"This I Believe" Essay: Victor Merina

A Journalist's Dilemma

GREENCASTLE, INDIANA - I have waded through the flooded streets of a hurricane-stricken town and watched how Houma Indians fought the rising water and scraped the clinging swamp grass that spilled from a Louisiana bayou.

I have slogged through six inches of mud that coated the floor and picked up the splintered furniture littering the ravaged house of a Biloxi Chitimacha tribal member whose home on the Isle de Jean Charles was at the center of a storm called Rita and at the mercy of another called Gustav.

And I held the hand of a Native mother as she described how her 16-year-old son paddled his boat through the swollen waters of yet another hurricane named Ike searching for rice to eat and stepping from his boat to a storm-soaked porch - only to plunge through the weakened slats of the wooden floor and drown in the silt-filled waters below.

I have spoken to tribal leaders as I stood in a Colorado football stadium in the midst of swirling flags and cheering voices, taking notes in the late summer night when a man named Obama won his party's presidential nomination. And I have stood in the bitter cold of a January day as Barack Obama was inaugurated and Northern Arapaho drummers and Eastern Shoshone dancers joined the parade marching along Pennsylvania Avenue.

I have walked the land of the Wampanoag who greeted the Pilgrims when they built on a foreign shore and who helped the newcomers as they struggled to survive in a place called Plymouth. And I have breathed in the air of the Black Hills of South Dakota, running my fingertips along the mammoth stone figure of a war chief named Crazy Horse who resisted the newcomers pouring into the territory of his people as they struggled to exist.

In all this, I have listened to Native voices so I could tell their stories, with my own words. And I have worked with Native writers as they have tapped their own voices, to tell their own stories, using their own words.

As a traveler among the indigenous people, I believe in their distinctive voices. As an itinerant journalist in Indian Country, I believe in mining the truths in their stories.

But for how much longer I can do that, I do not know.

I'm in an industry that has been shaken and stirred like Bond. I'm in a news business whose people have been bought out and wrought out. And, with the indulgence of the women in my profession, it has left me feeling like one of the Lost Boys of Journalism, one of the Lost Boys of the So Damned.

As I seek to tell the reality of Native life, I find myself facing the ugly reality of my own personal life. As a journalist, I am not broken - but as an individual, I am broke.

I have $11 in my wallet. I have $14 in my bank account. I have an IRS lien and a State Franchise Tax Board levy. I have a cell phone account that's on life support and a supported life that's awash in red. The Web site for whom I write has seen its funding dwindle. The institute for which I toil has lost its financial anchor. With no immediate paycheck in sight, I am at a loss even as I befriend a machine called Coinstar as my banker, turning my loose coins into bills and that petty cash into unexpected treasure.

In this down economy, my situation is worse than some and better than many. Any complaint seems painfully hollow. So I lament with reluctance even as I strive for solvency not prosperity.

I have a wife who is the family breadwinner. Who houses and clothes and feeds us. And she wraps those payments in genuine love even as her bank account is drained by her spouse's nomadic career chasing elusive stories and her frustrations mount with each debt of his writer's poverty-stricken life.

Our children are grown. The children are willing to help. But the children have lives of their own, and there are few things more shameful than asking one of your children to pay one of your bills, to settle one of your accounts. Nor is there humiliation quite like asking a relative or a friend to tide you over.

So what do I do, even as I ponder the stories I would like to write and underscore the importance of what I cover?

I agonize. I rationalize. I fight against being demoralized. I find myself weighing my values. I find myself measuring my life, ruing my old age and dissecting my future until I ask myself the once unthinkable question: Is it time to leave the journalism life?

If I depart, will I feel as I did when I suddenly jettisoned the newspapers I use to buy each morning at the 7-11 store near my home? The Los Angeles Times. The New York Times. USA Today. The South Bay Daily Breeze. I no longer could take them home, and it pained me not to support my own profession, to abandon the hard print of my fellow writers. But when I totaled what I was spending each day, it heartened me to think I now had gas money. I could now buy mass transit vouchers. I now had something in my pocket.

The convenience store clerk, however, missed one of his most faithful customers and one day he asked me why I stopped buying the newspapers.

I need the money, I simply told him. He looked disbelieving, then laughed and shook his head.

"Sure thing," he said. "You'll be back."

But I have come to realize there is no sure thing. And I may not be back. Even as a writer who writes. Even as a believer who is driven by the stories he finds. Who is passionate about the communities he covers. Even as a journalist who is enriched by the voices he hears. And who certainly would miss the truths he shares.