RESCUE
But it wasn’t despite the world, because this side of the story has guardian angels in it too. I wrote to Dom and told him what I’d done, and how it had worked. He laughed and called it my “dental floss camera bondage solution”, and I made a life-long friend. What Dom didn’t know about post-production hardware and software and media management wasn’t worth knowing, and he was unstinting in his advice and time.

I was thrilled to have a mentor in case things should go wrong, but I didn’t expect too many problems. I had a working set of footage, my computer was up and running, and I was getting the hang of Final Cut Pro. What else could go wrong?

If only I had known…Before the editing was over, I would send Dom over 650 emails. And he would answer every single one.

STARTING OVER

But first, it was time to move. I love my parents and enjoyed every moment I could steal with them, but at the age of 35 I had no earthly business living under their roof for more than a week or two. And besides, that area of the Chesapeake, though quiet and beautiful, was so remote that running into someone my age was about as likely as stubbing my toe on a gold nugget while jogging in Central Park. I needed to counter my workaholic nature, not nurture it. So, sadly, I packed all of my computer gear into my minivan, hung my mountain bike off the back and my hang glider on the roof, and headed for California.

I reached Los Angeles four days later, made a right turn, and eventually drove through Oxnard, about an hour north of the city. It was right on the ocean, had access to the mountains, and was home to enough migrant workers that the rents were a third lower than nearby chic Santa Barbara. I found an apartment small enough that I could vacuum every nook and cranny without ever having to move the plug, set up my editing system in a corner, sat on an plastic cooler, and got back to work.

HUBRIS
I think that if I had known the true extent of the work in front of me I would have kept driving north to Alaska and probably become a forest ranger. My one-hour documentary had gradually grown to two hours, then three, and finally, four. The footage was there, the stories were tight and seemed compelling.

Unfortunately, like all poorly-planned projects that are allowed to grow organically, my media management was non-existent. Whenever I got bored waiting for a project to open on the computer, I’d start a new one. Dom was expansive on this subject. Four months into it he was so worried that he suggested I wipe out all the footage in my computer, organize my clips properly, and recapture them again. That’s when I decided he was a pessimist, and stopped listening.

Shortly thereafter I tried to open one of my five projects, and couldn’t. I’d used the media manager to trim my clips – a definite no-no in Dom’s book – and it had trashed a month’s work. I started listening to him again.

“Don’t nest your sequences,” he told me. “Rebuild them each time from scratch”. You’re kidding, I thought, until one day Final Cut Pro informed me, in that metallic female voice, that 6,439 clips were missing reel numbers. After that I listened to everything Dom said, on any subject, from California car emissions inspections to the evil habits of Minnesota ladybugs.

A HOUSE OF CARDS
Then things really started to break down. My computer was freezing up every twenty minutes. Clips were disappearing. Files took forever to open up. I had created a seven-layer house of cards, and I had another dozen layers to go.

While Dom watched his own hair get grayer and held my hand over the phone lines, I ran diagnostics, bought external drives, partitioned my internal drives, reinstalled FCP and my operating system. I moved and managed and massaged and manipulated my media into some semblance of order. By the end of it, I knew that if I got hit by a truck crossing the street to buy strawberries then someone else could actually sit down at my desk and finish the project. It wouldn’t be easy, but they could figure it out. Dom offered to ship me strawberries. He knew he was next in line if I got wiped out of the picture, and the very idea seemed to scare him silly.

...WITH A CROOKED DECK

Then, one afternoon, I started hearing strange sounds coming out of my G4. The computer froze.

“Open it up,” Dom said over the phone. I did.

“Please tell me that none of your drives say, “IBM, Made in Hungary”.They did. All of them. Apparently a bad batch, bad enough to cause a class-action lawsuit against IBM.

By now Dom’s hair was gone and mine was going gray. I took up figure skating, mostly so that I could spend hour or two each day hurling myself into the air time and again in graceless spins and toe-loops and attempted axles. They named a move after me – the “Karin Heap”. It felt good to hit the ice, to hammer out some of the frustration that had built up over so many months. At least those were bruises other people could see.