Reporters love breaking a story. Such thrills are the pounding heart of the profession.
Every once in a while, you get a hold of one that just rivets the public’s attention. Somebody comes to grief or glory in some fashion and that is all anybody can talk about for days afterward.
For a newshound, there is nothing in the world more satisfying than having people hash over your work. It is what you do. You live to inform people and it is a validation of sorts if people can’t stop talking about information you gave them.
Then you get out in the community, and if it’s a small community like this one, say, it is not hard to find the people you write about living their lives. Something like seeing the parents of the teenager whose fatal car crash was your big story in line at the grocery store will bring it home for you.
All of the stories we tell, every single one of them, involves real, flesh and blood people who will continue dealing with their real, flesh and blood circumstances long after everybody else has moved on.
By now you have likely heard of the late Devon Staples, the formerly 22-year-old Calais man who died July 4 performing the monumentally stupid feat of putting a fireworks mortar on top of his head.
Sad to say, the act that ended his life made him a national punch line, and an instant frontrunner for a Darwin award; a pseudo-honor given out posthumously to those who remove themselves from the human gene pool in ingeniously imaginative ways.
It is our understanding the late Staples was a popular, gregarious man; one who liked to ham it up and entertain his friends. It certainly does not sound like he went to that party expecting to kill himself.
It is not an accident, we think, that almost every news report we have seen mentions alcohol was involved, but even so, if every intoxicated young man died in the act of doing something stupid, there would hardly be 7 billion humans on the planet now.
In light of this tragedy, we understand the calls to reconsider the legalization of fireworks. We caution against rushing to amend state law on the strength of a bad weekend, but it does raise the question about what role, if any, regulations should play.
On some point along the fireworks continuum, it seems sensible to consider where some line of demarcation should be drawn dividing the relatively safe dangers any sensible jamoke can handle from the really serious dangers that should be left to trained, certified jamokes.
None of this helps Devon Staples of course, and nothing will fill the hole he leaves in the hearts of those who loved him. We expect Staples will win a Darwin award for his final act if only because we shudder to think of what someone would have to do to supercede him.
Staples’ fatal foolishness makes an interesting story, we agree. It’s a riveting you-are-never-going-to-believe this tale, but Devon Staples was not a punch line. He was a real person. They always are.
