Squirrel was the nickname of a taxi driver we had hired to drive us to the most weird (or common) places to collect data as journalists working in Bilbao.
I never knew his real name. He was a short, thin and resolutive man. He used to have his taxi stationed in a stop near our building waiting for customers when he was not working for us.
I used to go to the stop to look for him when I needed a ride to go in a hurry to work in an ongoing news in some distant place, usually with a photographer who would take the pictures for the report or the interview at takes.
Once we went to make a report about the tuna fishermen of Bermeo. My boss sent me to do it precisely when all the fishermen were in the high seas fishing. Squirrel knew that. He knew almost everything. It was an impossible assignment. And my boss wanted a whole page written by me for that very night. It was his way to test me. I was a rocky then. Just nineteen. Taking my first steps in the job.
We went to Bermeo anyway. Squirrel helped me to talk with the women of the fishermen port (they spoke in Basque and very fast) and I got a good story about their way of life.
That night, I was able to fill my page with a human interest article. Not precisely what my boss had ask for, but something that was worth it. Test passed.
After 28 years working as a journalist for a newspaper, glued to the strict facts and trying to be precise and truthful, I kind of burned my writing style. It’s very difficult for me to compose something creative. And it’s a shame, because I once upon a time had some talent, and lots of ideas for short stories and poetry. Even I published a poem with some success. But I was young and enthusiastic then, and didn’t have experienced the harsh life of a street reporter, with a daily deadline to deliver my news and the need to tell real stories as accurate as possible, with as few words as possible. No adjectives. No fancy descriptions. Just so: what, who, when, where, why. Everything else, had no space in my work.
Back in the 90s I went to Bosnia Herzegovina as a reporter during the Balkans war. I contacted with a local journalist hoping to obtain some good sources and information about what was going on in Mostar, taking advantage of my knowledge of the language. So I left the group of foreign correspondents who were working in the area with a translator, based in Medjugorje, where the Spanish troops had their headquarters.
