Wavescribe: Fire and Ice

It's not often we do a story in an area in which you feel your life is in danger. The most common for me has been on coastal North Carolina during hurricanes. The previous scare was last year covering a shooting in a New Bern, NC project neighborhood--at night. Last night was different. All day the Piedmont received a coating of ice and snow. And the day before, Sheeka Strickland and I did a story with John Carter, a tree specialist who told us it would be the pine trees that would succumb first to the weight of the wintry mix. He was right. And there are a lot of pine trees in Rockingham county. All along Highway 65, 704, Ellisboro Road and Ayersville Road fresh firewood, softened by many days of precipitation, began falling; many of them blocking those roads. The roads are those two lane ribbons of asphalt that snake their way through rural North Carolina, and are dangerous enough with speeding 18-wheelers steered by sleep-deprived captains. Now you feel like you're running a gauntlet of leaning trees, just waiting for a cold push by old man winter to weed out the weak among them. Their icy claws posed over you as if you're driving through the arctic version of a haunted house.

Once you step out of the news assault vehicle to get some shots of the trees that didn't make it, you hear crackling of a conifer's canopy, it's limbs, or the whole trunk. And now let's add a sizzling thrill: sometimes, the thing pulls down power lines. We found one that was smoking, and one that had become a fire. I got the shots I needed, and sparked a hasty retreat back down the road. Then, we drive back through the gauntlet, Sheeka at the wheel, and me in the passenger seat, getting footage of the ice claws and downed trees. Suddenly, a pack of deer cross the road in front of us. What a cool and serendipitous encounter. That shot made it into one of two stories we produced for the evening newscast.