One thing I can say about the Data Road Trip is that it’s taking me places I wouldn’t have thought to go on my own. Like Northern Idaho, which I had heard was lovely, but previously had no reason to trek out to.

The story here? Well, according to the numbers we found, Idaho has the lowest abortion rate in the country. Folks here have various opinions about why that might be, but it seems to relate to some combination of geography, politics, and religious beliefs. I asked a former Planned Parenthood organizer whether maybe fewer women in Idaho got pregnant in the first place… she had a good laugh at that one. She thought it was much more likely that women who get pregnant here and can’t keep the baby will sometimes leave the state to terminate the pregnancy. With abortion providers in just two counties in the state, for some people, crossing the state line is the fastest way to get medical attention.

Today, I ‘ve spent most of the day scouting out spots where I can start shooting when the rain subsides and the fog rolls away. I’m just seeing the sun peek out now, and the forecast says things will be clear by 4 pm or so.

Check out a glimpse of the rainy Pacific Northwest on Flickr!

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In the next segment of our trek across America, we explored two of the most prominent communities one thinks about when they think “USA”; New York and Washington D.C.

D.C. leads the nation in new cases of HIV/AIDS, and New York leads with the highest abortion rate. So the question we asked was: how do the religious communities in these places respond to these statistics?

So far, our reporting for the Data Road Trip has mostly consisted of short video productions, but this time around a photojournalist - myself - tagged along. My former experience as a photographer has mostly been shooting photographs for newspapers; looking for that one key shot, then back to the newsroom for the A1 deadline. This time, I was shooting for video; a new experience in the age of digital/web/multimedia journalism.

The first challenged I faced was how to illustrate statistics with pictures, and then make them compatible with video. I shot as a photojournalist, but learned that capturing images that are figurative no longer applies. TV is very literal, and it’s the combination of sound, motion and graphics that give the viewer a complete sense of what the story is about. Is this the death of the documentary photograph?

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This convent in the middle of the Bronx, NY is surrounded by public housing units. 50 nuns live here. Every month (except in July and August) they hold post-abortion healing retreats for women (and men) from all faiths. The NY area has the highest rate of abortion in the nation, and the Bronx is especially high.

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TV screen with a Google map tracking
our coordinates, an iPod and jotting notes
on the TMobile Dash.

Data Road Trip is off to another location - this time the east coast. We’re reporting in DC and NYC. Jeremy Rue, the News21 website czar (and talented photographer) has joined us on this trip.

In DC, Joelle Jaffe will interview religious and community leaders who are combating the high rate of HIV infection among African-Americans.

In NYC, Toni De Aztlan will talk to a post-abortion counselor who has teamed up with a group of Catholic nuns in the Bronx to care for local women who have had abortions.

View photos of our trip.

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After a long stretch on 1-40 from Memphis, Clayton and I left the superhighway to climb up into the mountains of northeastern Tennessee. Hancock County spans several mountain ridges, winding roads climb steeply only to dive down into the next valley just when you thought you’d reached the top. In the widest valley, the Clinch River cuts a gentle blue swath through tobacco and hay fields. It’s known to be one of the cleanest rivers in the country.

Pastor Seven (a handsome wiry man in his 70’s who happened to be the seventh son out of eleven kids) told us with a smile, “you Californians think you’ve got life by the tail, but we’re already livin’ in heaven over here.” He meant this in more ways than one.

We’d come to Hancock County because the Glenmary Research Center reports that it is the county with the highest percentage of Southern Baptists in the entire United States.
To say that religion plays an important role here is a gross understatement. Around every bend is a small country church, each with a clean white steepled cross and simple names like Duck Creek, Snake Hollow, Elm Springs, Yellow Branch. More than 50 in all, in a county of 6700.

After talking to people it’s clear the data is a bit off: few churches actually belong to the Southern Baptist Convention, but rather are more conservative, independent Baptist churches. Most pastors we spoke to were openly critical of the looser ways of the Southern Baptist Convention. But the data did hold up on the ground in other ways: according to Glenmary, Hancock County also has the distinction of being the least religiously diverse county in the nation, and we found that Baptists are definitely the rule. Everyone we met had to think for a minute to come up with someone who didn’t share their faith. Two Jewish people live in the county, and one small Catholic church occupies a former beer store, fourteen folding metal chairs hinting at the size of the congregation.

Faith permeates the community. School days open with prayer. The only radio station is broadcast out of a church. And southern hospitality is still in full swing here – we were invited in for tea, for icecream, for late-night country gospel sessions on the church lawn. But most of all there was genuine concern about our life after death, and the certainty of an eternity in hell if we had not yet accepted Christ as our personal savior – The invitation to join them in their faith was the strongest invitation of all. I promised several people I would read the Book of John and get back to them.

Clayton and I started our day in a tuxedo shop in Benton, a small, sleepy town outside Little Rock, where the couple we’ve been profiling for the story on covenant marriages was shopping for their wedding.

This was no ordinary tux shop – a Bible lay open on a pedestal near the door, and the owner took off his heavy ring and held it toward us. “Do you know what this is?” he asked, suddenly serious. We shook our heads. He asked again for emphasis.

It’s the Seal of the Knight’s Templar, he said, without a smile. We nodded. He then looked at the bride-to-be: “A virtuous woman is more precious than rubies,” he said. “If anyone doesn’t approve, they can find another tuxedo shop.”

Now it was her turn to nod. In this small, one-street town private beliefs are front and center.

By evening we were rolling into Memphis for a different sort of religious experience. First stop: Rendezvous, a 60-year old back-alley rib joint that has become somewhat of a pilgrimage destination for meat lovers from around the world. A somewhat incongruous stream of pasty-legged middle class pilgrims were making a sharp right turn into the small back alley, following their noses to the rib-stacked ovens in the basement. Inside the door, smoke pouring from a tiny kitchen, a sign proudly proclaimed: “Not since Adam has a rib been this famous.”

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