TV newsman Grant Hermes' big career jump to WDIV starts with a 1,000-mile drive to Detroit that he and fiance Becca Slaughter never will forget.
They relocated from Oklahoma City this month -- a scary, weird time to cross the heartland, eat road food and stay in an unfamiliar room in Fort Wayne, Ind.
Grant Hermes and Becca Slaughter
(Photo: Facebook)
"As we're driving, the numbers of the infected and dead from coronavirus were rising," Hermes writes at his new station's website. "The roads were eerily clear."
The trip played out as a strange, dueling set of oddities.
On one side were crowded, gas stations filled with people whose lives seemed unchanged by the virus. On the other was the endless scene of empty school, restaurant and church parking lots that rolled by outside our car windows.
The broadcaster, a Minnesota native, was a reporter and morning anchor at KWTV for nearly five years. Now he leaps from a TV market ranked 43rd nationally to one that's 14th on Nielsen's list of designated market areas by viewership size. WDIV is his third station since earning a journalism degree in 2014 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Slaughter, 27, was a news producer for five years at the same CBS affiliate in Oklahoma City. She's a 2014 journalism graduate from the University of Oklahoma. The couple became engaged in December.
"Each truck stop experience was worryingly similar," writes WDIV's new reporter.
(Photo: LinkedIn)
Below are glimpses of their two-day relocation adventure in a season of plague. They rolled northeast in a three-vehicle caravan with two pets and Slaughter's parents, "who lent us their pickup truck and help with the move even though they too are worried about driving into one of the country’s coronavirus hotspots."
The anxiety of finally moving after weeks of preparing had given way to the anxiety of simply driving into common places with other people. ... Each truck stop experience was worryingly similar: Paper signs, sometimes handwritten, urging customers to wait until there were fewer than 10 people in a store and to mind the taped X's or lines marking six-foot spaces. Most customers didn't listen.
While many stayed behind their taped boundaries, I could count on one hand the number of people we saw wearing masks, despite the CDC recommendation just a day before. Almost no one was wearing gloves, including employees handling money. ...
As we drove into Detroit, the city was nothing like what we had seen just a few months prior. Becca and I had flown up for my interview and stayed the weekend to explore a new city. It was vibrant and bustling. We would tell our friends there was a magnetic energy that was hard to deny when many gave us cockeyed looks at the mention of Detroit.
But when we made it to our downtown apartment, we found the city had changed. The energy was still there but it was an undercurrent, not a live wire. The streets and parks were empty. None of the lights in the restaurants, bars and shops we had been so eager to become customers of were lit. ...
Still, we were grateful. We were healthy. Our loved ones were safe. Our biggest problem was finding out the movers would be days later than we expected, which right now is nothing compared to the new normal inside emergency rooms, ICUs and obituary pages.
