We got a new hire on the crew this spring, twenty-two, sharp with the diagnostic software but green everywhere else, the kind of green where he still flinches a little going up the tower on windy days, which, fair, everybody did once. First rained-out afternoon we couldn’t climb, Ray pulled out the trailer’s beat-up copy of Dominion the way he pulled it out for me years ago, and I got to watch the whole thing from the other side for once.
Kid’s smart. Picked up the rules in about the three minutes the box promises, which not everybody manages. What he couldn’t handle, and I mean genuinely couldn’t handle, was losing the first game to Ray by a wide margin. Went quiet, jaw tight, the specific kind of quiet you learn to read fast if you’ve spent any time around twenty-two-year-olds who are used to being the smart one in the room. I recognized it because I did the exact same thing my first time out, and Ray never said a word to me about it then either, he just dealt the next hand.
So that’s what I did. Dealt the next hand. Didn’t make a thing of it, didn’t give him a pep talk about how everybody loses their first few, because nothing kills a lesson faster than announcing you’re teaching one. Second game he lost by less. Third game he won, actually won, on a province rush nobody saw coming, and the look on his face was worth more than anything I could’ve said after game one.
Here’s the part I didn’t expect going in. Teaching someone to lose gracefully at a card game turned out to tell me something real about how he’ll take correction on the tower, which matters a lot more than a board game score when you’re the one clipping into a harness three hundred feet up with him. A guy who can lose a game of Dominion without sulking is usually a guy who can take a real correction from Ray without getting defensive about it, and that’s worth knowing before you’re both up there depending on each other.
I don’t know if that’s a fair thing to read into a card game. Probably it’s just Dominion. But it’s the kind of thing you notice once you’ve been on a crew long enough, how much of what actually matters about working with somebody shows up first in the small, low-stakes stuff, long before it shows up anywhere that counts.