Day Five

It doesn't take very long to develop new habits. I have read that as little as seven days can start the motivated person towards a completely new and in most cases, productive, routine. I am finding this to be so. It is day five of our hybrid journey into adventure, the half-way point of the trip in terms of days, not mileage, the passage measured more by time than by space. The days have started to blend into each other, cross-dissolving seamlessly every two hundred miles or so, separated only by the night and my feeble attempts to categorize, format and understand my real-time assessment of overloaded sensory movement. Put another way, it is sometimes difficult to keep the primary objective in clear focus when said objective is in itself intentionally obscure. Habitually then, we default to the habits, skills, desires and basic needs that provide the foundation. Or, perhaps more accurately, that have provided a foundation in the past, but are now in question, the daily subjects of change, in flux and flowing like class five rapids. As an example.

It is now common practice (this was an easy one) to slide open Whitey's side door prior to first light. Down here in Southern Oregon, that means around 0600. Pretty easy duty for a guy that regularly hits the ground runnin at 0400. But, and this is where it gets interesting, one of the important items on the trip video shoot list is what we call atmospherics, video to be used as time-lapse transitions. Sunrises are perfect for this application even if one is shooting on the coast known more for its sets than rises. One needs to be up, loaded for bear, and on site well before the sky begins to lighten. To accomplish this, one needs to be rested and to be rested one must slide the door closed for the night at an hour most adults would consider early. And this requires either a lot of discipline or the development of new habits. Being on the road means that my habitual nightly routine of CNN, MSNBC and one episode of the current TV series (Homeland Season 5) and then an hour of reading, is not longer applicable. Again that is the easy part.

Day two in Brookings has been spent doing research. I have unearthed several fascinating facts abut my subject and this morning (leaving at first light) I trekked 16 miles up a windy, gravel fire-road in search of the actual site where one of the two bombs we dropped by Japan on Continental US during WWII. Yes, it happened here, in Brookings, OR. That is why I am here. Doing research.

I get to the top and finally find a clearing to pull into and make coffee. It is so quiet up here at  three-thousand feet that I can hear birds leap and land on tiny fir limbs. The coffee is good and I finish the giant cinnamon roll I bought yesterday about five hundred miles North. I am going to shoot an intro as well as video of the location. I have a better idea of the concept after making the hour drive. The story will be stylized using three color pallets; Sepia tones for the scenes taking place in Brookings in 1944-45, film noir for the Manhattan Project scenes, and super-saturated color for the scenes of the present tense, where the story is actually being told in present time. Yesterday I found that I am not the first to bring a camera to this placation for this specific purpose. One of today's chores will be to track down the two docs that have previously been produced about this tiny town's claim to fame.

I am sipping the steaming coffee in this solemn location, wondering if this is how creative inspiration comes screaming into the world. Like a double espresso on a chilly morning.

We have been witnessing a lot of coastal fog. In the beach community where I grew up we would invariably say to anyone asking, that it would burn off by noon, but this soup seems to not have received the memo. It lingers all day.

Like a bad habit.