Farewell, Mark — and thanks for not falling off the cliff

I almost got my new boss killed, or at least compound-fractured, before the sun set on his first day in Baker City.

But I didn't mean to.

The incident, by which I mean accident, as there was a complete absence of premeditation, took place on the fifth of July in 1999, and it involved snow. And since those two elements don't often figure in a single story set solely in the Northern Hemisphere, I don't see as how I deserve even a smidgen of blame for what happened.

In any case the boss, whose name is Mark Furman, survived, although with slightly less skin than he had before the episode.

I was glad, because his survival spared me from having to explain how it was that I went up the Elkhorn Mountains with my new editor but came down a few hours later without him.

I doubt I could have persuaded anyone that Mark had simply run off, bearing south and yelling that he just missed Winnemucca too much. If his previous job had been in, say, Reno, I might have pulled that story off. But Winnemucca? No one's that gullible. (Which is to say, no one loves sagebrush that much.)

Yet I wasn't the only beneficiary of good fortune on that day almost eight years ago.

You are, too.

If you're reading these words then you are, at least for as long as my phrases can keep pulling your eyes across the page, a customer of the Baker City Herald.

It's a better newspaper now than it was on July 5, 1999.

And Mark Furman made it better.

This, obviously, would have been a tough trick for him to pull off had I in fact led him to his doom on that day after Independence Day.

Fortunately Mark lived, and he stayed, and he edited.

He stayed longer than I thought he would stay — longer, I suspect, than anyone who pondered the matter thought he would stay.

But now he's leaving.

Mark will remain as the newspaper's editor through the end of March. He'll start teaching a reporting class at the University of Oregon in early April.

If you wanted to gauge Mark's influence on the Baker City Herald you'd do well to compare issues from, say, 1998 with issues from a couple years later. There's a dramatic difference, and it's one you would notice even if you care as much about newspaper design as you care about Peruvian politics.

More to the point, you'd see a dramatic improvement.

Mark made the paper better in large part by making it look better. And though appearance is not so crucial to a newspaper as to a bathing suit, it's hardly inconsequential, either.

Mark strived to splash color across pages that had heretofore been the publishing equivalent of a plain gray suit — utilitarian, sure, but about as visually stimulating as a TV screen when you can't find the plug-in for the coaxial cable.

Mark is shrewd about such things, it seems to me.

He looked at John Collins' photographs and he realized that printing most of the scenes in black-and-white was sort of like stealing Picasso's palette and handing him one black crayon and one white.

What Mark preaches — and I use that verb intentionally, since he's ordained in some fashion, or anyway he's performed a couple of marriages — is that we ought to make things as easy for readers as we can.

Telling them something they didn't know is still paramount, but that doesn't mean you can't dole out the information in a form readers can digest without getting a headache or, even worse, scrunching the thing up and wedging it beneath the stove kindling or the hamster's cage.

But you don't care about inter-office minutiae.

You want to know how I nearly knocked off Mark before his name had been printed in the paper more than a couple times.

Well, I had interviewed Mark back in the spring of '99, after publisher Kari Borgen had hired him, but before he moved to Baker City.

I knew Mark rode a mountain bike.

I rode one, too, so I figured we could celebrate his first day as editor by riding the Elkhorn Crest Trail.

We crammed our bikes into my Scout that afternoon, and we drove up to Marble Creek Pass.

The trip was quite nice except for the Mark almost dying part.

There were big snows that previous winter and the deep drifts, which in most years have melted by the end of July, lingered late.

But we hoisted our bikes on our shoulders and slouched through the slush, and it wasn't too onerous because none of the drifts blocked more than a couple hundred feet of the trail.

We rode north about four miles to the saddle above Twin Lakes and there we turned back.

There was one particular snowdrift that bothered me. It was narrow and thin but it was pitched very steeply, on a section of trail where the builders had had to blast through an outcrop of slaty argillite.

Mark lifted his bike and started across. He was wearing biking shoes, though, and they lacked the lug sole you want in such a situation.

About the middle of the drift Mark slipped, went down and started sliding toward Twin Lakes at a pace that would have impressed me if I hadn't been standing 20 feet away and feeling helpless.

I consoled myself with this: At least, I figured, I wouldn't have to write the article about the accident, there being an obvious conflict of interest.

Mark managed, though, to arrest his fall before he tumbled out of control. He even held onto his bike.

We pedaled back to the pass and drove home to Baker City and the next morning we sat at our desks, which aren't even 10 feet apart.

Mark and I went on just a couple other bike rides, one of which involved, in chronological order, a blown radiator hose, a hail storm and mushroom pickers who gave us each a cold bottle of Corona.

But over the years we've reminisced occasionally about that first ride on the Crest Trail, and chuckled about what might have been.

Probably I'll do that every time I shuffle through the back issues, vintage 1999-2007, and see Mark's name on a colorful page of newsprint.