I first met John Sears (“Mule”) on Christmas Eve, and he agreed to let me interview him on camera. I expressed an interest in making a documentary about him, the mules and their way of life, but how would I ever be able to find out where he was going to be? He had a cell phone which he rarely used, and I asked him if he knew how to text message. He said he had heard about texting but did not know how to do it, so I showed him, and we practiced it several times until he was fairly confident with it.
After 10 days passed with no word from him, I figured nothing was going to happen — my idea for a documentary had ended before it really began. But then on the morning of January 3, I got a text saying if I still wanted to do my documentary, I could meet him at a location in Arcadia. This is a raw clip from some of my footage of that day.