Inconvenient

A generous family let us stay in their cabin for a couple of days. We needed rest, time to process and do laundry and not take in anymore. The cabin was quiet--and even more than quiet--it was private. We cooked, slept, raked pine needles in speckled morning sunlight. We watched a video and twisted Donna Renee's hair and played Scrabble. There was time for deep breaths and silence.

The road isn't like that. The road is, as Donna Renee would say, inconvenient. It's a crowded car, gas at $3.29, and that ache in your left cheek after a few hundred miles. It's stopping at another hotel with another mysterious smell and a TV that may or may not hook into the camera so we can watch the day's raw footage. It's a new lumpy pillow that is better or worse than last night's lumpy pillow in wherever-that-was and it's trying to remember where the bathroom is without turning on the light.

The interviews are inconvenient as well. Sometimes people won't talk on camera. Sometimes their profundity evaporates when they see the red REC light. A couple of days ago, an angry old street musician yelled at Angela, mocking and cursing her, making assumptions about what she was doing before she had a chance to explain. Inconvenient.

Even more inconvenient are the successful interviews. People honor us with their most intimate beliefs, their pain, their questions. Their stories stay with us, crushing down on our chests like an anchor. I know the weight of another person's soul--I feel it, I carry it with me long after the taping stops. The weight brings us to tears and to our knees. It pinned me to a bench on the pier in Santa Cruz. We were supposed to watch sea lions, but I couldn't stop the tears long enough to feign interest.

That's why we needed rest--Scrabble and laundry and all. But as we packed up the car and pulled away from the cabin this morning, we stomped around like horses eager to run. It's all about the stories, all about the people. As it turns out, inconvenience is addictive.