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Lance took a cigar from a small box in his desk drawer and motioned toward the door. "Looks like the sun's still with us. Care to step outside for a smoke?"
"Never touch the stuff, but thanks."
Robertson stood outside the door, legs athwart like the captain on the deck of his ship. He had the grace to blow the thick cloud of smoke away from me. "I take it you're not a shirt and tie man," he grinned.
"Nope. Ever since the corporate bean counters took over, journalism's been going down the tubes. They don't seem to get that doing a decent job costs money. They cut and cut—except of course for executive salaries—until even the bone hurts. 'Til they cut their own throats, producing such crap no one wants to read it anyway. Or no one believes it."
Robertson was savouring the taste of the cigar in his mouth. "Yep, I get it. More stories cribbed from the wire services, more celebrity gossip, less local reporting. Shorter and shorter stories. Most newspapers aren't trusted anymore. We don't hold with that approach here at the Echo. People look to us as their community newspaper. If they want to read about the latest earthquake in China or the latest scandal in Ottawa they can get that on the Web. Or they can read it in one of the big-city dailies. No point us repeating it."
I shuffled, moving a pebble around with my toe. "Well. A true community newspaper. No celebrity gossip then?" I flashed him an arch smile.
He grinned back, laughing. "Not much call for it around here."
"I take it you're not part of the Interior Media Corp chain of so-called community newspapers?"
"Nope. One hundred percent locally owned and operated. My wife Donna and I run it together. She's the editor."
"And Ms. Jane Bordeaux?"
"Our proofreader and copy editor. She's in doing a little extra editing work to lighten Donna's load on the slew of media releases. She's very good at it."
"You still employ a proofreader? My God, I thought they'd gone extinct, judging by the sloppy copy in everything from the Globe and Mail to the New York Times these days."
"We have a surprising number of retired English professors who live here part-time, not to mention an overall high rate of literacy. And one or two grammar Nazis. You should read our letters page sometime."
"So you're backwoods but not backwards, then."
Robertson guffawed. "I like that. If you're not careful I may just use that as a slogan."
"Feel free to. In exchange for some work."
Robertson evaded this one. "So you finished school in Newcombe? Spend much time in Glacier Valley?"
I could tell he was sizing me up as a potential employee. I could have lied for advantage but it's just not my style. "Not really. The odd day trip up the Glacier River in the lower valley to go inner tubing. But that's about it. Surprising how insular you can get living in even a small city like Newcombe. But I'm a quick study. So tell me: Why 'Eldorado'?"
"You'll have to brush up on your local history." His face-cracking grin with its tobacco-stained teeth seemed mischievous, as if he were testing me.
"Well naturally I'm aware of the mining boom in the 1890s here—the ghost town of Silverado tucked into the Lowery Pass. I remember that much."
Robertson shrugged. "Well it seems some legacies live on, although in much mutated form. In the 1890s, it was folks coming here in search of Eldorado, the City of Gold—or in this case, silver. Then it was lumber. Briefly it was orchards. Then after two world wars it got pretty quiet around here 'til the sixties."
"And then it was the draft dodgers and back-to-the-landers."
"Yep. Another kind of City of Gold—or the anti-city, as the case may be. People came here to get away from cities and the wage-slave economy. The reverse of a century ago—not seeking wealth but avoiding it."
"Or seeking a different kind of wealth."
"You are a quick study."
"Sure, but I'm not quite up to date. I've been away for fifteen years."
"Well in that time it's been another kind of lifestyle seeker— the spiritual fortune hunter. You can't swing a dead cat in the village of Applegrove in the south valley without hitting a half-dozen Tarot card readers, aromatherapists, and UFOlogists."
"I'll forgive the dead cat metaphor on behalf of my own feline. I take it you don't approve?"
A shrug accompanied his jaw-splitting grin. "I neither approve nor disapprove. We have our fair share of crystal gazers in the north valley too. As long as they take out ads in the Echo I don't really care."
"Fair enough."
"Then to complete the picture you have the grow-ops and the neo-Rastafarians, the white kids with dreads."
"I seem to remember something about that from my high school days here. I was a bit of a teenage hippie myself."
He flicked some ash from his cigar. "Our mayor once said if the cops ever shut down the grow-op industry the whole economy of the valley would collapse."
"Interesting culture."
"My sister Nicole once described it as 'Norman Rockwell with dreadlocks.'"
I had to chuckle. "I'll remember that one. That might even make a better slogan for the Echo than 'backwoods not backwards.'"
