Freelance journalists will tell you that they are always on the lookout for a good story. But sometimes the best stories throw themselves at your feet. That was the case with this story, which includes space-age technology, territorial conflict, and old-fashioned romance.
How a downed internet balloon produced an unlikely love story
I stumbled across it in January 2020 while visiting a dude ranch in Uruguay and started pitching it the same month. By mid February, I had racked up half a dozen rejections from publications including Outside, Vice, and BBC Travel. An editor at Wired magazine said it wasn’t right for the print publication but suggested I reach out to the online editor. He liked the idea and commissioned it at a generous rate. But by the time I submitted the first draft in March, the pandemic had taken center stage, and the story got lost in the lockdown.
When we returned to the US after sheltering in place for more than two months in Argentina, I attempted to revive the story with Wired, but it was ultimately killed. So I started pitching it again. Over the course of a month, I collected rejections from The Verge, The Atavist, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Vice Motherboard, California Sunday, and Wired UK before finding the perfect home for it at Rest of World, a recently-launched non-profit publication that focuses on the intersection of technology and culture in the non-Western world. The team there was delightful to work with, challenging me to explore the issues deeper and delve into details I hadn’t previously considered.
The story was finally published in mid-October 2019, a full nine months after I stumbled across it while riding horses across the pampas. Whenever I considered walking away from it, it chased me down, tackled me, and demanded my attention. Its unrelenting persistence often frustrated me to the point of sleeplessness and nausea, but delivering this story truly has been a labor of love.