On a frosty winter morning more than two years ago, some of the very first scenes of "Water and Fire: A Story of the Ozarks" were committed to videotape. The project has occupied us in every season since. By the time the shooting ended, we had recorded some 60 hours of images and conversation.

The result is a portrait - an unabashedly affectionate one of a part of the American heartland I have cared about, and written about, for much of my working life.

Two years may seem like a long time to be engaged in a program that takes 90 minutes to play. It is a long time!

But in a television project like this one, you know to a fair certainty you'll have but one chance at the subject. So you rethink and revise, edit and re-edit, argue some among yourselves tweaking the piece until finally it finds the shape you think is right. That's the satisfaction of working in public television.

It's also how two years can get away.

We decided to tell the Ozarks story in a frame of seasons - seasons of the natural world, and seasons of lives. Along the way there were many adventures... and some misadventures.
One rainy spring day we went to shoot a spectacular rock formation, the Johnson Shut-Ins. The early morning light was gauzy and mystical. The wet boulders were shiny as polished metal. They also were slick. Trying to do my donkey-share of lugging camera equipment, I slipped on one of them and broke a rib.

Fire has played a big part in Ozark life, but the first year of our project wildfires were uncommonly scarce. So we came into this last autumn wondering where we¹d find the footage. Then fate stepped in. On the windiest, driest day of the season, a power line short ignited a piece of country I love - the stretch of Ozark woodland in which my cabin stands.

That was the start of the burning. In the next two weeks, before the rains came, 6000 acres of the country were blackened with fire.

My little cabin was scorched some, but it survived. The rib healed without complication. And in another month or two, in the fullness of spring, the burned-over land will green again. I hope, after watching "Water and Fire: A Story of the Ozarks," you'll feel as we do, that it all was worth it in the end.