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The first rock hits and the water goes off like a small animal.

"Two more," Ghorlan says.

"Two more is a lot of rock."

"Two more is a rolling boil for ninety seconds."

So two more go in. Steam comes up in a column and then turns sideways at head height, because everything on this mountain turns sideways at head height, including me.

Six forty. And at six forty-four the ridge road makes a sound.

I hold up a finger. "That's the side by side, and it is definitely not the truck."

"It is a motor."

"It's the little one. The truck has a lower note and it hits the culvert at the second switchback and goes bang, and then somebody swears, and this morning nobody swore." I set another rock on the edge of the coals. "Which means it's Neve and the sound bag, not craft services, which means no coffee smell at eight, which means today is a talking day."

Ghorlan straightens up off the shelter post with a sixty pound bundle of split alder on one shoulder. "Explain talking day."

"Cards. Interviews. They only send the small vehicle when they're planning to sit somebody on a stump."

He stacks the wood under the eave, butt end out, the way he does, so the ends dry and the bark sheds water. "You have their schedule."

"I have their habits. Nobody has their schedule."

Neve comes over the lip of the bench at seven oh two, which is when she always comes over the lip of the bench, hauling the folding stool and the card case and a poncho that has given up. Bear arrives three minutes behind her carrying eleven thousand dollars of camera on his shoulder like a sleeping child.

Nobody says good morning. Nobody has said good morning since Day One. Neve is contractually barred from speaking to us, which is a thing they told us twice and her once, and Bear has never made a sound in five days.

Neve sets the stool. Squares it. Sits.

"Two dollars," I say to Ghorlan.

"We have no money."

"Two theoretical dollars. First card of the day is domestic. Something about home."

He goes still, which is what he does instead of raising an eyebrow. "Why."

"Because it rained all night, because we're on rocks and bark for water, because I look like a woman who slept in a culvert, and because there is nothing on this earth an editor loves more than a filthy person talking about her kitchen."

Neve opens the case. Pulls the top card. Holds it up.

Tell us about your favorite meal at home.

Ghorlan does not move for a moment.

"Two dollars," I say.

He goes back to the woodpile.

Here is the thing nobody put on my application, because there is no box for it.

I have spent nine years at tables reading strangers for money, and reading strangers is not magic and it is not a gift, it is inventory. You log what a person does when nothing is happening, and then you log what they do when something is, and the difference between those two files is the whole person. Neve pre-sorts her cards every morning at base camp against a beat sheet that somebody types at midnight, and she keeps them in order, and she never fans them, and the top card is always the one production wants most. The sound tech turns up hungover every third morning. Bear repositions about four seconds before anything emotional happens, which means Bear can read the beat sheet through the back of the card case, or Bear has been doing this for twenty years and has the whole species memorized.

I cannot start a fire with one match. I cannot tension a ridgeline. I lost a fight to a tarp on Day One in front of four million people.

But I can tell you what these ninety crew members will do before they do it, and by Day Five I have stopped pretending that this is a small thing.