Flirting with Danger (20 page)

After eighteen-hour days crammed in the pub reporting on the outpouring of support for this hometown girl and inhaling so much cigarette smoke I felt like suing CNN for secondhand-smoke damage, we headed out in search of food before collapsing for a few hours back at our hotel. One night all we could find was Kentucky Fried Chicken. We all sat huddled in our van at eleven-thirty at night ravenously gnawing on Colonel Sanders’s finest, and I had a moment of déjà vu.

A year before I had been sitting hunched on a bench with my crew in Magnitogorsk, a town in the Urals where the sky is black from the steel mills. We were covering the Russian elections from the hinterlands. We were eating Cup-a-Soup for dinner outside in the cold because inside in our hotel the stench of urine was so strong, it killed the appetite. Todd had been the cameraman on that trip too.

“I can’t believe instead of having a real dinner with my husband and kids, I’m eating this slop in the middle of nowhere with you guys. Nothing personal,” I said to Todd.

“Think of us as your family,” said Todd in an effort to soothe.

Todd was right: my colleagues were like a surrogate family, and I knew many of them almost as well as I would a spouse. I always knew to order Todd a Coke when we stopped for food. I could read his moods; I knew his habits; I knew that he knew every word to every Beatles song and that I could count on him to take the most compelling pictures in any event we covered.

The Louise Woodward story became a lightning rod for all the
fears of working mothers who leave their kids with au pairs and nannies. It shocked Americans into paying more attention to who was raising their children. For me, it was one more big reminder that I was thirty-seven, alone, and had no babies of my own. I realized I was so worn out that if I didn’t start taking care of myself, I would never be in any condition to have them. The bureau was understaffed in London, so I ran from one country to the next without a break in between. I would be in Moscow for a couple of weeks, then be shipped off to the Middle East with maybe a two-hour stopover at Heathrow airport. The London bureau manager, Ros Jackman, was heroic in her efforts to make our hectic lives easier. She would get some warm-weather clothes from my flat sent out to the airport. She helped me arrange elaborate Max transfers: he would head off to a dog-sitter alone in a minicab every time I jetted off to cover another disaster.

A few weeks later, Prince Charles had given complementary medicine a big plug in a speech. I was sent out to do a story, so we hunted down a clinic that specialized in faith healing and other nontraditional remedies. My interviewee, a high-tech homeopathic practitioner, used a computer to analyze her patient’s electrophysiological reactivity to determine the condition of his or her organs. She wired me up to her contraption by using Velcro straps around my head, wrists, and ankles to show me how it worked. After a few moments, with raised eyebrows, she issued a stern warning: “Your exhaustion level is off the monitor and your adrenal glands are stuck in the on position, putting constant pressure on all your organs. You need to give your adrenal glands a break and take a long rest or you could get seriously ill.”

I don’t know if her fancy computer figured all that out or she had just taken one look at me and my haggard face and the bags under my eyes, but what she said rang true. She gave me some drops to
turn off my adrenal gland for a while. I went back to the bureau and wrote my story and then went home and decided I was going to turn off my adrenal glands for good. I was constantly sick, which I blamed on drizzly British weather, but now I thought that maybe my body was screaming for attention in the only way it knew how. I realized I was not indestructible and I had to stop living like this. I had to stop running and being wrenched from my home and any semblance of routine. My life felt so out of control that I just wanted to hide under my desk when any story broke. I hadn’t picked up my dry cleaning in weeks. I hadn’t been to a grocery store. I knew the configuration of furniture in Heathrow’s business-class lounge better than in my own living room. Every time I set foot in the airport, I would frantically dial my sisters or Lori or whatever man I was with at the time, desperate for a lifeline, a moment of connection to a saner world before being hurled into the epicenter of another news story. I was running so fast that my life just felt like a blur.

I had one of the most coveted jobs in television news, as London correspondent for CNN, with a front-row seat to every major history-making event, but I had to walk away. I had collected so much input from the outside world, it was time to turn inward and see what I had amassed. I needed to rummage around all those half-forgotten treasures of experience, one heaped atop the next, like a closetful of exquisite designer clothes that were never worn. I needed to stop and listen to myself, that person I had been running from and for whom I seemed to have had no time. I wanted to get comfortable inside and wear my self like a long-lost sweater I used to love but had left neglected in the bottom of a drawer for so long I had forgotten I had it. It was no longer all about trying to find a man to save me; I needed to save myself.

Spinning

I
knew I was really in California when my yoga instructor told the class to mentally thank the room for being there. That came after a lengthy explanation of why we should spend ten minutes a day inverted, meaning standing on our heads. Creatures that spend time upside down every day, like bats, escape arthritis and suffer less stress than those mammals that haven’t discovered the benefits of a change of perspective, the teacher said.

I had just turned my whole life upside down. I told my bosses at CNN that I needed some time off, and I moved to California. I packed up my Central Asian carpets, my socialist realist paintings, my Russian antiques, and even my minishrine to the world’s dictators, including my Saddam Hussein engraved platter and old Stalinist propaganda posters, and, with Max, headed to Santa Monica.

My first real encounter with the natives was a “spin” class: a roomful of beautiful people pumping away at stationary bikes, with
a teacher distracting us from the physical pain with loud music and inspirational life commentary. Greville, an English refugee who had broken free of any bonds of reserve with which he was brought up, was my favorite teacher. He reminded us to drink water while exercising—“you need to hydrate like the flowers in your garden.” During another spin class, Greville put on Strauss to cycle by and asked if anyone had lived a past life in Vienna. This was a perfectly normal question in Los Angeles. I knew I was going to like it here. After years of neglecting my physical and mental health, it felt good to be in a place where people went overboard in the other direction. When I moved into my new condo, the barefoot landscaper told me it was an auspicious day to move in, in lunar terms, and gave me some sage to burn. Nobody would think me odd here for my occasional visits to a clairvoyant. Even the
Los Angeles Times
has a daily astrological forecast and, in my new life, it was often the only part of the paper I read.

I relished going to sleep in the same bed every night and waking up there with no plane to catch and no story to cover. I woke up each morning with a long, sun-soaked day stretching out before me, and nothing to do. After all those years of deadlines and time pressure caused by events I could not control, facing an eternity of time with nothing hanging over my head was luxurious, a feeling I hadn’t encountered since childhood summer breaks from school. I could meander into my own feelings and thoughts without limits. I spent time cooking, which I had almost forgotten how to do for years. I slept a lot. Sometimes I took two naps a day. My exhaustion was so deep that the naps always felt as if they were just chipping away at a mountain of sleep deprivation stored inside me. I started feeling muscles relax that I didn’t even know had been tensed for years. My shoulders seemed to drop a few inches.

Of course, sometimes that expanse of time seemed ominous. I
had a tinge of fear that I wouldn’t find something meaningful to fill the time. Mostly, though, it felt like wide-open sky or like looking out to the ocean. Memories wafted up from deep inside me that I hadn’t thought of in years. I wrote them down, capturing them quickly before they drifted back into the dark for another decade.

Sometimes my old reality intruded. When air strikes hit Baghdad in December 1998, I watched from the comfort of my sofa with Max curled at my side. It was amazing to see what entertainment war appeared to be from this end of the camera. I sat with my dinner in front of the TV, tuning in to the surgical strikes. I noticed all the hype and drumroll that CNN used to rev up viewers before they cut live to Baghdad. To me, it felt like the ultimate in voyeurism, like craning your neck to see a car wreck. There was a vicarious thrill of danger and clearly defined good guys and bad guys, and it made great entertainment. During all those years that I had been visiting battlefields to get the “news,” I had had little idea of how it actually came across on TV as entertainment, competing with reruns of
N.Y.P.D. Blue
. When I got tired of watching, I could just switch the channel and watch
Ally McBeal
or read a book or take Max for a walk, just like everyone else.

But a few months later when Kosovo flared up, something drew me back in. I watched NATO planes send wave after wave of missile attacks on the Serbs. Only this time I couldn’t turn off the TV. I found myself crying as I watched. I couldn’t stop crying. I cried for all the times I had gone into villages and interviewed refugees crammed twenty or thirty into a room. I felt a powerful urge to go there, wanting to help tell their story to the world. I felt guilty sitting on my sofa, immobilized, not doing anything.

I was enraged by the U.S. coverage of the war, which demonized the Serbs in an oversimplistic way, mindlessly repeating NATO jargon about morality. I wanted to yell, “It doesn’t matter who is right
and who is wrong; people are suffering!” I wanted a chance to get in front of the cameras again, to describe the trauma of Albanian refugees crossing the mountains, cold and afraid, after being driven from their homes. Or to talk about the Serb in a black woolen mask who had knocked on the door and ordered the Albanians out, pained beneath his surface anger. I could explain that he hadn’t been born bad, that I might have even been to the village his family was driven from, where his grandmother probably died in a concentration camp run by Croatian fascists and he had been weaned on stories about the cruel Croats and Albanians.

I knew I couldn’t go back there. My time had passed. And yet I felt so drawn to it because it had been my life for so long, covering breaking news like that, and pitching in with CNN in a crisis. As I watched with tears streaming down my face, I thought, I might as well be there, because I can’t turn off the TV. I was mesmerized, trapped by the feelings of images stirred up in me, the fear, the sense of futility, of feeling like a coward to sit and weep and not do anything.

I picked up the phone to call CNN, to volunteer to go. Then panic gripped my neck. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to leave my sofa. I didn’t want to see any more. I turned off the TV.

I was like a junkie for whom the only thing that will make her better is the very thing that hurts her most. There I was, frozen on the couch with the phone in one hand, feeling so terrible and repelled by what I saw, yet so drawn to the violence and the crisis. The only thing that would break my paralysis, I thought, would be to go. I dialed the number but hung up before anyone answered. This isn’t my war, I thought. I need to fight my own battle. I’m like an alcoholic on the wagon about to take a drink; I can’t go there again.

I remembered a house I had visited once with my camera crew. It
almost doesn’t matter where it was because I have been to that house so many times in so many villages. We pulled up and knocked on the door. We had driven past a stream of people, some of them on foot lugging hastily packed suitcases, others piled onto tractors with their clothes, a few pots and pans and family photos stuffed into sheets. Families uprooted in moments, trudging through mud and snow and not sure where they were going. They walked slowly, their eyes blank with fear. The children held on tightly to their parents’ hands. The door opened to a crowded one-room house. Twenty people were now living in a place hardly big enough for two, sharing one bathroom and sleeping huddled on the floor. It was the home of a farmer, and I marveled at his humanity. I saw sadness and generosity in the eyes of this man, who took in fifteen of the tired arrivals, his wife baking flatbread to feed the hungry strangers. I interviewed a scared young mother who didn’t know where her husband was. She didn’t know how she would feed her children or where they would go next. She said she hoped to go home soon. But I knew better. I had seen her so many times before in so many places. I had just come from her village and I had seen what the soldiers were doing there. Maybe that had been her house burning. The true extent of what she had just endured might take years to absorb. She might no longer have a home to go back to. I had also seen her husband many times. He was no longer the farmer who got up before sunrise to work the fields to feed her and her children. Now he hid in the hills with the other men and used his rifle to take aim at his enemy. She might never see him again. I was touched by this mother, who thought to grab her son’s teddy bear as they ran from their home. But I knew it wouldn’t be enough to comfort the boy or make him ever forget what happened. He would grow up hating, and yearning to return home with vengeance in his heart. It was unbearable, this misery and cruelty and terror I
saw. For only now could I see it. Only now, while watching it on TV thousands of miles away. I was safe in my home and I felt their helplessness. I knew what it was like to be small and scared.