Editor's Note: Footnotes from 3-part ‘Climb’

We’ve gotten quite a bit of response, mostly positive and some amounting to high praise. While much of it arrived in the form of emails or phone calls rather than letters to the editor, I’m going to share a bit.

Gopher Gulch columnist Inez Castor copied me on a congratulatory note she sent to reporter Nick Grube and said of the series, “It was community building at its best — not to mention damned good storytelling.”

She added: “This is the sort of writing I think readers of a local paper want to see. We want to care about people, and this story makes those of us who never knew them care about Mari, Peter and their lives, as well as the Alexandres and their struggle to deal with this.”

A family friend wrote to say that she has “never once seen Mari without a smile and only God can understand why someone so amazing would have to endure this.”

An outbreak of food-borne illness with such serious consequences has the potential to tear the community apart, but that doesn’t seem to be what happened in Del Norte County. There are disagreements over the wisdom of drinking raw milk, and there are different versions of how the whole event unfolded. But there is a unanimous, fervent wish for the Tardiffs to recover from their ordeal.

And there is more. The Tardiffs weren’t the only ones to open up to Grube as he reported “Mari’s Climb.” From the county Public Health Department to Sutter Coast Hospital to the Alexandre family, representatives of all three spoke with a disarming openness.

One issue is the hospital’s reporting of cases of campylobacter infections to the Health Department. Nurses there said they received no such reports in the month of June 2008. On Friday the hospital provided copies of reports showing confirmation they were faxed June 5. As Sutter Coast CEO Eugene Suksi readily acknowledged, that’s confirmation that they were successfully transmitted, not that they were actually received at the Health Depart­ment fax machine.

This discrepancy is not pivotal, since Mari drank the milk that made her sick on June 2. The hospital acknowledges it did not properly report two other campylobacter cases. Would those reports have prevented Mari, then a Health Department nurse, from drinking the milk? In this case, hindsight is not 20-20.

What is clear is that Mari Tardiff isn’t letting up on her drive toward the fullest possible recovery. In an email to Grube over the weekend, she told him, “you will be glad to know our mantra has changed from ‘this too shall pass’ to ‘you ain’t seen nothing yet.’” 

The entire series is now available at triplicate.com. Click “on-line extras.”