My phone buzzes with an incoming call, the world “HOME” flashes on the screen.
In the nanosecond before I answer, the half-dozen worries that come from having elderly parents flash through my mind. Did somebody fall over? Was there a concerning doctor visit? Is everyone OK?
My 83-year-old father’s voice crackles on the other line.
“Fred, I just talked to Steve,” he says. “You really need to write an article about him for your magazine.”
I’m silent. My mind races again, this time bouncing off disparate emotions. Relief. Confusion. Annoyance.
For the past six months, my father has relentlessly asked—no, commanded—me to write about a buddy of his named Steve. From what I’ve deduced from my dad’s enthusiastic pitching, Steve loves to explore underground caves. In Mexico. Yep, Steve goes caving. This, in my father’s opinion, makes Steve a fabulous person to profile in the pages of Outside. “Steve is a really great guy,” my dad always adds.
This, of course, is not the first time my father has prodded me to write about something. Each one has evoked complex feelings that can only come from a parent-child relationship. Intellectually, I know that my dad is just striving for connection, some way to relate to the adult son he once took fishing and tossed a baseball with in the backyard.
Alas, his determination (you NEED to write about Steve) unearths thousands of memories of past parental commands: tie your shoes, no elbows on the dinner table, don’t forget your homework. All of a sudden, I’m 13 years old again, pushing back against my dad, striving for my own independence.
I sigh as I respond into the phone: “Dad, I’m really busy right now.”
The Complexities of a Parent Pitch
Working in journalism means constantly fielding story pitches, and as my 22-year career in media has progressed, this has only grown in number and intensity. At Outside, my email inbox overflows each day with more than a dozen story ideas from freelance writers, PR agencies, non-profit watchdog groups, and even politicians.
Most are narratives about a personal adventure into the backcountry, or a request to write about a product or idea. Very few of them, however, check all of the boxes that we editors consider when assigning an actual story. Is it timely or newsworthy? Is there a person at the heart of it who has a compelling arc? Does the story say something about a wider dynamic in outdoor culture that a general audience would find compelling? Is the subject matter actually of interest to Outside readers?
Very few pitches meet the standards above, and even if one does, we must make a final assessment. Does the writer have the reporting experience, access, and writing skills to tell this story?
My father’s pitches rarely meet the bar for pursuing a story. Most involve some element of geology or geologic exploration—the field he’s worked in for the last 60 years.
Assessing a story is a complicated vetting process, and one that is nearly impossible to explain to a parent or family member without that person’s eyes glazing over with boredom. This is why nearly every journalist I know can share stories of fielding bad story pitches from their loved ones.
“My dad also started ski touring last winter and got his avalanche training, so every time he reads about an accident in the news, he shares it with me, I think in an effort to remind me that avalanches exist,” says Anthony Walsh, one of the Climbing editors.
“When my dad does try to pitch me stories on climbing, it’s like guided mountaineering clients or news we already covered a week earlier,” writes Maya Silver, Climbing’s editor-in-chief.
“My dad is an avid cyclist and doesn’t really follow running, so he sends me all the Velo articles he loves and then sends me stories about running from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal that we covered like two years previously,” Abby Levene of Outside Run ays.
These are all relatable anecdotes. Many of my father’s pitches are stories he reads in the Wall Street Journal. When I’d tell him that coverage in a major newspaper usually means that a similar story in Outside will generate less of an audience, he shrugs.
“But it’s still an interesting story,” my dad always says in a last-ditch attempt.
But Sometimes Parent Stories Work
These anecdotes are reminiscent of my favorite episode of This American Life, the celebrated podcast and public radio show. Back in 2010, the show’s reporters took on familiar pitches head-on. The logline to the episode reads: We try something harder than anything we’ve ever tried before, by taking the random ideas that members of our own families have told us would be “perfect for the show” and turning them into actual stories.
Lisa Pollack’s mom wanted a story about funny funerals. Nancy Updike’s dad had a great idea for a radio episode about the building of the Erie Canal. Alex Blumberg admitted that his father’s pitches are “generally big and abstract,” like the one he pursued: corporate personhood. Another reporter told the story of how her father, back in the fifties, tinkered with his Oldsmobile in a way that it could be turned on by dialing a rotary telephone.
The most relatable anecdote was from reporter Jane Feltes, whose dad pitched a profile about the local Methodist pastor, a guy named Harry Brakeman. At first, Feltes was skeptical of her dad’s assertion that Brakeman had founded a university in Haiti. But Feltes called up Brakeman, investigated his work, and stumbled upon a wonderful story about a dynamic person doing amazing work.
I recently re-listened to the episode and analyzed each parental pitch. No, none of these story ideas had much mainstream appeal, newsiness, or timeliness. But each of the tales were, in their own way, compelling. The Harry Brakeman segment, specifically, drove home the point—maybe some parent pitches do work. While listening, my mind wandered to my dad, and to his friend named Steve. No, Steve’s story has very little potential to harness a major audience, or to break news. But what if Steve’s story was just as dynamic as that of Harry Brakeman? What if my teenage tendencies to ignore my father were blocking my own sense of curiosity?
I decided to call up Steve.
A Story About Caves
A voice answers on the other end of my phone. Within a few minutes, I laugh. My father is right: Steve Maynard, who is 70, is an extremely great guy. And boy does he love caving. Over the course of a half-hour call, Steve recounts his multi-day expeditions deep into the Earth’s crust to explore tunnels and chambers in the pitch black depths of caves.
“I’ve crawled through places that were pretty tight, and I’ve been in tunnels where I had to exhale just to get through,” he tells me. “For whatever reason, it doesn’t bother me.”
In the nineties, Steve completed several dozen expeditions into the Lechuguilla Cave in New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns National Park, where he helped map some of the 150 miles of passageways. More recently, Steve has embarked on trips to a recently discovered cave in Oaxaca, Mexico, called Xine Xao.
“The passages are as big as subway tunnels,” he tells me. “It’s mostly an easy walk—at least as far as caves go. You’re scrambling, but you’re not crawling on your hands and knees.”
Steve and other cavers wonder if the Xine Xao tunnels link up with the nearby Sistema Huautla cavern, which stretches 5,118 feet into the ground, making it the deepest cave in North America. Linking together two massive cave systems would represent a massive breakthrough—at least within the tight-knit world of cavers.
“You’re talking about a few thousand people worldwide who really care about this stuff,” he says.
As Steve shares stories of his expeditions and discoveries, one major question pops in my head: Why? It’s easy to understand why mountaineers scale high peaks—glory, fame, personal accomplishment, and, well, because society rewards such feats with attention. But why explore the depths of the Earth’s crust? The only mainstream attention caving receives is during or after a disaster.
Steve is silent for a few moments after I present my question.
“It’s an adventure,” he says. “I’ve had the good fortune of being the first human being to ever step into some chambers on a few occasions. That’s a feeling that’s really hard to describe.”
There’s also a social pull to it. Since he began caving in the early nineties, Steve—who is now 70—has made friends within the international caving community. When he goes on an expedition, he gets to catch up with other friends who share his passion.
And finally, there’s the attraction of science and discovery. Steve has a background in geology—the same as my father. When Steve explores a cave, he can visualize the mountains, mineral deposits, and other features of the Earth’s crust that surround him. It’s a relatable perspective that reminds me of dozens of road trips I took with my dad, during which he spent hours explaining the geologic forces that created mountains, gullies, and canyons.
Steve tells me that it may take decades to fully explore the Xinexao system and to find the chambers and tunnels that lead to the surface.
“Part of my motivation for being interested in it has been to help people learn about caves and map them out,” he says. “Maybe someday, when I’m in a wheelchair in the old folks home, someone will make a connection at Xine Xao to the surface. I will raise my cup of prune juice to them.”
I mentally raise my own cup of prune juice to Steve, and to my father. His relentless pitching has led me here, to Steve, and I am absolutely compelled by Steve’s perspective on caving. Will his story produce the next great piece of American journalism? Probably not. But it has kept me enthralled and interested—the bar that all stories must cross.
Before we end our call, I do my final bit of diligence. I ask Steve if these multi-day caving expeditions into dark and deserted corridors deep underground will ever become a recreational activity for the masses, like mountain climbing or whitewater rafting. Steve laughs. He is doubtful.
“It’s dark, you get dirty, and personal hygiene is an issue,” he says. “You don’t realize how bad you stink until you get out of a cave.”
Fair enough, Steve.
Articles editor Frederick Dreier grew up in Golden, Colorado, and everything he knows about the outdoors he learned from his father, John Dreier.
The post For Father’s Day, I Wrote the Story My Dad Pitched Me. It’s About Caves. appeared first on Outside Online.
