This was, as Amy describes it, the easiest assignment we’d ever been given.
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Hold on to that sentence the way you hold on to a receipt for something you’re pretty sure you’ll have to return.
It started somewhere around Carolina Beach, which has apparently decided to renovate every road on Pleasure Island simultaneously.
Wynd Horse Has Opinions
Wynd Horse’s GPS did what any reasonable navigation system does when the world stops matching its internal map: It panicked quietly and started making decisions I can only describe as creative.
“Recalculating,” it said, with the tone of someone who had given up but was contractually obligated to report its status.
“That’s not comforting,” Amy said. “That’s the voice of a system in denial.”
Instead of delivering us to the quiet residential parking near the filming set for this episode of the R. J. Decker television series, Wynd Horse deposited us in a retail district on the edge of the Carolina Beach Boardwalk.
Traffic was thick enough to make one what to chew the rug.
Amy made the executive decision to park and walk rather than take our chances in traffic.
This was the same stretch of Boardwalk where we’d previously suffered the humiliation of the teenager and the ice-cream sprinkles. Returning to the scene of an old embarrassment on the way to a brand-new one felt less like bad luck and more like the universe reusing a set.
The Man with the Lighting Rig
Then hope appeared. Real, tangible hope, wearing a backpack.
A young man emerged ahead of us, pushing a sophisticated-looking lighting rig mounted on a rolling tripod. An equipment bag hung from his shoulder. He moved with the brisk, purposeful walk of someone who knew exactly where to find a film set.
“Eureka!” I said.
“Don’t say Eureka,” Amy replied. “You haven’t discovered anything. You’ve found a man pushing a lighting rig.”
“A man with a lighting rig who clearly works in production.”
“Fine. Follow the man. But I want it noted in the log that I have reservations.”
For a while, following the lighting rig felt like genuine detective work: the quiet, purposeful trailing of a suspect in a movie, except that in movies, the trail usually leads to what you’re looking for.
Ours led steadily away from the residential neighborhood where filming was supposed to be happening.
“He probably knows a shortcut,” I said.
“A shortcut to nowhere, like that swamp road we took after a local told us not to.”
“Amy, production people know all the back routes. This is probably faster.”
Amy didn’t respond, which, in Amy terms, is the verbal equivalent of crossing her arms and pouting.
The man led us behind shuttered beach shops and down a service alley that smelled faintly of low tide and bad oysters.
I want to be clear that at no point did I consider this a bad sign.
“This is clearly a route the production assistants use to avoid congestion,” I said. “Very savvy.”
“Or he’s cutting through here to buy a sandwich.”
“Production people don’t stop for sandwiches mid-shot, Amy. There’s a whole department for that. Craft services. I’ve read about it.”
The alley gave way to a gravel lot designed, apparently, for turning an ankle. The cart’s rollers began making a sound like a shopping cart with a personal grudge.
“He’s slowing down,” I said. “We must be really close now.”
“Or gravel is hard to push a cart through.”
“Both things can be true at the same time, Amy. That’s a very good sign, structurally.”
Wynd Horse’s GPS did what any reasonable navigation system does when the world stops matching its internal map: It panicked quietly and started making decisions I can only describe as creative.
“Recalculating,” it said, with the tone of someone who had given up but was contractually obligated to report its status.
“That’s not comforting,” Amy said. “That’s the voice of a system in denial.”
Instead of delivering us to the quiet residential parking near the filming set for this episode of the R. J. Decker television series, Wynd Horse deposited us in a retail district on the edge of the Carolina Beach Boardwalk.
Traffic was thick enough to make one what to chew the rug.
Amy made the executive decision to park and walk rather than take our chances in traffic.
This was the same stretch of Boardwalk where we’d previously suffered the humiliation of the teenager and the ice-cream sprinkles. Returning to the scene of an old embarrassment on the way to a brand-new one felt less like bad luck and more like the universe reusing a set.
The Man with the Lighting Rig
Then hope appeared. Real, tangible hope, wearing a backpack.
A young man emerged ahead of us, pushing a sophisticated-looking lighting rig mounted on a rolling tripod. An equipment bag hung from his shoulder. He moved with the brisk, purposeful walk of someone who knew exactly where to find a film set.
“Eureka!” I said.
“Don’t say Eureka,” Amy replied. “You haven’t discovered anything. You’ve found a man pushing a lighting rig.”
“A man with a lighting rig who clearly works in production.”
“Fine. Follow the man. But I want it noted in the log that I have reservations.”
For a while, following the lighting rig felt like genuine detective work: the quiet, purposeful trailing of a suspect in a movie, except that in movies, the trail usually leads to what you’re looking for.
Ours led steadily away from the residential neighborhood where filming was supposed to be happening.
“He probably knows a shortcut,” I said.
“A shortcut to nowhere, like that swamp road we took after a local told us not to.”
“Amy, production people know all the back routes. This is probably faster.”
Amy didn’t respond, which, in Amy terms, is the verbal equivalent of crossing her arms and pouting.
The man led us behind shuttered beach shops and down a service alley that smelled faintly of low tide and bad oysters.
I want to be clear that at no point did I consider this a bad sign.
“This is clearly a route the production assistants use to avoid congestion,” I said. “Very savvy.”
“Or he’s cutting through here to buy a sandwich.”
“Production people don’t stop for sandwiches mid-shot, Amy. There’s a whole department for that. Craft services. I’ve read about it.”
The alley gave way to a gravel lot designed, apparently, for turning an ankle. The cart’s rollers began making a sound like a shopping cart with a personal grudge.
“He’s slowing down,” I said. “We must be really close now.”
“Or gravel is hard to push a cart through.”
“Both things can be true at the same time, Amy. That’s a very good sign, structurally.”
Nothing tracks
“We’re now four blocks past the last residential structure,” she said. “There’s a bait shop to our left. It’s closed. It’s been closed, I would guess, since before you were born.”
“Bait shops are exactly the kind of unglamorous local color a location scout loves. This tracks.”
“Nothing tracks. You’re tracking someone going somewhere but you don't know where.”
“I am tracking a man with a lighting rig, Amy. That’s the single most trackable thing a person can track.”
Fifteen minutes later, the man arrived at an equipment truck parked so far from both the filming location and the original traffic jam that it might as well have been in another county.
He loaded the lighting rig into the truck, latched the door, and walked away in a direction that had nothing to do with us.
“He wasn’t going to set,” Amy said. “He was leaving set. We followed a man in the exact opposite direction of the thing we were trying to find for fifteen minutes, with total confidence.”
“In my defense—”
“There is no defense. There is only geography, and you have failed it.”
The Great Debate
“There’s only one thing to do,” I said. “We backtrack to Wynd Horse and drive around the construction. We still have hours of filming left today.”
“Or,” Amy said, “we accept that this outing has been cursed since that lame excuse for a navigation system decided it knew better than the actual roads. I say we cut our losses and head back to Coastal Tacos.”
“That’s not the spirit of The Circular Journey.”
“The spirit of The Circular Journey,” Amy replied, “is that we set out for one destination and end up somewhere else entirely. I’m suggesting we lean into that theme a little early today.”
We compromised, in the loosest possible sense of the word, by asking strangers for directions.
This turned out to be its own special category of disaster.
Everybody Is an Expert
“Oh, they wrapped that weeks ago,” one confident stranger told us. “You can watch it already. It’s on NBC. No, wait—CBS. One of those.”
RJ Decker is an ABC production. Nothing about his information was correct, yet he delivered it with the certainty of a man reading from a teleprompter.
Someone else insisted the production was filming downtown, near the courthouse.
“It’s a crime drama, you know. The police are always going to the courthouse to see the judge.”
He was wrong, too, but I admired his confidence.
The Verdict
By the time we made it back to Wynd Horse, defeated, sunburned, and no closer to South Churchill Drive than we’d been an hour earlier, I felt compelled to put the disaster into words.
“Of all the messes, in all the set locations, in all the film productions we’ve covered,” I said, “this is the worst one we’ve gotten ourselves into.”
Amy didn’t pause a beat.
“You have a very short memory,” she said. “This doesn’t come close to the humiliation of you thinking that teenager on the boardwalk was a star in a Disney movie. He thought you were a cop.”
She wasn’t wrong.
She’s very rarely wrong, which is, as I’ve mentioned before, precisely the problem with Amy.
I’m reminding myself that there’s always tomorrow. So until next time, my friend—assuming Wynd Horse and I are still speaking—see you on set.
“We’re now four blocks past the last residential structure,” she said. “There’s a bait shop to our left. It’s closed. It’s been closed, I would guess, since before you were born.”
“Bait shops are exactly the kind of unglamorous local color a location scout loves. This tracks.”
“Nothing tracks. You’re tracking someone going somewhere but you don't know where.”
“I am tracking a man with a lighting rig, Amy. That’s the single most trackable thing a person can track.”
Fifteen minutes later, the man arrived at an equipment truck parked so far from both the filming location and the original traffic jam that it might as well have been in another county.
He loaded the lighting rig into the truck, latched the door, and walked away in a direction that had nothing to do with us.
“He wasn’t going to set,” Amy said. “He was leaving set. We followed a man in the exact opposite direction of the thing we were trying to find for fifteen minutes, with total confidence.”
“In my defense—”
“There is no defense. There is only geography, and you have failed it.”
The Great Debate
“There’s only one thing to do,” I said. “We backtrack to Wynd Horse and drive around the construction. We still have hours of filming left today.”
“Or,” Amy said, “we accept that this outing has been cursed since that lame excuse for a navigation system decided it knew better than the actual roads. I say we cut our losses and head back to Coastal Tacos.”
“That’s not the spirit of The Circular Journey.”
“The spirit of The Circular Journey,” Amy replied, “is that we set out for one destination and end up somewhere else entirely. I’m suggesting we lean into that theme a little early today.”
We compromised, in the loosest possible sense of the word, by asking strangers for directions.
This turned out to be its own special category of disaster.
Everybody Is an Expert
“Oh, they wrapped that weeks ago,” one confident stranger told us. “You can watch it already. It’s on NBC. No, wait—CBS. One of those.”
RJ Decker is an ABC production. Nothing about his information was correct, yet he delivered it with the certainty of a man reading from a teleprompter.
Someone else insisted the production was filming downtown, near the courthouse.
“It’s a crime drama, you know. The police are always going to the courthouse to see the judge.”
He was wrong, too, but I admired his confidence.
The Verdict
By the time we made it back to Wynd Horse, defeated, sunburned, and no closer to South Churchill Drive than we’d been an hour earlier, I felt compelled to put the disaster into words.
“Of all the messes, in all the set locations, in all the film productions we’ve covered,” I said, “this is the worst one we’ve gotten ourselves into.”
Amy didn’t pause a beat.
“You have a very short memory,” she said. “This doesn’t come close to the humiliation of you thinking that teenager on the boardwalk was a star in a Disney movie. He thought you were a cop.”
She wasn’t wrong.
She’s very rarely wrong, which is, as I’ve mentioned before, precisely the problem with Amy.
I’m reminding myself that there’s always tomorrow. So until next time, my friend—assuming Wynd Horse and I are still speaking—see you on set.
