Chapter Thirteen
The reporter called the lodge’s landline on Day Twenty-Three, a number I hadn’t known still worked until it rang while I was up a ladder confirming the last course of the east wing’s new decking, and Wyatt answered it before I could get down, because he’d taken to answering the phone that week the way he’d taken to a lot of small competencies lately, as if claiming them before anyone doubted he could.
“It’s a lady from the newspaper,” he called up to me, hand cupped over the receiver with the seriousness of a boy relaying a summit report, “she wants to know if you’ll talk about the lodge. ”
Her name was Nadia Cole, staff reporter for the Larkspur Falls Courier, and she had, she told me once I’d climbed down and taken the phone, been meaning to call for two weeks — since she’d heard, secondhand, the way everyone in this county heard everything, that Marsh Basecamp had a paying group through it for the first time in three years.
“I do a business-revival piece every fall,” she said, brisk, pleasant, the efficient warmth of someone who has learned exactly how much charm a cold call needs to survive its first thirty seconds.
“Local business coming back from the edge, that kind of thing. Readers eat it up. I’d want maybe twenty minutes, a walk of the property if you’re willing, a photo if the light’s good.
” A pause, professional rather than coy.
“I should say up front, since you’d find out anyway once you googled me back — I know who your husband is.
I’m not asking you to talk about him. I just don’t want you agreeing to this thinking I don’t know, and then feeling ambushed later if a reader connects it themselves. ”
I appreciated the disclosure more than I let my voice show, because I have spent two decades in rooms with people who withheld exactly that kind of information until it was too late to have declined gracefully, and I told her Thursday would work, and hung up, and stood a moment in the gravel lot doing the calculation I do with anything that puts my own name somewhere I can’t fully control it: what it would cost me to say yes, what it would cost me to say no, and which cost I could actually afford.
A lodge trying to rebuild its reputation in a county that still, four weeks in, called me Hollis Marsh in the same breath as a story about a broke climber, needed exactly this kind of piece.
A woman two months out from deciding what she was willing to say about her marriage in public did not, particularly, want a reporter’s twenty minutes anywhere near the seam.
I said yes anyway, because the lodge’s numbers didn’t have the luxury of waiting for my own numbers to settle first.
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Nadia arrived Thursday morning in a compact sedan with a coffee-shop cup in the console and a notebook she used the old-fashioned way, pen and paper, which I noted and appreciated, because a recording app changes what a person’s willing to say in ways a visible notebook somehow doesn’t.
She was younger than I’d pictured from her voice, thirty maybe, in a fleece vest with the Courier’s small masthead embroidered on the chest, and she walked the property with me the way I’d walk a client through a base camp — asking good, specific questions, writing down numbers rather than adjectives, which told me within the first five minutes that whatever else this piece turned into, it wasn’t going to be lazy.
“How bad was it, when you got here,” she asked, at the gear shed, running a hand along the newly retensioned tarp the way half this town’s residents had apparently developed a habit of doing, testing rather than admiring.
“Bad enough that I spent the first week making lists instead of feeling anything about it,” I said, which was true, and which she wrote down without editorializing, and I found myself, walking her toward the rope wall, giving her the real shape of it in the register I’d have used with an investor rather than the softened version I’d been giving the town for a month — the roof, the lapsed permit, the provisional authorization, the county extension Simone had helped me negotiate on the strength of a signed repair contract.
“I run a version of this exact skill set on mountains,” I told her, at the trestle table, over coffee that was, for once, not my father’s instant.
“Weather-window risk, medevac contingency budgets, permit logistics. Turns out a failing outfitting business responds to the same kind of triage a bad forecast does. You don’t fix the whole thing at once.
You fix the piece that’s about to kill you first, and then the next one. ”
She liked that. I watched her write it down twice, once in shorthand and once, slower, verbatim, the tell of a reporter who’s found her lede.
“You ran logistics on your husband’s expeditions,” she said, not quite a question, glancing up from the notebook with the careful, neutral expression of someone deciding how hard to push a door that isn’t fully hers to open.
“The documentary made a little bit of a splash, locally. People had opinions about the four seconds.”
“They did,” I said, and let that sit a beat, doing the same arithmetic I’d done on the phone Tuesday — what this cost me to answer, what it cost me not to.
“I ran logistics on four expeditions. Permits, weather-window risk, insurance, medevac contingency budgets that had to satisfy three different carriers at once. That’s a real, licensable skill, and I built it here, at this exact table, starting when I was twenty-two.
I’m not going to pretend the film doesn’t exist, Nadia.
I’m also not going to make it the subject of a piece about a lodge that’s trying to reopen on its own merits.
If you want a quote about the marriage, I don’t have one for you yet.
If you want a quote about what it takes to run a weather-window risk model at fourteen thousand feet with a client’s life on the other end of a satellite call, I’ve got twenty years of those. ”
She held my eyes a moment, weighing it, and then did something I hadn’t expected, which was nod and close the notebook halfway, a small, deliberate gesture that told me she’d decided which piece she was actually going to write.
“I can work with that,” she said. “For what it’s worth — off the record, since you didn’t ask, but I’ll give it to you anyway — the four seconds thing already made the rounds up here weeks before you got back.
Half this county’s seen the clip on somebody’s phone.
I’m not going to be the reason it gets a second life if you don’t want it to.
I’d rather write the piece that’s actually true, which is that a woman who was already running that operation before anyone in Hollywood knew her name came home and started running it again. ”
“Thank you,” I said, and meant it more than I usually let myself mean things to strangers with notebooks.
Frankie showed up partway through the walk-through, ostensibly to check a carabiner gate that didn’t need checking, actually, I understood within about four seconds, to make sure a reporter poking around the rope wall wasn’t going to write something that got a client hurt on a technicality.
Nadia recognized the opportunity for what it was and pivoted without missing a beat, asking Frankie how long she’d been guiding, whether she’d trained anywhere besides here, what the state certification actually required.
Frankie answered in the same flat, unhurried register she used on a client mid-rappel, no performance in it at all, and somewhere in the middle of explaining rope-system redundancy she said, without any particular emphasis, “Wade Marsh taught half the guides working this county right now, whether their business cards say so or not. Including the one running Finch Adventures forty minutes east. Nobody puts that in the brochure.” Nadia wrote it down word for word, and I watched her decide, in real time, not to ask a follow-up question that would have turned one sharp sentence into a feud story, which told me something more about her judgment than the whole rest of the interview had.
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The piece ran the following Tuesday, above the fold on the Courier’s local section, a photograph of me at the rope wall with Frankie in the background coiling a line, headline reading LOCAL OUTFITTER, LOCAL EXPERTISE: MARSH BASECAMP REOPENS UNDER FOUNDER’S DAUGHTER.
It was, on the whole, exactly the piece I’d asked for — Wade’s history, the debt handled in two careful sentences that made it sound like ordinary hardship rather than crisis, Frankie quoted at length about the rope wall’s rebuild, Marcus Webb’s spring booking mentioned by name with his blessing.
One paragraph, four sentences, acknowledged that Hollis Marsh Calder had spent the last two decades running expedition logistics “for several high-profile documentary productions,” without naming the productions or the husband, a discretion I recognized as Nadia’s own choice rather than an editor’s caution, because I’d watched her make it in real time at my own trestle table.