The business

Do you wanna be in the business? (The business)
The ups and downs with the hoes (The business)
Always gettin' fronted on at shows (The business)
People gotta stick their nose (In the business)
-A Tribe Called Quest

How succinctly A Tribe Called Quest describes my line of work. Well, maybe the hoes are a bit of a stretch. And I haven't been fronted on yet. But yes, thank you, I do want to be in "the business." The journalism business, that is.

The first two weeks are easy. Nothing's going on, I cram my page with filler and AP wire stories about the St. Louis Blues and the Missouri Tigers.

I work late (until 8 or 9). But I don't have to come in until 10. Or 11. Or 12. Whatever. I wear jeans to work 3 out of 5 days. I listen to co-workers, mostly women, talk about men and shopping for toys for their children. Then they poke fun at me for being the only guy around. I laugh along with them. Yes, the business is easy, so far.

***

Except now that basketball season starts. I cover 10 high schools to varying degrees. The big high school gets an automatic bid and onto my "SportsTime" page. They play in a large league with eight other big high schools. Four of them are from the metropolis of Springfield. Then there's Joplin (a good two hours, basically the Oklahoma border), Lebanon (pronounced "LEH-banin"), Rolla (RAWL-a), Camdenton, West Plains.

The Springfield media turns its nose up at those other hillbilly teams from the rest of the Ozarks. Which is ironic, because the St. Louis and Kansas City media does the same to the Springfield teams. I only have to cover them when my team plays one of them. Which give me an excuse to go to "Stick It In Your Ear" record store/ head shop every once and a while.

***

The other schools I cover are small. Really small. Like 100-300 students. They're all at least 10 miles from homebase, in small communities nestled in the Ozarks. They don't have football teams, so they like their basketball. And baseball. Fall baseball, in fact, is a Missouri-sanctioned sport.

But how do I get there? Because I still have trouble driving on Ozark highways at night. They're all two lanes back here, save I-44, and the prospect of going 55 on a winding two-lane highway with no light of any kind from Waynesville to, say, Crocker (11 miles away) sort of frightens me.

Who knows what kind of turn is going to come out of nowhere and trip me up? Sometimes there will be four "s" turns in a span of 5 miles. One wrong flick of the steering wheel and I'm colliding with sedimentary rock.

Even the interstate winds much more than normal interstates should. On the way to Rolla there's this community called Devil's Elbow, which is little more than a service station and a shack. Named such because of its place on a particular harrowing turn on the Big Piney River, the engineers who constructed the highway apparently didn't realize that it's a bit more dangerous for automobiles to go 75 miles an hour on the same type of turn.

Huck and Jim might have been able to do it on a raft, but a lumbering semi-truck? Not so much.