The story behind many stories to come

I have shared this story in conversation and via email many times because it’s the story of one of those unlikely life moments that turns out to be very significant, but I want to share it here, too, because it’s the backstory of hopefully many stories to come.

Last July I was standing in line in the Rite Aid pharmacy at the bottom of Portland’s Munjoy Hill. I live at the top of the Hill, and it’s a place I frequent often because of its convenience, but that has a reputation for being a little bit seedy (part of why I’ve grown to find it endearing—many stories within those four walls!) I was in line behind an attractive woman with long strawberry blond hair and freckles who was having an involved conversation on her cell phone. I’ll admit, I’m a terrible eavesdropper, but it’s kind of part of the job description. And this blond stranger in front of me happened to be talking about multimedia—the other key part of my job description—so I was listening extra closely. She apparently had these big multimedia projects unfolding with a couple of her longtime clients, and I ascertained that one of them was a college. Being in Maine, I assumed she was talking about one of the local schools—USM, SMCC, UNE—or perhaps one of the NESCAC schools: Bowdoin, Bates, or Colby. I was interested, of course, but skeptical: lots of people do “multimedia,” and multimedia can mean a lot of different things. I heard her tell the person on the other end of the phone, “I can’t do these projects myself, I know I need a collaborator, but where do I find one?” Somewhere in the conversation I also gathered that she was about to catch a plane somewhere—not the best moment for an introduction.

I can’t remember the exact order of events, whether she got her prescription and I followed her, or if I got mine first and waited, but the key thing is that as this blond stranger turned to leave the pharmacy, I followed her. I tapped her on the shoulder tentatively, and said, “Um, I do multimedia,” and handed her a homemade business card that I had miraculously tucked away in an Altoids container in my purse. Flustered, she dug one of her own out of her purse, thanked me, and we parted ways. After discovering from her card that her name was Bridget Besaw, and that she specialized in “environmental photography” and “conservation publishing,” I put her card in my wallet and didn’t expect anything to come of it. Didn’t look at her website. I almost forgot about it.

A couple of weeks later, I got an email from Bridget saying she’d found my card in the bottom of her purse. She asked if I could send along some links to work I’d done and explain my role in the projects. She wrote, “Thanks for taking the chance to pass on your card! Maybe our chance meeting was meant to be!” I was hours away from leaving to meet my family for a week in Franconia, New Hampshire, and decided that I had to respond right then—I was in no place career-wise to pass up exploring any and all leads, even if only mildly promising (I mean, we met in Rite Aid)—and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to muster up the focus once lulled into vacation-family mode in Franconia. So I parked myself at my desk and wrote Bridget a small novella about my work to date: my experience at Salt, the LiveWork Portland series, the NOAA Fisheries project etc. I also mentioned offhandedly that I had been an Environmental Studies minor at Middlebury; I thought the unlikely chance that something would come of my Rite Aid meeting of an environmental photographer could only be improved by sharing my small enviro creds.

I don’t specialize in short emails: by the time I finished writing, the email was probably a screen-and-a-half’s worth. I sent it off into the ether, relieved to have wrapped up the last pre-vacation work-related obligation. Just as I was loading the last bags into my car (I’m also not a light packer), a response from Bridget popped into my inbox. It started, “Willa, wow. We certainly have too many dots connected to not continue talking. In the short term I can almost certainly feel confident about bringing you in on a project for Middlebury that is unfolding for October. It would be their first steps into transitioning their print view book to web multimedia pieces.” So the college that she was talking about in front of me in line was my alma mater—bizarre and unlikely coincidence number one.

As Bridget and I continued to correspond via email and over Skype—our most viable phone option since it turns out that the day we met Bridget’s flight was back to Pucón, Chile, where she lives—our similarities continued to reveal themselves. For example, my novella didn’t scare Bridget off at all; in fact, her long emails rival mine, and I think it’s an arena in which she might actually have me beat. We are both Libras: my birthday is September 25th, hers is the 28th. We are happiest eating salad and avocados and good cheese (and sometimes burgers), and thus the nickname “the Salad Sisters,” which is how we’re often addressed by our employers at Middlebury. We are both particular about where we sit in restaurants, how we order, and prefer the music not be too loud. We like to color code: calendars, production schedules, email inboxes. We dream big, and are constantly bouncing ideas off each other. The list continues, and when you’re spending 12 days straight together in the field in an intense collaborative situation as we did for the Middlebury project, these little things are big. Our trial-by-fire experience in the field together for the first time was either going to make or break our collaboration and our budding friendship. It made it.

After nearly two weeks in the field together in Middlebury, Bridget returned to Chile, and I returned to Maine, where I spent a month editing the five multimedia pieces, so highly and lovingly produced that we began to think of them as mini films. In December, I flew down to Pucón to work together on the final stages of production. And now, six months after our chance meeting meeting in Rite Aid, our mini films for Middlebury College are finished, presented to the board and trustees last week; so far, they have been met with rave reviews. We are in the midst of launching a production company together, Fieldwork Pictures, and onto dreaming and scheming about our next big projects. In a few short weeks, I fly back to Chile, where we’ll be researching the environmental and cultural consequences of Chile’s growing salmon farming industry, and putting together a short documentary to celebrate our launch, a cornerstone for the exciting work that lies ahead for Fieldwork Pictures.