Home Sweet Homeland

By Melinda Welsh, Sacramento News & Review. Posted July 2, 2004.

At age 19, Dale Maharidge took a month-long solo backpacking trip across Canyonlands desert in Utah and realized with a jolt that he was meant to become a writer. He forthwith moved to the town he considered most overflowing with untold stories: Sacramento, California. After living for three months out of his Datsun pickup, he got hired, in 1981, as a low-level cop reporter at The Sacramento Bee.

It was there, on assignment to cover breaking news – a trailer fire! – that Maharidge first was paired up with the photographer fated to be his professional collaborator for the next three decades. Michael Williamson, who didn't own a camera until age 18, somehow had managed to land a job in the newspaper's darkroom. The two rookie journalists met, in fact, while running side by side down the halls of the newspaper plant on their way to cover that first story together.

They haven't stopped running since.

For almost 10 years, the pair worked the paper's "poverty beat," focusing their words and photographs mainly on the stories of the dispossessed who lived along the river and hung out at local rail yards. (The term "homeless" was not yet in the vernacular; the pair was tracking the early signs of this new aspect of modern American life.) During the same period of time, they authored three books. One of them – And Their Children After Them – won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1990. Another – Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass – helped inspire Bruce Springsteen's album The Ghost of Tom Joad. The pair left Sacramento in 1991, but since then have proceeded basically to do the same work nationally that they had begun locally.

And this month, there's more.

As the nation prepares to celebrate Independence Day 2004 – in its current state of distress over issues of war, terrorism and the economy – Maharidge and Williamson have a brand-new work, Homeland, in bookstores. It chronicles post-9/11 America. Like their other projects together, Homeland attempts to chart – through feet-on-the-streets journalism – the trends in a restless America, especially in aspects relating to poverty, race and working-class people.

But Homeland is different; it comes with portent. In fact, thousands of miles and hundreds of interviews later, Maharidge believes he saw signs of something genuinely new and disturbingly un-American erupting in the homeland after the terrorist attacks of 2001.

"What I was seeing was a new nationalism," Maharidge said point-blank. "The flags that sprouted after 9/11 cover a wound that's been festering for decades."

The Fourth of July on the American River, Sacramento, California.

Three weeks before America changed forever, Maharidge moved from the West Coast to Manhattan. In the early hours of September 11, 2001, the soon-to-be journalism professor at Columbia University stayed up until 4 a.m. talking on the phone to Williamson – who had become a staff photographer at The Washington Post – about life, loves and upcoming projects. The pair had been known in their Sacramento days for working full throttle into the early hours of the morning, exulting in their self-dubbed discipline of "NS" (no sleep!), and apparently they'd taken their all-nighter tendencies with them to the other coast.

Finally, they hung up. A few hours later, Maharidge was startled awake by another phone call from Williamson. Told about the planes and the World Trade Center, the writer raced to the roof. "I saw the second tower crash from my rooftop," said Maharidge. "I knew that a genie had been uncorked."

From his home in Washington, D.C., Williamson knew he needed to get to ground zero. Having won a second Pulitzer in 2000 for his work in Kosovo, he was well aware by then that a photographer's first job was simple: Get there, be there and stay there. Despite the fact that no members of the media, no politicians and not even the pope probably could have gotten through the seven checkpoints set up to stop people from crossing the Manhattan Bridge in the days following the terrorist attacks, Williamson managed. After speeding to New York, the photographer reached the forbidden bridge, placed his thumb over the word "press" on his laminated Senate ID badge and, somehow, convinced officials at each station to let him pass. "I have to get to the bureau," he told them urgently. Checkpoint by checkpoint, they believed him. When Williamson finally made it to the site of the demolished towers, he stayed there shooting pictures for 27 hours straight.

Melinda Welsh is a writer, teacher and editor-at-large for the Sacramento News & Review.

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