Small Town News

The tethers of a hometown

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As a journalist, I've always struggled with my hometown.

That is, whenever my job takes me back to Menno, I hesitate, I overanalyze and I second-guess. The prospect does intrigue me, but there's a squirming awkwardness, too.

After more than 25 years in this business, writing about and photographing innumerable events that have ranged from good times to terrible times to times I probably forgot about the day after they happened, I still wrestle with covering Menno.

It happened again this week when I learned a house had exploded there. Duty called, and I was on my way in the middle of the night to once again confront my private civil war...

This battle started 26 years ago this week on my very first night as a Press & Dakotan employee. I was taking phone calls on football games for the sports department, and the first call I took was from Menno. It made what was already a nervous first night a slightly more anxious experience.

Although reporting on your hometown can be pretty cool, the prospect of covering Menno also scared me a little bit. I knew the people and would wonder what they thought, but that wasn't my biggest worry. I didn't want people

from elsewhere to think I was playing favorites with whatever I did with the town. At the same time, I wanted to do right by the town and not shortchange the people. So, I was concerned that I might overplay a Menno story, which might cause people to question my objectivity; on the other hand, I might underplay a Menno story and not give it the prominence or credit it deserves. Every time I deal with a Menno dateline, I still do this mental balancing act and continually question whether my ties to the place are impairing my judgment.

Covering Menno sends me into a time warp of sorts. Wherever else I go in my job, I see it through a journalistic prism. But Menno is different: The vast majority of my recollections from there hail back to before I ever looked at the world through a reporter's eye or a photographer's lens. Menno is like a reset button for me. It takes me back to a time before this professional life, which often feels like it consumes the rest of my life now.

Reporting on Menno during good times -- like a basketball game or the Pioneer Power Show -- is easier to do, for obvious and happy reasons.

But when I'm there for something bad, it tears me in a dozen different directions.

Unlike anywhere else I go when a storm or some such tragedy strikes, I'm tied so closely to what

the people in Menno are enduring. Even though I've lived in Yankton for more than 20 years, there is still something more intimately attached to me in Menno than there is or probably ever will be here. It's not simply because of family or friends; it's because it's home -- a universe of comfortable familiarity, no matter how much it or I seem to change.

And that's how it was again this week...

My hometown anxiety kicked in late Monday night as I dashed up there, but this time it wasn't simply because my job was taking me home. The tethers that bind me to the place tightened around me like a stranglehold.

I was going to where, as I feared, a friend just died, someone who lived across the street from me when I was a kid.

When I arrived, I found a neighborhood, which at one time I could probably walk through blindfolded, lit up by stark floodlights and strewn with smashed debris.

Some friends escorted me into a badly damaged house next door to the blast site. As so often happens with small-town ties, the occupants were relatives of mine, and their place was shattered.

I saw familiar, tired faces in fire-fighting gear, or hovering behind yellow tape and fighting back tears, or floating on the fringes of the darkness watching this surreal

spectacle through grim, blank eyes.

And I was there with a camera doing my job, like I always do anywhere else. But here, amid my hometown's pain and chaos, I never felt more like an outsider. I never felt more alone.

There are so many things in this job that I get to see, do and experience that I embrace and/or dread; sometimes it's both. And as a rule of journalism, I'm never truly part of what I'm covering. I'm next to it, observing it, shadowing it; I'm a faceless third party peering in. These things occasionally suck me in emotionally, but there is usually a marginally numbing mental distance in place between the incident before me and my perspective. Frankly, that's what experience has done to me.

But that rule never completely applies for me in Menno, as this week reminded me. I may not live there anymore, but the place still lives somewhere within me. So do the joys and wounds that come with that connection, because that's part of my job and, by a sometimes-inconvenient coincidence, that's who I am.



Copyright 2010 Hutchinson Herald, Menno, South Dakota. All Rights Reserved. This content, including derivations, may not be stored or distributed in any manner, disseminated, published, broadcast, rewritten or reproduced without express, written consent from SmallTownPapers, Inc.

© 2011 Hutchinson Herald Menno, South Dakota. All Rights Reserved. This content, including derivations, may not be stored or distributed in any manner, disseminated, published, broadcast, rewritten or reproduced without express, written consent from DAS.

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