You’re telling me the Skagit bridge fell into the river?
I was minding my business one May late afternoon in 2013, driving the last leg of my commute from Seattle, when I got a call from an editor at Times that I will never forget.
“The Skagit River bridge between Mount Vernon and Burlington has fallen into the river,” she told me.
I rushed to the scene — the first member of the Seattle media to arrive there — filed information for a story and took photos with my iphone that would appear in newspapers around the world, including the New York Times and Washington Post.
Below is a link to a Seattle Times story of my first-hand account of that day. It was a miracle there were no fatalities.
Tales from the road: Skagit County’s super commuter
Yes, I’m crazy for commuting to Seattle from the farming community of Conway just south of Mount Vernon for about 30 years. One summer day in 2018 I was doing the math. I figured I had driven and bused 779,520 miles between Tulip Country and the Emerald City. That’s the equivalent of a round-trip to the moon and more than a one-way trip back. I didn’t mind my commute, but I must say I didn’t love it to the moon and back.
I’ve had some interesting experiences along the way. I thought “I wonder if people might be interested in reading about this?” I put together a draft of the story and pitched it to Metro editor Richard Wagoner. He liked it. He said it’d probably run on the Northwest cover (the local news section that used to be a separate section seven days a week behind the “A” section.) Then it took on a life of its own. News artist Gabriel Campanario, aka “The Seattle Sketcher,” got involved and did several illustrations. Ace desk editor Laura Gordon read the story, liked it, and starting editing and writing headlines. The story went from a slow news day, second-section placement to the centerpiece on a Sunday front page in October of that year. Here’s a link to that story:
Searching for Bob Rule:
I just didn’t want to give up
Bob Rule was my first professional sports hero growing up in the Skagit Valley. I lived and died with the Seattle SuperSonics – mostly died, because they were awful in those early years, beginning in 1967. He was traded away in 1971, and was never heard from again – by anyone. All of those “Where Are They Now” stories about once-prominent athletes in the Seattle newspapers, but nary a word about Rule. So I set out to find him, but ran out of time when in September 2019 his sister told me he had passed away.
Lost train of thought, didn’t
see that one coming
We were sitting in our family room one September evening in 2016 when I heard a loud metal-on-metal scraping noise. Soon, emergency vehicles were racing to a railroad crossing about 5 miles away from our home in Conway. My story about a Mount Vernon boy who was hit by an Amtrak train traveling 79 miles per hour – and he survived. The link to the story in The Seattle Times is below:
Disaster at his doorstep:
Eyewitness to the Oso slide
Persistence paid off in my pursuit of this guy. Couldn’t figure out why he was never interviewed. But this guy wasn’t talking to anybody. I would find later there was good reason. About a year after the deadly 2014 Oso slide, the story would take an even more tragic turn. Metro editor Beth Kaiman called me on a Sunday afternoon to inform me that Reed was wanted in the murder of his two neighbors, who he had a long-running border dispute with. And to think Times photographer Marcus Yam (now with the LA Times) and I spent more than an hour in his living room for the 2014 story.
https://special.seattletimes.com/o/html/localnews/2023709258_mudslideedge1xml.html
The Inside Scoop 