I consider myself someone who prepares for any and everything.
I carry Tylenol and antacids at all times. I only carry felt tip pens because I don’t trust ballpoint pens to work when I need them. My car has an emergency bag with enough supplies to sustain me through getting snowed in for a full 24 hours.
I’d like to think that there are few times I have been completely unprepared.
But admittedly, it does happen, and the most recent instance was while I was working on a feature story for the Leader about Stream Teams, a volunteer organization that cleans up waterways across the state.
One of my sources, the incredibly informative Brian Waldrop, had invited me and another Leader intern out on a river cleanup.
I assumed this interview would be like all the others I’d done, so I packed as I normally did: a notebook, pens, my wallet and an iced coffee.
No breakfast, water, lunch or sunscreen, and a very poor choice of outfit (notably, darkwash jeans and white sneakers.)
I have never considered myself overly outdoorsy, but rather outdoorsy by association. I’ve hiked and gone fishing with my far outdoors-ier friends, and I was often brought along to my dad’s outdoor adventures.
Most times, it went well. Other times, like the one and only time I was brought along squirrel hunting and was bitten by a truly alarming amount of chiggers, it did not go so well.
Showing up to the cleanup on a stretch of Plattin Creek, I did not expect to be outdoorsy. Being handed a canoe paddle quickly changed that.
What I’d intended to be a “done by noon” interview turned into a seven-hour adventure on Plattin Creek, south of Festus. My original feelings of preparedness rapidly faded away as I chucked my belongings into a watertight bag and waded into the water, feeling my sneakers fill with sand and river water.
The creek was lower than the cleanup team had anticipated, forcing us out of the canoe to drag it through rocky beds on more than one occasion. I was soaked past my knees, and I could feel myself getting sunburned after an hour (the joys of having red hair!)
With canoes filled with trash, the cleanup crew prepared to leave Plattin Creek. From left are Pat Clemins, Tim Oberkirsch, Brian Waldrop, Leader interns Audrey Ellis and Cole Bailey, and Mike Griewing.
When I made it back to my fellow Leader intern’s car, I chugged my heavily watered down iced coffee and surveyed my newly acquired farmer’s tan. We laughed about the day we’d spent paddling and helping haul abandoned tires out of the creek.
It surprised me how much I enjoyed my day in the outdoors. I’d seen a fawn curled up along a riverbank, watched fish dart away from my paddle and learned about the entomology of Missouri’s waterways. I’d had many heart-to-hearts with the cleanup members about what inspired them to come out and why it mattered to them.
It also reminded me what I loved about journalism.
I spent the spring semester of my junior year of college studying and interning abroad in London. My internship experience there had rattled me – it had taken over a month to get a daily task and most days were spent reading the news for eight consecutive hours.
There is a lot of bad news in the world, but not enough to fuel eight hours worth. There’s also a sort of crushing, apathetic weight that comes with consuming international news for longer than two hours.
I’d had good days at that internship, don’t get me wrong. Shoot days got me out of the office and in the field, doing actual work instead of reading about it. But I was lucky if I could go on a shoot every other week, and as an unpaid intern, there were few people who trusted me to do work beyond getting coffee.
Coming into my internship at the Leader, I wanted to feel like a journalist again.
My day with Stream Teams reminded me of that. A day doing something completely out of the ordinary, talking to people I never would have before and learning about things I hadn’t given a second thought to.
Now that I’m wrapping up my internship with the Leader, I’ve done a lot of reflecting on my experiences thus far. All in all, it’s been nothing but positive; I’ve written about topics I never imagined myself covering and about events I likely wouldn’t have attended if it hadn’t been for the Leader. I’ve met some of the kindest and most informative people both inside the newsroom and out.
And most importantly, I feel like a journalist again.
Audrey Ellis, an incoming senior at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, is working a 10-week internship for Leader Publications.