbow, CA, where he lived with his dogs and cats, shelves full of books and art pieces from around the world. (more…)

It’s summer in Southern California, and nothing says “summer” quite like a gray-haired man in buttless chaps skinning a catfish by the side of a river.

I witnessed such an individual in Victorville yesterday. Mind you, Victorville is not the type of place where you generally find eccentrics wandering the streets — that would be Barstow’s province — but this was a special occasion, being the Huck Finn’s Jubilee bluegrass festival. I can’t imagine a less fitting place to hold such a festival than Victorville, which is not in any way, shape or form rustic, quaint, quirky or literary — in fact, it should probably be the poster child for the phrase “suburban wasteland,” with its thrown-together expanses of strip malls and abysmal traffic. But it happens to have a large park with a river with actual water in it, which I suppose is reason enough to have a festival there. (more…)

When I read that Snowball the famous deer is bound for a petting zoo today, I cocked my head and smiled nostalgically at the computer screen. Weirdly enough, the custody battle over that deer turned out to be the highest-profile story I got to cover in my Molalla days, and I’ll always look back on her fondly.

I’m not really sorry that I’m not covering the story now, because it did get a little old. But I’m happy to see that Snowball & Co. will continue creating circus-quality entertainment and diversion for the masses (albeit at the taxpayers’ expense) for some time yet.

There were reports that less people would be traveling this Memorial Day, but I bucked the trend. Even with gas having shot past $4 a gallon and climbing steadily, I was not about to waste a three-day weekend hanging out in Barstow. Instead, I met up with some friends in Lake Havasu City, prompting my Los Angeles-born dad to make fun of me for going native. Apparently going to Lake Havasu on Memorial Day weekend is a stereotypically Southern California thing to do.

“Next thing you know, you’ll be getting a dune buggy,” he said. (more…)

I officially rejoined the land of the living this weekend — which is to say, my Internet service finally got hooked up. As soon as the installation guy was gone, I ran to my computer as if to a beloved friend recently emerged from a coma.

Suddenly, my lifeline to the greater world was restored. Now I once again have access to instant curiousity satisfaction via Google, online news sites and other useful items, and the hours of pleasant time-wasting afforded by blogs and social networking sites. (more…)

The desert attracts interesting people — in that hunkered-down-in-a-bunker-waiting-for-the-collapse-of-Western-civilization kind of way. People tend to live in the desert because they don’t want to be part of normal society. Some of them live in places like Sandy Valley, out on the California/Nevada line, where they killed a man by shooting him in the leg and then setting him on fire in his own mobile home.

Some of them spend their time cooking meth and stealing copper wire.

Others are harmless codgers with mechanical leanings and a distrust of Uncle Sam, like Harvey the worm poop guy. (more…)

For my loyal readers who may be wondering if I fell off a mountain, wandered across the path of a passing UFO or got “taken care of” by Mafiosos from Las Vegas, none of those things have happened. The reason for my recent silence is much simpler — I have been living in a vacuum with no Internet access outside of the office where, believe it or not, I actually have to spend my time doing work every day rather than posting on my personal blog.

Barstow has karaoke, decent Mexican food, mountains to hike, a ghost town and a delightfully cheesy 1950s diner just up the road in Yermo. It even has sushi. What it does not have is any coffee shop outside of Starbucks, a bookstore outside of the one run by the Mormons, or wireless internet access outside of a hotel. Apparently it is important that the travelers passing through en route to L.A. or Vegas have a chance to check their e-mail, but as for the locals — well, if they want the Internet, they’d better shell out $45 a month, something that I didn’t feel financially solvent enough to do immediately upon arriving.

“We need to introduce Barstow to the wonders of wireless Internet,” I complained to one of my coworkers the other day. “I feel like I’m in a cultural vacuum.”

“You are in a cultural vacuum,” explained the coworker, who is fond of Barstow but maintains a realistic view. (more…)

I didn’t have high expectations for Barstow. I expected flat, dusty expanses of strip mall. I expected ugly. So upon arriving, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was nestled in the middle of rolling hills. More than that, it immediately felt familiar. (more…)

I have crammed everything I could into the back of a Ford Escort wagon, with a painting and two bikes strapped to the outside. Everything else, I have given away, thrown out and, in the case of a few boxes of books and CDs, mailed to myself at the general delivery address in Barstow.

I went for one last rendezvous in Sisters and learned to snowboard. I went to Astoria to cover one last court hearing. I sang my last karaoke at the Horse Shoe, the bar full of old bikers just north of Molalla, and followed it up with one last uproarious night of karaoke in Portland at the Alibi tiki bar. I went for my last horseback ride down through the cow pasture behind my place in Molalla. I had my last cozy dinner in Portland, said my goodbyes to the close friends who mattered and to the people I encountered randomly along the way, including the baristas, gas station attendants and post office clerks of Molalla. They knew I was leaving because they read it in the paper.

Then I loaded up the last of my belongings, picked up a craigslist rider in Eugene and drove my weighted down station wagon over the mountains and out of Oregon. After weeks of stress and sentimental goodbyes, it feels good to be gone. The homesickness will kick in soon enough, I know, but for now I’m happy to have the open road before me, with no expectations other than that I will start my new life next week.