Like most people my age or maybe a little younger, I don’t really need a whole lot of sleep. Generally five or six hours of shuteye, all at once or collected through power naps, is enough to keep me from being a zombie. I can go with less when duty calls; while sailing to Hawaii I remained on deck for three consecutive watch shifts during a squall that would have kept me rolling about in my bunk anyway. I discovered no matter how hard the rain came down or high the seas went up, as long as there was hot chocolate and stale bread available from the galley I could remain on deck. For the better part of two days and one night, I helped my shipmates tame the ship’s wheel, rig lifelines and chase gear as it rolled from port to starboard.

When the squall finally subsided – three days after it began – I spent an entire day confined to my bunk, bruised and soaked, where I listened to the gentle ripple of our bow through the water and was rocked to sleep by the open ocean rollers beneath our keel.

It was perhaps the best nap of my entire life – until last week.

Our editorial staff began preparing for the election more than a month before Nov. 4. Our editors covered the walls of the newsroom with House of Representative and State Senate District maps, the names of various candidates and their affiliated parties scrawled across the top. Reporters made spreadsheets and printed out massive lists of the different local wards and voting districts, called candidates for local races, made friendly with town clerks and shared pointers about how to take a good photo at the polls. 

Last Tuesday night, none of it really mattered.

Like a frantic crew whose ship was suddenly caught in a maelstrom, we sprinted from phone to computer to fax machine as deadlines came and went. We were at the mercy of the municipal clerks who were as unpredictable as a squall; some waited until 4 a.m., others until noon the next day to send us the results we so desperately needed to get our papers out in time. The look of dread on my editors’ faces was comparable to my former shipmates as they were tossed into the lifelines and rebounded back onto the deck, sputtering salt water.

But we weren’t sunk, not by any means.

There wasn’t any hot chocolate or hard tack but we had the foresight to arrange a pot-luck buffet and found a coffee maker – enough fuel to keep us all awake and motivated. Reporters kept each other from drowning by combining coverage areas and sharing phone calls, editors held their heads above water by tag-teaming drafts of pages as they came flooding in. Still, long after the presidential race had been decided, many local issues within our coverage areas remained hanging in the balance. We broke for the night only to return early the next day and continued harassing weary city and town clerks for their unofficial results. 

All in all, the election didn’t end for me until 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday – nearly 36 hours after it began. 

I don’t remember driving home or walking through the front door. I woke up on the couch when my wife arrived from work late that evening, only because the dog wriggled out from my embrace and the cat leapt off my feet when her car pulled in the driveway. I was covered in fur, confused and needed a shower but finally back in my own calm after one storm of an election.

A historic event for the country, an extraordinary night to be a journalist.

— Nate Jones