Natural Disaster

by Ginger Zee

  Remember when I told you I make my passwords my goals?

  Well, by this point I was fighting that self-destructive behavior with every weapon I had, and positive passwords were a big help. Hey, it had worked for me before with the old todayshow10 password.

  Corny passwords were all fine and good until I had to call my producers back in New York while I was on that tornado chase and ask them to update my password since my e-mail was full.

  I was on the phone with Claire Brinberg, a senior producer for World News. I was spelling out my password as if she weren’t going to figure out what I had just said….

  S-P-A-R-K-L-E-E-V-E-R-Y-D-A-Y-12

  Sparkle every day. Freaking nerd. But I wasn’t a nerd. I was a natural disaster, working through my demons. And sparkling. No, dazzling. And that was it. From that e-mail confirmation from Diane until today, it has been a positive ride. Not just six years of luck, but hard work, love of myself and others, a constant desire to learn, and a daily use of my fence. I’m far from perfect, but let me tell you who never picks up a wine bottle before six P.M. This girl. And it is usually just one glass. It’s not the answer. I was, all along.

  How many airports have you been in in one day? At ABC it is a crazy game I play with other correspondents and field producers, and we all seem to enjoy telling our travel “war stories.” My record is five airports in one day. Let that sink in next time you’re standing in the TSA line. I’m not complaining, because I love my job, but it was a day that would have made John Candy and Steve Martin cry.

  The five airports that one day were DFW (Dallas/Fort Worth), DAL (Dallas Love Field), BHM (Birmingham), ATL (Atlanta), and JFK (New York). Well before I was a traveling nut for ABC, I’d studied those three-letter identifiers for meteorology. I never would have thought I would have the opportunity to visit so many all at once. On this particular day, we did a live shot in Dallas on floods, then went to DFW to try to make our flight to New York. As soon as we dropped the rental car off, the New York desk called. “Change of plans. We need you to go to DAL and fly to Birmingham, Alabama, for an interview” (one that I had been trying to get for over a month). No problem.

  We landed in Birmingham, then drove an hour to interview a family that had lost their child in a tornado when the entire family had been blown from their home. Heartbreaking. Then we rushed to get the last flight from Atlanta to New York. I was exhausted but exhilarated at the same time. There has always been a calm that I tap into during these endless days driven from a sense of achievement, of doing the impossible. Thanks to my Energizer Bunny of a mom, I never feel like I can accomplish enough in one day. I am a woman who lives with a never-ending list of to-dos and have been told by more than one person in my life that I need to learn to relax. So a day where relaxation isn’t possible makes me feel productive and harmonious. To anyone but a natural disaster, this would probably be disturbing. But to me, it’s fun, and just another part of my job that I love.

  My new role at ABC was full of these productive trips. For example, there’s the time I was going to shoot a feature story in Missouri, got delayed overnight in Atlanta, flew to Springfield, Missouri, and drove an hour to Branson to shoot for GMA on a roller coaster. As soon as I got on the roller coaster, I got calls and an e-mail from our senior producer, Chris Vlasto.

  “Get off that roller coaster. We need you in Las Vegas by tonight for World News and GMA in the morning to talk about the record heat.”

  I started to explain that I was just getting off the roller coaster, then remembered my New Employee/Good Soldier role and opted for something more efficient.

  “I’m on my way.”

  That adrenaline, the travel test that lay ahead, was unlike any challenge I had been presented in my career before arriving at ABC, and it was thrilling. I loved to make the impossible probable. It was a pop quiz, and I was passing with flying colors.

  I used to travel and move without reason to avoid the depression that would settle in; now, as I made inroads with Dr. Wilson each time I was home in New York, the constant crisscrossing of the nation had purpose and never felt like I was running from something, but rather to something. One of the great deterrents to depression is purpose. I was learning that I had it in life despite my career. My identity was growing just as my career was blossoming.

  I made my live shot and did GMA the next morning from the Strip, and then an e-mail arrived from Wendy Fisher, the true mastermind behind the positioning of ABC’s correspondents. Wendy essentially runs the assignment desk logistics, keeps track of where everyone is and when they are moving, and organizes their travel arrangements. She wanted to know where I could go that would be even hotter. I was so excited to name the city or locale that had been on my bucket list for a long time.

  “Death Valley. It could reach one hundred twenty-nine, which is nearing the all-time world-record high of one hundred thirty-four.”

  “Great, go,” she said.

  And just like that, my producer Brandon Chase and I hit the road and drove to Death Valley, where the temperature did reach 128°F. As soon as we arrived and started setting up a time lapse of the sunset, we saw a roadrunner and a coyote. We thought, This has to be fate. After a 107-degree four A.M. live shot (GMA starts at seven A.M. eastern time, so whenever we go west we have to be ready by three A.M.), we were instructed to go back to Las Vegas. We did another twenty-four hours of storytelling, and we were pretty spent. I always went into these trips so positively, loving every moment of the wildness. But then exhaustion would hit me and I would get a little salty from sweating in these record-high temperatures. Either way, Brandon helped keep my spirits up (he has to have a little natural disaster in him, too, because he has been on the road for at least six years), and we made it through, booked our flights for the next morning, and felt ready for a night of sleep. And perhaps a meal. I definitely get hangry, too.

  We pulled into the hotel, and there it was: an e-mail from Vlasto.

  Nineteen firefighters were killed in Arizona. We need you to get there by GMA.

  Immediately I felt a combination of sorrow for this horrible tragedy and fatigue as I thought about the long drive ahead of us. Again, I was in Good Soldier mode, so all I said was, “We’ll be there.”

  Brandon and I mapped out the drive, which would hopefully be just under four hours. Okay, not bad. But it was already eight P.M. Pacific time, which meant we had just eight hours before GMA started. We hadn’t eaten all day and had slept about nine hours total over the past three days. Neither of us thought it was a good idea to drive under the circumstances—exhausted, in the mountains, at night. By this point I had been with ABC for almost eighteen months and was feeling a bit more emboldened. I was more than happy to make the trip, brush my teeth outside the SUV…but this was not worth our lives. I called the overnight producers and explained our situation. They agreed it was on the dangerous side and suggested getting us a driver. Then we could sleep and still get to GMA on time. Great idea. But oh, goodness, did we have no idea what lay ahead of us.

  The driver arrived and Brandon and I loaded our gear and suitcases into his black SUV. At this point I was so delirious from lack of sleep that it looked like a carriage to my castle. We hopped in, put the seats back, and gave each other a high five. We can do this, I thought.

  I woke up thirty minutes later and thought it was weird that we were still in a residential area. I looked up front and saw the driver frantically going through a stack of papers. I leaned a little closer to look at the papers and see what he was reading.

  MapQuest.

  WAIT, MAPQUEST?!

  This was 2013. No one used MapQuest anymore. We had smartphones, with GPS. I opened the map on my phone. We were barely ten miles from where we had started. Heading in the wrong direction. I nudged Brandon awake and showed him on my phone how little we’d traveled. Brandon spoke up.

  “What route are you planning to take? Ninety-Three looks like it would be a straight shot,” Brandon said.

  Th
e driver looked back at us, clearly distressed. “Yeah, I just…well, I can’t find Ninety-Three.”

  If you’ve never been to Las Vegas, there is really not much to the highway system. US Route 93 is very easy to find. If you aren’t using MapQuest.

  We suggested that he use his GPS instead. He said, “I don’t have one. I’ve never really driven anywhere outside the Strip.”

  This guy had never been off the Las Vegas Strip. In his entire life.

  So, instead of sleeping, Brandon and I directed the driver back through Las Vegas to US 93. Once we hit the highway, we both figured, Oh, good, now we can rest. There are no turns, just a straight line to Yarnell, Arizona. We repeated the direction, “Just stay on Ninety-Three,” and fell asleep.

  Two hours later I woke up and it was pitch black. I looked around and saw mountains. That was promising. The driver heard me wake up and said he needed to pull over at the next stop to use the restroom.

  Now it was midnight. We had just four hours until GMA started and, I figured, about two more hours to drive. I checked my e-mail and felt even worse than before I’d gotten a little sleep. I opened my map, and lo and behold, we were not on US 93. We were on Interstate 40, going away from our destination!

  I woke Brandon again. We were both so frustrated, and laughing, because what could we do? As soon as the driver got back in the car, we told him he had messed up again. We got him going the right way, and less than an hour before GMA was to begin, we arrived on the scene where nineteen firefighters had lost their lives.

  I flew home from Phoenix the next day after seven airports in five days. As soon as I hit that seat on the way home, I took a breath for the first time in twenty-four hours. I thrived on the pandemonium, yes, but the reality of the stories I was telling was impossible to ignore. I don’t know what pre–Dr. Wilson Ginger would have done in these situations, but I can’t imagine it would have been as measured. I almost had the best of both worlds now: the ability to live in chaos paired with the tools to separate my feelings when needed.

  As a sort of unwritten rule, the first year or two that you work as a network correspondent at ABC seems to be an initiation period of “Let’s see how much you can handle.” As a viewer, I can always tell when the bosses are liking a new television correspondent, because I see them all the time. The more they like you, the more they have you in action, and that was certainly the case for me when I got to ABC.

  For two years, I traveled nonstop, often working fifteen to thirty days in a row, then having just one day off before starting a long stretch again. I can count on one hand the number of true “weekends” (meaning two days off in a row) I had those first two years.

  A typical work week would begin with my GMA Weekend and World News shifts on Saturday and Sunday. Then Sunday night I would fly out to wherever the weather was happening. I traveled so much, I actually had to write down the hotel room number of wherever I was sleeping that night in the notebook on my phone.

  One of my favorite travel tales begins with a slew of e-mails from my bosses right after I finished a Sunday GMA show. The messages instructed me to prepare for a flight to Minneapolis to cover a snowstorm. So, about eight hours later, immediately after I ran off the set of World News, I boarded a Sun Country Airlines flight (contrary to popular belief, there are no ABC choppers or private jets; I have always flown commercial) to MSP out of JFK with my work husband, David Meyers. David was a field producer who essentially organized the crew, coordinated the live shots, drove, and was my partner on the road.

  David is a solid Midwestern guy with the friendliest disposition. I was fortunate to have him as my travel buddy. We got along so well, and that is important when you spend more time with the people you work with than with anybody else in your life.

  After barely making our flight, we landed in Minneapolis and did a live shot for GMA that Monday morning. Then we jumped on another flight to Washington, DC, to cover a significant nor’easter (a nor’easter is a storm where winds blow from northeast to southwest).

  When we landed in DC, we did World News and GMA, then drove to Front Royal, Virginia, for the epic-snow part of the story. But just as we were going to settle in and get a few hours of sleep, our GMA producers called and said, “We need you to find damage.” That meant they wanted a story on the damage from the storm. So we went out into the field but couldn’t find anything. The only reported damage was a four-hour drive south, which we relayed to producers along with the fact that we hadn’t slept in forty-eight hours. They said they really needed us to get there.

  They were looking for the shot of us in front of a fallen tree on a house. We had no idea where to find this, so we just started driving. All night. And finally, like an oasis in the desert, it appeared. We found a fallen tree over a road at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Lots of trees, actually. And a tree into a house! It sounds so awful when I think about the reality that our success came in finding another person’s property damage, so please understand, I am always cognizant that there are real lives inside that home with a tree on it. We only had two hours until GMA would be live, so we decided to nap in the SUV. I remember brushing my teeth and peeing outside the SUV as if we were camping just before going on air, thinking how glamorous being on network television is!

  Moments after I finished the update for daylight (we usually stick around to make sure our shot is updated for the West Coast feed of GMA), we got the call from our producer to go back to DC to reposition before the storm hit Boston. In just two and a half days, we had gone to four cities. And by dusk, Boston would make five. As soon as we landed, Chris Vlasto told us to be in nearby Worcester for Thursday morning’s GMA. But just before we got to Worcester, we got the call that they had decided against having us on GMA in the morning and that we could turn around and come home. So we drove back to Boston, booking a flight home to NYC as we drove, and just as we were returning the rental car we had taken only ninety minutes before, we got another call. “Sorry. We do want you in Boston.” No problem. Back we went to Boston in search of a hotel, and then we got the call that they weren’t going to use us after all. David and I started laughing at that point. There was really no other response. The upshot? They felt so bad for moving us back and forth that they offered us a night at the Four Seasons. After two nights of restless sleep in an SUV, we said yes pretty quickly. Up until that night, my top-of-the-line work hotel was a Marriott, and most of the time it was more like whatever Econo Lodge came along the way.

  After we checked in, knowing we didn’t have to work in the morning (another unusual bonus), David and I decided we deserved a nice meal and a few drinks. It felt like the best meal I had had all year, and when we were through I went to bed and slept harder than I had in a year. That is until the hotel phone rang around five A.M.

  It was David. The producers changed their minds (again) and wanted us live in Boston in the snowstorm after all. It was snowing heavily at this point, as we had forecast, so driving was nearly impossible. Our crew was coming from Worcester (since that is where we had originally booked them) and pretty soon we realized they weren’t going to make it to us in time for the broadcast. So we called our affiliate WCVB and asked them if they had any cameras we could borrow and any lines to connect us to the network. They said yes, and so we drove a treacherous seven miles north to their station.

  At this point, I kept pinching myself to wake up, it felt so much like one of my stress dreams. But this was not a dream—this was real life. We got to WCVB and rushed in. They were busy enough with their own coverage. They pointed us toward a locked cabinet. The camera was in there. David had no idea how to use one of those huge news cameras. Plus, they had misunderstood. They did not have a way to broadcast to NYC.

  After all that, we were not going to make air.

  And then we had a brilliant idea. I genuinely don’t remember if it was mine or David’s, but I do know that ten minutes later I was live on GMA. Via Skype on an iPad. After the show, I got a lot of gr
eat feedback about that iPad broadcast.

  There was no time to rest or celebrate. We got straight back into the rental car and drove more than two hours to Cape Cod to get blasted by snow, rain, ice, and waves for our World News live shot. Then one more shot for GMA finally concluded our epic trip, which had lasted ninety-six hours and taken us to eight cities. It was stressful, and at times we wondered if we’d pull it off, but we did it. I had to rush back to NYC to be in place for GMA Saturday. And so went my cycle in those early days at ABC.

  I always tracked my travels in a journal, and there was one line I wrote on the way back from one of my epic trips: I just saw a family get on the plane. A mother with her two young children. I wonder, when, if ever, am I going to be able to do that? How? I’m not getting younger, but to keep my job I have to be viable and available always. How does a wife and a mother do that?

  I remember crying as I wrote that line. I had been running nonstop, I was so tired, my body felt fatigued, and I was only in my early thirties. As much as this natural disaster enjoyed the unruly life of a traveling correspondent, there was a large part of me that yearned to settle down. If even for a weekend!

  I wish I could go back to that version of me and give her a pep talk. It is going to get better. It always does. All of those things I was so concerned that I would never have a chance to have—a husband, a child, a weekend. I have them now. And I cherish them so much more because I know what it is not to have them.

  I woke up in a panic. After fumbling with my phone in a dark hotel room, my tired eyes finally made out the time—3:45 A.M.

  A mental scramble of questions fired through my brain: Am I late for work? What hotel is this? What city am I in? What time zone am I even in?

  Eventually my brain settled down and I remembered that I was in Wichita, Kansas, and I still had thirty minutes to get up and out the door. I’d been driving all night with my crew and our producer, Gina Sunseri, in search of a live location where damage had been done by one of the tornadoes we had been chasing.