Photograph by Dilip Vishwanat

As the sun sets, the crowd swells. They've come wearing ski caps and neon goggles, clutching snowboards and skis in the 70-degree weather. They hold makeshift signs that read, "Small Hill ... Big Heart" and "Wildwood — City of Extortion." Firefighters watch as more than

300 people filter into the parking lot. Across the road, teens gathered around a red SUV sell "Save Hidden Valley" T-shirts for $12. A policeman guards the door to city hall, informing newcomers the room is full but they can listen to loudspeakers set up especially for the occasion.

Standing at one edge of the lot, 23-year-old Jane Tellini stares in amazement. "This is like something out of a movie," she says. "It's such a small West County town."

Indeed, before this fall, Wildwood — a quaint city of 35,000 nestled in the hills west of St. Louis — was a relatively quiet place, one of those dots on the map that most people blow past on I-44. But when a dispute erupted in early September between Hidden Valley Ski Area and Wildwood, causing the resort's owner to threaten to close, skiers suddenly emerged from all over the Midwest. Over the course of a month and a half, the drama unfolded in newspapers, on TV and in locals' conversations — with the loudest outcry at a September 22 city council meeting.

The room fills to capacity, with more than 100 people squeezing inside. A young entrepreneur wears a tie-dyed T-shirt that reads, "Make Snow, Not War." A pair of ski patrollers sits side by side in matching red-and-white jackets. The mayor, dressed in a turquoise shirt, finds his seat beside the city attorney. As the meeting is called to order, a chant rises in the night air, starting with one woman and quickly spreading: "Save Hidden Valley. Save Hidden Valley ..."

The meeting lasts more than four hours, running until just past 11:30 p.m. The council hears from 42 people, from a business owner to a passionate skier with cerebral palsy. As they speak, sometimes fighting back tears, their words are pierced by occasional bursts of applause from outside.

And missing from this great spectacle, working more than 1,100 miles away: the owner of Hidden Valley, Tim Boyd.


Man Behind A Mountain
Here's the thing about Boyd: He's not a skier. He didn't try on a pair of skis until he was 27, just a few years before opening his first ski resort. Today he rarely goes, preferring tennis shoes to ski boots.

Golf is Boyd's game. The 56-year-old frequently carries a shag bag with him, hitting balls when he has the chance. He swings his Ping irons right-handed, but putts left-handed. "I tell everybody, the older I get, the better I was," he jokes, though he's still a scratch player more than three decades after playing on his college team.

Most weekdays, Boyd wakes by 7 a.m. He reads the Post-Dispatch and Wall Street Journal. He might flip on FOX News or check his favorite ski blogs. "He always knows what's going on in all his areas and what people are thinking," says Missi Boyd, his wife and co-founder of Hidden Valley. He spends much of his day on the phone — more than he'd like. During winter, he works every day, sometimes in the office, other times in a snowplow.

Everything about Boyd is unassuming: his height (5-foot-10), his weight (185 pounds), the way he dresses (fleece pullover and jeans), his preferred movie genre (sci-fi). He comes across as down-to-earth, downplaying his accomplishments ("I'd rather be lucky than good") and listening patiently before speaking, the consummate golfer sizing up the situation. "He plays things, from what I can tell, close to the vest," says Joe Soraghan, a local ski patroller.

But truth be told, Boyd is far from average. "He's not a roll-with-the-crowd guy," says Dave Grenier, general manager of Boyd's Snow Creek ski resort near Kansas City. "If everyone else goes left, you can bet he'll go right."

"He's not afraid of failure," agrees Boyd's son Jesse, who helps manage several ski resorts. "He's always willing to take chances. The decisions he makes aren't always in line with the rest of the ski industry, but he's done his homework." Sitting inside a Sno-Cat in Vermont in mid-November, Jesse adds, "He's actually snow-making here today. He's always been the hands-on type of guy; he feels detached if he's not out working with the guys."

Today Boyd's company, Peak Resorts, stretches well beyond St. Louis. It spans 11 ski resorts dotting the Midwest and New England, including Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, New Hampshire and Vermont. "I kind of flit around wherever there is a need," he says. Boyd travels about twice a month, recently spending the bulk of his time at Vermont's Mount Snow, his latest and largest project. As he conducts his business, he maintains a level, professional manner. "He's got his father's genes," says Grenier.

Growing up in Valley Park, Boyd admired his father, Glenn. Boyd Contracting Inc., his dad's excavation company, moved earth for the Edward Jones Dome, America's Center and other large-scale St. Louis projects. Boyd was an A student, though his real focus was sports. He played football, basketball and golf at Lindbergh High School. When he graduated in 1971, he accepted a golf scholarship to the University of Missouri–Columbia, where he majored in business.

It was the summer after his freshman year when he began working at an isolated nine-hole golf course near Eureka called Hidden Valley. During summers, Boyd returned to St. Louis to tend greens and mow fairways. He also began dating Missi Kuelker, a fellow Lindbergh grad and occupational-therapy major one year his junior. After graduating in 1975, the two married and returned to St. Louis. Two years later, at the age of 25, Boyd made the jump to entrepreneur by convincing Hidden Valley's owner to sell him the course. "At that point in my life, it really wasn't that big of a risk because I didn't have anything to lose," he recalls.

From the start, managing the golf club was a rough prospect. "We bought the course and ran it for a couple years, and it wasn't making any money," recalls Missi. So the Boyds adjusted, adding nine holes and opening it to the public for several years. Still it foundered. "The whole time, Tim was really trying to find something that he could do year-round," says Missi.

His answer came in the most unlikely place.


Starting a Slope
Boyd's first time on skis was a disaster.

He and his wife visited Lake Tahoe in 1979 to visit his brother, Glenn Jr. They saved up, bought ski suits from J.C. Penney ("the goofiest-looking things in the world," recalls Missi) and flew to California. "We stayed in a condo that his brother owned with like eight guys, and it had no towels, no sheets, no heat," recalls Missi. To add to their grief, it rained the entire time. "We were miserable," says Missi. "I told him this is the worst thing we could have done."

Yet somehow, Boyd saw opportunity, like a glow in a snowstorm. "We're on this bunny hill taking lessons, and there are thousands of people standing on this hill in the pouring rain. And I told my wife, 'You know, we have a hill that's about this size back home — and we certainly have plenty of rain. This ski thing could work.'"

He wasn't the first person in Missouri to consider it. "Others had tried and failed miserably," Boyd says. Tan-Tar-A made a run of it at Lake of the Ozarks from 1962 until 1979. Then there was Kirksville's Rainbow Basin Ski Resort, which opened in 1982 and lasted until 1991. Finally, there was Snow Bluff Ski Area in Brighton, near Springfield, which closed around 2000. That's not to mention other resorts that lasted just one or two seasons. "Everybody I talked to said, 'Oh, I heard about the place by Pere Marquette and that guy in Pacific,'" he recalls. "And I said, 'I understand that, but we're going to go about it a little differently.'"

Boyd meticulously studied the ski industry. He and his father consulted with experts in Michigan who decided Hidden Valley had the right ingredients to be successful. He visited other Midwest ski areas. He researched snow-making technology. When it snowed, he and Missi rented skis and took turns driving each other up a hill and skiing back down. Boyd attempted to get funding — a far more difficult prospect than buying a golf course. "I got thrown out of a lot of nice places," he recalls. "It wasn't funny at the time. They'd say, 'Yeah, we'll see you in the insane asylum.'" At last, he got a loan.

To help Boyd get started, his father cleared a hillside south of the golf course for a single lift and seven runs, a handful of which Boyd named after his family: his wife (Missi's Wish), his mother (Betty's Butte) and his newborn son (Jesse's Jog). He bought 12 snow guns and ran the operation out of empty chicken coops and rented trailers. "The best word to describe those first couple months is chaos," says Boyd. "Just like any new business, it starts off and it looks like a Chinese fire drill."

To jump-start the business, he worked around the clock. Because the snow guns sat on tripods, he moved them acre by acre. He would begin making snow when the resort closed at 10 p.m. and not finish until 4 a.m. "By the morning, it would be warm, so we'd have to start the whole process over — if it was cold enough," he says.

Hidden Valley Ski opened to the public for the first time on December 28, 1982. Boyd gave the green light on just one run, but 1,000 people showed up and took turns. "It was like a zoo," Boyd recalls. "But it showed the demand was there if we could deliver the product. That was when I first realized we had a chance of surviving."


Making a Mountain Range
Boyd figured out the formula: Build a metro ski area in a climate where there's no competition; offer affordable rates and nighttime skiing; take advantage of the growing snowboard market, which doesn't require a steep vertical terrain — "the great equalizer," Jesse calls it — and put the lion's share of capital into snow-making technology. The rest will follow.

"Here's the thing about these ski areas," says Boyd. "The good news is there's no competition. The bad news is there's a reason: It's really tough to run these things successfully."

He admits Hidden Valley, with only a 310-foot vertical drop, isn't a Colorado ski resort, but he contends that it's affordable, it's nearby and it's fun — making it viable even during a recession. "In past downtimes, we've actually done better because people don't travel as far," he says. "What we give up in weather, we gain in the fact that the economy and other factors tend to help us."

The biz breaks down like this: Hidden Valley is open about 70 to 80 days per season; it makes snow during about 13 to 15 nights; last season drew about 64,000 visitors. So when winter comes, there must be a system in place to put down a lot of snow quickly. "All of the other things in the ski area become meaningless if you don't have snow," says Boyd. "It's like trying to play golf on burnt-out greens — no one is coming." Today, Peak Resorts can quickly cover its hills when the temperature falls below 20 degrees for at least 48 hours.

In 1985, anticipating someone else might open a resort near Kansas City, Boyd moved his family to nearby Weston to start his second ski site, Snow Creek. He convinced Grenier to quit his job in Massachusetts, despite a recent promotion, and become manager at the new resort. At the time, Grenier's boss thought he was crazy. "Now we're not even a question," says Grenier.

Over the years, Peak Resorts innovated new ski practices — largely out of necessity. "The models he's developed have been embraced by the industry," says Mike Berry, president of the National Ski Areas Association. "If it works in Missouri, it's relatively simple in New Hampshire." Boyd learned to pile large mounds of snow at the top of runs and groom it downhill. He created retention ponds at the base of runs. He lobbied for an industry-wide standard for purchasing ski-rental equipment. Following the advice of Felix Kagi, then-general manager at Indiana's Paoli Peaks, he placed snow-gun fans on towers to shoot the snow upward, allowing it to gain more moisture as it floated to the ground.

"He is a superb listener," Kagi says with a thick Swiss accent. "I believe the fact that Tim doesn't ski makes him a better ski operator, because he isn't set on any given thing."

Today, Boyd continues to invest in top-of-the-line snow-making equipment that operates at a third of the cost and decibel level of older equipment. "Peak Resorts really became snow experts by being in their geographic region," says Joe VanderKelen, president of Michigan-based Snow Machines, Inc., which provides Boyd with its state-of-the-art snow guns. "They were able to take that model and modify it for those markets with that understanding of snow."

Others soon began to take notice. "When we first started, we'd go to these trade shows and be nobodies," recalls Grenier. "One day you're drawing from their wisdom, and the next day it flip-flops."

Suddenly, Boyd was getting calls from other resorts. "Honestly, we never planned to have more than Snow Creek and Hidden Valley," says Missi. "But then we were offered Paoli Peaks, and then Mad River Mountain. Then the people at Brandywine wanted to retire and offered it to us." Others followed: Boston Mills, Crotched Mountain, Jack Frost Mountain and Big Boulder Resorts, and finally Attitash and Mount Snow. "All of these places came to us; we never sought them out," says Missi.

"You can look at a place and know if it's going to work," she adds. "You can tell by the mountain, the infrastructure, the population base. To be really successful, you need to have a base of 5 or 6 million people; we've learned St. Louis and K.C. are a bit small. To have a great year, you really need to ski over 100,000 people. These two do just under that."

While East Coast skiers are sometimes skeptical of a Midwest company running a ski resort, Peak Resorts has earned a solid reputation. Jeremy Davis, founder of New England Lost Ski Areas Project (nelsap.org), a website devoted to documenting closed resorts in the Northeast, has witnessed the transformation firsthand. "Peak Resorts has done some great things with reviving Crotched Mountain in New Hampshire," he says. "It was totally abandoned and falling apart, and they basically made it a new ski area."

The president of the Midwest Ski Areas Association, Chris Stoddard, has also watched Peak Resorts grow over the years. "A lot of places thought they'd make money in condos or hotels. But if they don't make money in the ski operation, they become a drag to the business," he says. "Tim has been careful to find businesses where he can make money and build from there."

"It's not rocket science," says Missi. "The ski business is about 10 things you have to do great, and people will come." Boyd says it's not quite that simple. "It's become a very sophisticated industry," he says. "You need to keep up with the technology. It's not like the old days, where you had a hill and as long as you had a bunch of snow it worked out. It's also much tougher to run a business now because of the regulations."

And there it is: the regulations.


Fallout in the Valley
Pulling to the edge of Hidden Valley's highest peak, Bill Brandes throws his Ford Explorer into park. "Look at this view," he says, gazing into the distance, the Arch barely visible through the morning haze. "Twenty-five years I've had the opportunity to come out here from December to March, look at the view, see the snow, the stars, the sky, the wildlife. It's been awesome."

Brandes became general manager at Hidden Valley in fall 2007, around the time he retired as fire chief of Creve Coeur Fire Department. "My second day out here, Tim said, 'This is your resort. Run it,'" he recalls. With Missi's help, he oversees the entire operation: rentals, ski patrol, lodge, ski shop, maintenance shed and paperwork, among other things. During winter, Brandes checks weather forecasts religiously, judging when to make snow — a crucial decision, because the process is so costly (a monthly electric bill runs $50,000). "If I see a window of two or three days, I'm gonna go for it," he says.

As Brandes drives, he points out the snow-making guns, explaining how the hoses along the towers carry water, electricity and compressed air to the fans, allowing water particles to shoot out of the nozzles. "There's less noise from that snow gun than there is from a hair dryer," he says. "I try to tell my wife that." The guns create a 3-foot bed of snow in most places. Reservoirs at the base of the hill, fed by a 1,000-foot well, catch the water and pump it back to the guns through a series of underground pipes, allowing Hidden Valley to take advantage of Missouri's regional "freeze-and-thaw" pattern.

Brandes stops near the maintenance shed, pointing to a steep hill that he hopes will one day become a snow-tubing area: a project nearly a year in the approval process.

It began last March. Brandes filed a request with Wildwood's Department of Planning and Parks to expand the resort's parking lot and add a snow-tubing run. To his dismay, he received a letter a month later that outlined 39 problems with the request. He began digging through files and asking engineer David Springer about the paperwork. "Lo and behold, all but four things had already been submitted to Wildwood," Brandes recalls. "What I gathered was somewhere things got lost or misplaced." Undeterred, he resubmitted the paperwork, believing everything was in order.

The shock came five months later. The morning of the planning and zoning meeting, September 2, he went online to see the report. There were additions. Two were particularly disconcerting: 1) a requirement that Hidden Valley donate 1.65 acres of public space for the expanded parking lot or pay a fee of $251,559 and 2) a request that Hidden Valley's hours be prohibited from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. "I called up Tim right away, and I said, 'You've gotta come see this,'" recalls Brandes. "'This is BS!'"

When Boyd walked in, Brandes was on the phone with Wildwood director of planning and parks Joe Vujnich. "I'm saying, 'You never discussed this before. You're going to run us out of business,'" recalls Brandes.

It wasn't the first time Hidden Valley and Wildwood had butted heads.

From the city's incorporation in 1995, Boyd vocally opposed it. "I never looked at it as a positive because everything Wildwood brought to the area we already had — except more taxes, less control, and fighting." When Boyd added ski runs in 2001, Wildwood claimed he hadn't followed procedure. Two years later, the city demanded the resort halt additional work, saying it hadn't filed the proper site plans. "None of these people have even been out here during the winter," says Missi. "How can you be up there legislating when you don't even know anything about us?"

A passionate discussion ensued at the September planning and zoning meeting. Vujnich started with an overview of the site, discussing curb and landscaping requirements for the parking lot. He mentioned complaints about late-night activities, citing a seven-year-old petition from Radcliffe Place, a subdivision near the resort. "What he failed to add was a follow-up petition showed the complaints came from just a few people," says Brandes. Afterward, more than 20 Hidden Valley advocates voiced their support, with only one man expressing concerns about noise and traffic. Brandes then gave a PowerPoint presentation — outlining the proposed improvements, as well as arguing that the resort already met the public-space requirement and that late-night operating hours were a must, because the weather demands making snow at night. The commission agreed to some of Hidden Valley's requests, though Vujnich recommended the resort seek the city council's approval for late-night hours and its public-space appeal. Bringing it to a motion, the planning and zoning commission agreed by a vote of 8 to 1.

That's when it happened. During a break at 10:20 p.m., a frustrated Boyd motioned Brandes to the side. "Pull the request," he said. As Boyd marched out of the building, a passerby asked what he was going to do. "I'll sell the damn place to a developer," he said. The commission quickly rescinded its vote and postponed action, but it was too late. Boyd's words had struck a chord.

"All of a sudden, that went through there like wildfire," Boyd says. "I might as well have thrown a match on a straw pile."


Call of the Wild
Wildwood Mayor Tim Woerther settles into a booth at Winchester's Saint Louis Bread Co. "So what kind of piece are you doing?" he asks.

It's mid-November. Woerther has weathered a media storm. "No matter what I did to talk to newspapers, TV and radio stations, if it didn't help them out, it became a nonstory," he says. He says he's personally responded to more than

400 emails, nearly 40 phone calls and a dozen letters about Hidden Valley. Even today, the ski resort is the first subject that comes up when Woerther talks to the Eureka High School Politicats, a student political group. "It was around September 8 when the media began coming to the city and asking questions," Woerther recalls. "That's when things got off the rails."

An hour after Lafayette High School freshman George Hyland heard the news from his mother, he started a "Save Hidden Valley!" Facebook group. "I thought it would just have about

100 people, mainly friends," he says. Instead, it quickly grew to more than 3,700 members.

The captain of the Hidden Valley Ski Team, Dave Coulter, discussed moving to Utah with his family if the resort shut down. His son, Steve — the 2008 NASTAR men's champion — was also dismayed. "If it would have closed, I would have left the St. Louis region," he says.

When Scott Baker, owner of Fox Creek Outfitters, got wind that a TV reporter was interviewing Boyd about the possibility of closing the slopes, he drove to the resort. "The majority of my business plan is contingent on Hidden Valley," he says. "Without them, I'd probably be selling beads or candles." Since moving to St. Louis from upstate New York in 2004, Baker had ingrained himself in the local ski culture. "I always say, 'Snow runs thicker than blood,'" he says. Desperate to salvage the slopes, Baker immediately launched a website, savehv.com, with an online petition that drew more than 2,700 names. He also organized protests for the city meetings.

"The funny thing is that Hidden Valley is one of those places that's small, and you sometimes feel this cabin fever and want a bigger ski hill, but then you're right back on that hill the next day," says Baker. "When you have to fight for something you love, it makes you realize how much you want it in your life."

Looking back, the mayor believes the dispute arose mostly out of a miscommunication. Many people didn't understand that the hours-of-operation policy and public-space requirement were "clearly city council issues," he says. Personally, he hadn't heard any complaints about noise or light, and "in the city's history of replying to public-space [requirements], nobody has ever paid the fee," he says.

"The point is that if you're open and honest with communication, there should be some trust built up there. And that is the one thing that has broken down during all this."

"Why the miscommunication occurred, I don't know," says council member David Sewell. "That one I don't think any of us will ever know. The only people who can answer that are Tim Boyd and Joe Vujnich."

Responding to an email from SLM, Vujnich said the hours-of-operation request met the minimum two-week advance notice, and the public-space requirement was part of a 2007 amendment to the original land-use permit.

While the mayor acknowledges that the resort predates Wildwood, "that doesn't give them, or anyone else, a pass from getting out of the process," he says. "At that point, I at least recognized we were not going to win a public-relations battle. The only way we would is if the city and Hidden Valley got together and came up with some sort of resolution."

Sewell was the first to act.

"As soon as I heard, I called to introduce myself and said, 'Let's sit down and talk, because I don't want to see you leave. I think this is a whole series of misunderstandings.'" Boyd agreed to meet only with Sewell and council member Ron James, Hidden Valley's ward representatives. Brandes gave them a tour of the facilities, and they sat down with Boyd. "Initially he didn't want to talk, but within an hour he was saying, 'Well, maybe we have some options,'" recalls Sewell. "As we worked with Tim Boyd over the next couple weeks, as he started to see the groundswell from the people in the area, he started to realize how important Hidden Valley was to the region."

Boyd admits, "Even I was shocked at the public reaction. I was sitting up in Vermont and getting phone calls every 30 seconds saying, 'You're on the front page of the Post-Dispatch.'

"I knew there would be some people who'd be concerned, but I had no idea the magnitude."


Back on the Lift
In the end, Boyd resolved to do what he's done with the weather for decades: compromise.

On October 20, he arrived at city hall and slung his blue-and-black jacket over a chair at the front of the room. Again, hundreds poured into the parking lot and packed the room. Reporters swarmed along the walls. Once the meeting began, Boyd approached the podium. "My goal tonight is basically to present the planning and zoning board with a conceptual idea that we think can bridge the gap to give us the reliability we're looking for and give Wildwood the things it's looking for," he said.

He unveiled a proposal that he'd pieced together from other ski resorts: the idea of a 10-year master plan that would include a snow-tubing area, additional ski runs and "ski-in, ski-out" housing units — among other potential improvements. To fulfill the public-space requirement and to ensure Hidden Valley's future, he suggested putting the land into a conservation easement. Finally, he revealed that the golf course would close at the end of November, after years of being subsidized by the ski resort. "That's coming from an avid golfer," he said. "No one hates that more than me."

As he made his presentation and answered questions, he put the resort's future on the line: "If you don't like this idea, there's no point in going any further," he said. "I'm not looking for approval of details, but I would like you to look me in the eye and tell me that you think this is a good idea or not. All I'm looking for is honesty."

The city officials reacted with an informal indication. "I would say that we poll this commission and unless we have an absolute negative for Mr. Boyd, that we are in support of going forward," said commissioner Harry Dillon. "And The Farmer's Almanac has the next 10 years of being cold ..." Before he could finish, the room erupted into applause.

The rest of the commission seconded the sentiment, with city council liaison Bart Cohn noting, "I would just like to restate that this still has to clear our city council."

The mayor closed, saying, "For the people that are here tonight, thank you very much for the phone calls, the emails. Thanks for the show of support, because I know without you, we wouldn't be here tonight talking about this."

In just two hours, Hidden Valley seemed to have been saved.

Untrodden Snow
Boyd got the answer he wanted — on the record and in front of hundreds. "It's one of the reasons I said at the meeting, 'I want you all to look me in the eye and tell me you think this a good idea.' Let's get this on the public record here, because all the stuff they've told us in the past is behind closed doors, and when we raised a stink about it, they'd say, 'Oh, we didn't say that' ... It was really a great lesson in what happens when things get in the court of public opinion."

Brandes has a different take. "This was a battle," he says, adding that it will take months to flesh out the master plan before again asking the city's approval. "It's one of the battles that's won in the war. I hate to say it's a war, but when you're developing a master plan ..." He lets his words trail off, pondering the possibilities.

"The devil is in the details," says the mayor. "Never say never, but I think we have enough eyes on this that we can go ahead and adequately address it going forward."

Sewell notes, "I think it really softened the hearts of some of the hard-line council members." He adds, "The key here is to be diligent in keeping the communication flowing. One thing that Ron James and I are going to be diligent about is ensuring there is absolutely clear and unambiguous communication so neither side is surprised again."

As for Boyd and Peak Resorts, what's over the next mountain?

"I really don't see him slowing down much in the next 10 or 15 years," says son Jesse. "He's as interested as I have ever seen him." Missi agrees. "We're still young enough and the family's young enough that we like to keep busy." And though Peak Resorts owns a condo in Vermont and a house in Pennsylvania, she says they plan to keep their feet firmly planted in Missouri, especially after the recent birth of their first grandchild: "We started here; our whole life is here."

"We're not done yet," adds Grenier. "Now Jesse and the next generation are getting into it. We're letting these young, enthusiastic managers draw from our wisdom and learn from our mistakes." Jesse, who grew up on the slopes, is largely steering the terrain-park portion of Peak Resorts, adding inventive obstacles for the ever-expanding crowd of snowboarders.

And while the grand scale of Vermont's Mount Snow marks the company's next big step, Boyd plans to stick to what he knows: metro ski resorts and snow-making. "Our expertise is there now, so that's probably where we'll stay — unless someone were to make us an offer we can't refuse," he says, smiling.

Reflecting on the past three decades, he says. "It's stunning to look back at the years when people were laughing at this whole thing."

"I guess it shows conventional wisdom isn't always the best wisdom."