It’s 7:15 on a Sunday morning and I’m sprawled out on the couch in my living room apartment, lights ablaze, laptop quietly playing MP3s and the television replaying last night’s SportsCenter. I vaguely remember listening to highlights of another failed comeback attempt by the Cubs.
The phone rings. My eyes scan the floor, eyes half shut looking for the source of this wretched noise.
“Jack, you up?”
It’s Mike Kane. At any other place, I would have referred to him as my photographer, but if nothing else, Poynter taught me that photographers belong only unto themselves. In any case, we’re supposed to meet with a group of volunteers at the Merry Pier in Pass-a-Grille in 30 minutes. For the next two hours, we are to document their cleanup of the nesting area on Shell Key Preserve. It’s a noble cause worth writing about, to be sure, but my mind is still fighting to process the reasons why I’m awake at this God-awful hour of the morning.
“Ya, ya,” I mutter over the phone. He gives me 10 minutes to get dressed and meet him in the parking lot.
I stumble onto the balcony, hoping the morning sun will invigorate me. Instead I find the aftermath of yet another rainstorm that passed through the night before. I keep forgetting that summer is rain season here in Florida. I’m starting to really hate rain season here in Florida.
I slap on a pair of shoes, grab my notebook and head outside.
We make our way to Eighth Avenue and just as we finish parking, one of several torrents of rain pounds the top of Mike’s truck minutes before departure. After uttering a few choice expletives, we sit and watch the situation unfold.
The thoughts I had that morning went something like this: There is no way I’m heading out in that rainstorm. No way. No. Forget about it. Maybe they’ll put it off until later this afternoon, when the system has had a chance to pass through the area. Maybe they never even showed.
I’m still half-asleep and Mike’s passenger seat is feeling mighty comfortable. But we notice people standing along the pier, and somehow we manage to trudge out to the docked catamaran. Underneath the canopy, Barbara Ranck, the group’s leader, is frantically organizing the boat to make room for its guests. She hardly notices us stepping on. Her concerns lie with the trip ahead. Within a few minutes, nearly a dozen tired faces make their way under the same canopy. They sit on the white plastic benches, staring blankly into the distance, waiting for the voyage to begin.
They do the cleanup every 10 days like clockwork. The cleanup is a job, like any other. Without their efforts, the barrier island would become prey to wayward tourists who use the place as their personal party pad. But there’s also another motivation at work. These people make the trek to Shell Key for a chance to watch the snowy plovers and American oystercatchers and least terns in their natural habitats. As backwards as it sounds to me, they get their kicks just gazing at birds all day.
As we sail toward the island, Mike and I slowly introduce ourselves to the crowd of blue-shirted bird-lovers. It takes a few minutes for each face to come to grips with who we are and why they’re getting photographed.
Eventually we strike up a series of conversations. Within minutes, my obsession with more sleep turns into a desire of understanding why this cleanup crew would wake up at such a God-awful hour of the morning to pick up a few beer cans and change some twine barriers.
The more we walk and talk, the more I’m understanding why they’re here. Without this group, the county’s Department of Environmental Management -- regulators of the site -- would have to spend their limited resources on finding another crew, which would put these birds at risk.
“There is nobody else to do this work,” Ranck says.
The experience, while not an earth-shattering moment of clarity, did teach me a few things about why I’m in this field.
I hated waking up that morning. My gut reaction when Mike called me was to chuck my cell phone out the window and continue sleeping. When I’m working, this feeling takes on several manifestations. I don’t want to go up to that random person standing next to his three-alarm apartment fire and bug him about what happened for fear of some kind of backlash. I dread making the phone call to confirm a questionable lead in my story. There are days when I just don’t feel like going to work.
But I do, because it’s my job. But it’s more.
Most of last school year was spent in a flurry of 200-mile commutes between two cities working a full-time gig as a night general assignment intern in Peoria while finishing up my classwork at the University of Illinois. I still wonder how exactly I managed to burn more than 21,000 miles on my car for what amounted to two viable clips in my file.
Again, I did it because it was my job. But it’s more.
These bird-watchers, while tired and sleepy, battling morning rainstorms and sharing a piece of themselves with two curious student journalists, came out Sunday morning for a self-centered purpose. They treat every cleanup session as an opportunity to enjoy the presence of these rare birds. Without them, a piece of each crewmember is lost.
I treat every assignment as a blessed learning opportunity, a chance to write a tighter story, to learn a new philosophy, to meet someone I would’ve never known otherwise. The sheer scope of life’s events, from the pure good to the pure horror, can unfold in front of my eyes on any given day. The profession allows me to grow spiritually, potentially instigate change in my community and create a piece of copy my mom would be proud of posting on her fridge.
And without journalism, a piece of myself is lost.