“Then do us a favor. Hire Marshall’s guides. You already know them all.”
“Sure. If Ryan pays, I’d love to have them in my boats.”
Carlyle ignored the insult. “Let me interview your guides. When I’m done, much as I’d like to avoid this place like the plague, I’ll tell you what I’ve found.”
Burton shook his head. “People around here still haven’t forgotten how you let them down. Why should I help you now?”
Carlyle had begun driving rafts through the Hudson Gorge a decade ago. Wanting to make his new colleagues look good, he wrote an article for one of those glossy second-home magazines on the glamorous lives of whitewater guides. He listed all the risks they faced, unpredictable river levels, treacherous rapids, hypothermia, severe weather, and clients who didn’t know a paddle from a pisspot, and then sat back waiting for the letters of congratulations to come pouring in.
When his story was published, Burton was the first to call him. “What the hell were you thinking?” he yelled. “You made those trips seem like just one endless ordeal. We get just ten weeks in the spring to make enough to last until skiing season. Are you trying to ruin all that?”
Carlyle had felt like a fool. Instead of winning the respect of people he admired, he’d made them think he was naïve and disloyal.
“Your clients aren’t risking their lives for the scenery,” he’d said. “They go because it’s the most demanding thing they’ll ever do.”
“What are you talking about?”
“They say they only feel really alive when they’re on that river. And want to come as close to death as they can without flinching.”
“Are you nuts?” Burton had said.
“You should emphasize the hardship.”
“It’s our goddamn livelihood,” Burton had said that day almost ten years ago. “You can write whatever you want when you really understand what we’re up against.”
“I apologized for that article,” Carlyle said.
“Makes no difference. People around here’ll crucify me if I cooperate with you.”
“Get serious. You own a fleet of school buses, three convenience stores, two sporting-goods shops, a pizza palace, a twenty-four-unit motel, and a two-bay gas station. Who’s going to crucify you?”
Burton hurled a book against the wall. “Listen to me. My father died in a paint factory fire when I was two years old. When my mother recovered from a nervous breakdown, she dumped me on her relatives for a year. I worked every summer on a potato farm and ran away from home a half-dozen times. So stop bitching about Marshall’s problems. I’ve got my own shit to deal with.”
As Carlyle listened to Burton’s life story, he remembered how little empathy the guy had. One April four years after Carlyle had retired from the business, Burton had invited him up to Warrensburg to run the Hudson Gorge one final time. It had rained for three straight days and the snowpack, unable to absorb another soaking, had begun pouring off the slopes. When Burton’s crew took off, the river was at near-record levels.
When he heard that he would be in a raft with a rookie guide, Carlyle knew he should have backed out, but admitting his fear in front of Burton and his former colleagues was unimaginable.
His luck ran out in Mile-Long Rapid. When he got caught in the backwash pouring off Big Nasty, his raft hit a huge boulder sitting midstream just east of the Narrows, flipped, and dumped him into the middle of the longest continuous Class IV-rapid on the East Coast.
The thirty-four-degree water and unstoppable waves quickly overwhelmed him. Unable to pull himself into an eddy, he was swept downstream like a rag doll in a tornado. His dry suit came apart and water just this side of slush turned his skin blue. Tumbling downstream and caught in the trough in a seemingly endless series of waves, Carlyle realized that unless help came soon, he was going to drown.
Leo Wells, who’d been waiting at the bottom of Mile-Long, managed to snag Carlyle just as he was about to plunge into another set of rapids. Two hours later, shivering uncontrollably and unable to believe he was still alive, Carlyle found himself back at the take-out in North River.
As he was about to get in his car, Burton walked up. “I heard you decided to swim the Narrows. Pretty ballsy move for a guy your age.”
Carlyle was almost speechless with fury. “You have any idea at all how long I was in that fucking river?”
“Oh, please. We’ve all gone through shit like that. Don’t get all weepy on me. We were watching your clown act the whole time. You had nothing to be afraid of. My insurance policy discourages me from letting my employees drown.”
Carlyle now said, “Listen, are you going to help Marshall, or not?”
“Not a chance. Guess who’s going to buy up his seat licenses if he goes under?”
“His guides are living in trailers and unheated cabins. If we don’t stop this person, they’ll all be out of work for good.”
“Not my people. They’ll always have jobs.”
“I hate to ruin your dream of a motel and laundromat empire, but if one more person gets hurt on that river, the DEC and the police are going to close down every operation up here. Including yours.”
“You think they’re going to tangle with someone who creates almost two hundred jobs in this county?”
“Do you have any idea what’s really been going on just ten miles from here?” Carlyle told Burton that Marshall’s father had spent the past five years buying up pretty near all of Johnston Mountain. Private investors and hedge funds were supporting his plan to turn the place into a ski area that would rival anything that could be found in Utah. They’d begun evicting locals and bulldozing the valley so they could put up a huge base lodge, thirty shops, a golf course, and several hundred town homes and condos. The development would transform the economy of the entire region. “These guys are thinking Las Vegas plus snow. The last
