Field Journal: Learning by Embarrassment

Vince Patton, Producer/Reporter

Tuesday, June 26, 2007 — After two months with Field Guide, I thought I had settled into the new job just fine.

Then boneheaditis hit me twice in two weeks.

Where should I start? With the car that nearly rolled over or the TEN extra hours of driving?

Ok. The driving. The first thing Art Beat's KC Cowan advised me was to remember that producers must pack the blank video tapes for the shoots, not the photographers. (This is the reverse of TV news where we have both previously worked.)

Empty cameras don't record stories very well.

So did I remember the tapes? Of course I did. But not until we had already driven 5 hours from Portland into central Oregon. The kind folks at the Paulina grocery store let us use their phone to call back to OPB for help. Unfortunately, there really was no way to ship the tapes to us quickly enough.

So, we drove another 45 minutes on to Delintment Lake where I dropped the photographer with tent, food and camping supplies. He stayed with the fossil hounds we were teaming up with.
I drove back to Portland - and then back to central Oregon yet again - with the tapes at long last.

At least this wasn't as scary as my adventure one week earlier.

As I backed the OPB van up to a campsite in the Tillamook Forest, I misjudged a curve and we started sliding sideways down an embankment. Once stopped, I looked out my window to see nothing but rocks and a stream below.

We climbed out the uphill door and then carefully extracted the camera from the back of the van. (The camera is worth more than the car.)

A quarter of a mile hike took us to Highway 6 where we started waving. After 5 minutes, a kind-hearted guy in a pickup pulled over and agreed to give photographer Michael Bendixen a ride into Tillamook to get a tow truck.

The tow turned out to be particularly difficult as the back end of the car wanted to slide down into the creek as the front was pulled out. But with two cables, two winches and a pulley fastened to a tree and me yanking on a strap to turn the steering wheel, the van eventually came free suffering only a flat front tire.

This misfortune only cost us 3 hours of delay.

Suffice it to say, I hope the next two weeks are much more calm!