“There aren’t,” I said flatly. “That’s why we’ll never run out of copy.” Ellen just shook her head.
“What are you working on?” Chris asked her.
“Shabby contractors, bogus long-distance phone charges, car complaints, spoiled dog food, unsafe toys…” She shook her head. “I could go on and on.”
I looked up to see a giant standing next to our table wearing a thick suede jacket. He was bearlike, maybe six foot five, with a beard and brown curly hair.
“Hey,” Chris said, coming around the table and hugging him the way men do, in a hard, standoffish kind of way. It reminded me of a Broadway play that I saw years back called Defending the Caveman that homed in on the differences between the sexes, showing in one particular scene how old female friends greet each other, as opposed to the male approach. Women squeal in delighted high-pitched voices and then come together screeching, laughing, crying and embracing. And men? One goes up to the other and punches him in the arm while saying something endearing like: “You still driving that old piece of shit?”
Moose patted him on the back. “How you doing?” Chris introduced him to me and then to Ellen.
“Ladies,” he said, nodding.
Chris poured him a drink and we toasted. I looked at Chris, then at Moose. His blue eyes peered out, surrounded by curly locks as though he were Santa. The immediate impression that I got was of shyness.
“How come you’re in town?” I said.
“Came to see my mom. I can’t get her to come up and visit me…” He shrugged and didn’t finish the sentence.
“It’s pretty cold up there,” I said, feeling for some reason as if I had to take her side.
“Twenty below last week,” he said matter-of-factly.
“So you live in an igloo?” Ellen teased.
Moose shook his head as if he had considered that and then decided against it. “Log cabin. I built it. Great woodstove, keeps the place really warm.”
“What do you do all winter?” I said. “Doesn’t it get lonely?”
He looked at me curiously and smiled slightly. “I have work to do in the house, firewood to cut, I’m preparing to put on an addition, and I have my books, carpentry work in town, journals, my dog and I’m writing a guide to wilderness survival. Not much time to get lonely.”
“Wilderness survival?” Ellen said.
Actually, it turned out that he was working on his third book. Ever since he was small, Moose said, he spent most of his life outdoors. After we looked at our menus and ordered he told us that his mother was a nature lover who grew up on a farm and unlike other mothers who baked, cleaned, shopped and maybe went off to work, she spent much of her time with her children outdoors, hiking, swimming in the ponds, and teaching them about birds, snakes, turtles, insects, trees and plants. By age ten, he was an expert marksman with a slingshot and a bow and arrow, he knew how to start a fire, build a shelter and forage for food, distinguishing between the edible plants and berries and the poisonous ones so that he could basically survive outdoors, no matter what the temperature. He learned how to carve plates out of wood polished with beaver fat and could weave baskets out of split white oak, make his own clothes and get by in the woods with just some basic clothes and a knife.
That was a world that, of course, was unknown to me. I never did understand all the esoterica about camping and being able to use a compass if I was lost, build a tent for shelter or cook over an open fire.
That’s not to say I wouldn’t welcome being in the wilderness with the right guide, particularly if he looked like the six-foot-four Australian who took me and a group of friends on a rafting trip in Colorado, our present to ourselves after we graduated from college.
“So you spent your summers camping out?” Ellen asked Moose.
“I camped outside my house from the age of eight,” Moose said. “My parents built me a tepee in the backyard instead of a tree house and I spent most of the year out there. I grew my own fruits and vegetables in the garden and made my own clothes. Even my own shoes.”
Ellen and I looked at each other. Manolo of the Adirondacks.
“And I bet you never went to the doctor,” I said.
“To get my shots and all, sure. But when I was sick I tried to treat myself with medicine from plants. I haven’t been to the doctor in the past twenty years.”
“Germs probably can’t survive where you live,” I said. He smiled.
“And what about when you’re doing all that outdoor work. Don’t you ever fall or hurt yourself?” Ellen asked.
“I broke my ankle a few years ago. Set it myself.”
We were all silent. I was proud of myself when I closed a wound with ointment and a butterfly bandage.
“So you’re writing your book with a quill pen, or what?” I said. He shook his head.
“I have a computer and all that. I’m connected.” I imagined him hunkering down by candlelight and writing on a computer.
“Let me guess,” I said. “You built your own with twigs and leaves.”
“Actually I have a Dell,” Moose said, laughing. “But now that you mention it…” With a smile he steered the subject to me, obviously eager to get himself out of the spotlight. “So what about you, how are you doing with the column?”
“The pressure gets me a little crazy,” I said. “But I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.”
“I read your stuff from time to time online,” he said. “I try to keep up with the papers.”
“We don’t cover your part of the world that much. Any good investigations to be done where you are?”
He was silent for a moment. “Local political stuff, sure, but it’s a small town and people tend to get along.”
“And if they don’t?”
“They don’t go running to the media.”
“Sounds idyllic,” Ellen said.
“What do you do?” Moose asked Ellen. She reached into her bag and gave him her card. Moose looked at it and smiled slightly.
“Consumer reporter,” he read. “That raises your blood pressure.”
“I try not to let it,” Ellen said. He stared at her for a long minute and didn’t say anything.
“How long you been doing it?”
“Six years,” she said. She looked back at me. “Remember when I took the job?”
I couldn’t forget. It was a year after she started with the network. She was nervous and we arranged to have lunch at 21 to celebrate, even though most of the time she talked about all the reasons why she secretly felt she wasn’t up to the job, couldn’t do it and shouldn’t have agreed to take it. With all the negativity out of the way, we agreed never to have another conversation like that, ate every bit of the amazing hamburgers that the place is famous for—each seemed to be made up of at least half a pound of meat—finished off most of a bottle of very expensive wine and had to practically hold hands to steady ourselves as we walked across Fifth Avenue and over to Saks to buy her clothes that would look good on television.
“We didn’t think you’d stay there for more than two years,” I said. “Six is a record.”
Ellen nodded resignedly.
“So what keeps you going when everyone else burns out?” Chris asked.