Bunch of Amateurs (4 page)

Out in the forest with the Gungywampers, I came to understand that the conventional wisdom about the Age of Discovery is deeply flawed (even if they never won me over with their Chi-Rho evidence). I would hear one withering critique of Christopher Columbus after another. Not of the anti-imperialist sort; there were no mentions of blankets infected with smallpox. The Gungywampers trash Columbus because they think his big, bold, much ballyhooed “risk” of sailing across the Atlantic was in fact not that big a deal and has been hyped by academics who don’t want to even consider the possibility that crossing
the ocean was not that difficult. Goaded by the Gungywampers, I started calling around the history departments and wound up talking to a historian who had taught at Brandeis and NYU, Cyrus Gordon, who specialized in archaeology and ancient languages.

“Plenty of people were capable of crossing the Atlantic. They just didn’t make a big deal about it,” Gordon said. He argued that what really marked the Age of Discovery was not so much that Columbus sailed the ocean blue but that it also coincided with the Dawn of the Book. Unlike the previous era’s illuminated manuscript, with its labor-intensive efforts making it suitable only for extremely valuable texts like scripture and maybe a little science or history, this new book medium was faster to produce and more easily distributed. In its own time, the book’s impact on culture was not unlike our Internet’s. A lot of things could be published, and new stories could get told. Columbus, for instance, published his letters after his voyages, as did most of the name explorers. This new medium was drawn more to stories of individuals and their great achievements. If and when Brendan returned, he had to wait for an epic poet to compose a saga. That’s some serious lag time in publicity (although one that bitchy authors nowadays believe they can understand). And sagas weren’t written down but existed in the oral tradition, a second-rate venue back then, the tabloid media of the Dark Ages.

When Columbus returned, Professor Gordon told me, he “practically held a press conference, that’s all.” And there were publishers there to take it all down.

Gungywampers hold that there were plenty of accounts of people sailing to America. It’s just that we don’t read sagas the right way anymore. Brendan the Navigator has his poem too. Eventually it was written down and called the
Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis
(
The Voyage of the Abbot, Saint Brendan
). It’s a ripping yarn of a band of Irish monks who left home around
A.D
. 500 in leather boats called currachs. They sought to escape European corruption by sailing west in search of a remote place they called the “Promised Land of Saints.”
As the poem goes, the monks endured the frights of a moving island, a giant who hailed fire down on them, and a dangerous sea of crystal pillars—very colorful images, clearly the fictional embroideries of a poet. But what if they were metaphorical descriptions of a whale, an Icelandic volcano, and icebergs? the Gungywampers argue. Suddenly the story can be read somewhat journalistically, too.

Although Brendan was a historic character and the Irish monks of that era were known for their maritime talent (currachs can still be found among Atlantic fishermen, and
National Geographic
sailed one from Ireland to America in 1976 for a TV special), few historians agree with the Gungywampers that there was a voyage. But it’s no longer absurd to try and prove with solid material findings that it did happen. And the era that preceded Columbus looks a lot less dark and far more interesting than it once did. Adventurers did sail and improbable journeys did take place, and it just might be that one of them sought out the Promised Land of Saints and found it just off I-95 not far from the Foxwoods Casino.

This is a book called
Bunch of Amateurs
because that last word most accurately captures this essential quality that runs through these stories. I also call it a search for the American character, because there’s just something fundamentally American about heading off to one’s garage to reinvent the world.

Amateurs are often wrong, crazy, fraudulent, or twisted. There is typically a pomposity among amateurs that, well, one just has to get used to. They are often nerds, if younger; cranks, if slightly mature; eccentric, if aged; and—it should be said—at just about any age they can be total jackasses. But these are just the characteristics of people
obsessed with a new idea, following their bliss, in love (
amo
,
amas
,
amat
—amateur) with one true thing.

Who cannot love amateurs like the gungywamping David Barron? Not merely because these people are loopy and fun in a knight errant sort of way, but because even the amateurs who have it all wrong but are obsessed are typically on to something. It’s just often not the something they think they are on to.

I’ve hung out with a lot of amateurs who were misguided or, for now, lost in a world defined mostly by their own private conspiracy theories. But their views of the larger profession or frontier against which they were pushing usually led to some cool thoughts. What I always liked about hitching my own curiosity to someone else’s amateur passion was that it granted me access to a world, like a travel writer, in a way that few others get to see. Think of this book as a hitchhiker’s guide to amateurism. In each chapter I get in somebody’s car and go somewhere, and often no place near where the driver thought we were heading.

I sought out the venues where amateurism seemed to be thriving—those multimillion-dollar contests and those weekend hobby clubs hoping to break out into something important. Some disciplines are just teeming with amateur passion right now and long have been—astronomy and paleontology, for instance. It’s probably not a coincidence that both fields take us into the biggest questions. If you’re going to fiddle around on the weekends, why not solve the secret of the universe or the mystery of life? I hitched a ride on the ongoing controversy of Kennewick Man in part because the amateur anthropology in that case drove so revealingly off the rails. And I couldn’t resist the story of the ivory-billed woodpecker because no amateur pursuit takes us so far afield, lost in bureaucratic thinking, the drama of experts failing, the hidden history of Dixie’s postwar destruction, and the very American fantasies motivating the restoration of the land.

In this book, there is a search for the original American amateur and the baptismal moment of defining this country as a nation of
garage invention and second acts; the story of a fortress of expertise under attack by banshees eager to bring down the walls; an expedition into the world of weekend warriors meeting in their clubhouses plotting scientific revolutions; an intermission of error and total amateur fiasco; and, finally, a visit to one of those perpetual frontiers where amateurs continuously have (and always will) come to discover—in this case, literally—new worlds.

It’s a series of stories that glimpse the ongoing American experience, the one told repeatedly throughout our pop culture’s sacred art, such as
The Wizard of Oz
. Just who is the Wizard? A cranky old expert whose breakthrough achievement occurred long ago (during the Omaha State Fair, if the balloon is to be believed). He is no longer certain that his expertise will sustain his reputation, so he hides out in his fortress and engineers a mighty façade of smoke and fire he can belch at others who challenge what he has to say.

And who challenges him? Rank amateurs improvising their way through the deep dark forest. Their roundabout journey is a way for them to discover their own emerging capacities as unfinished creatures of intellect, compassion, and courage. Sure, that story might have been a metaphor for the qualities needed to get Americans through the Depression (what I always heard growing up). But
The Wizard of Oz
is also an American narrative about self-invented outsiders overwhelming the domain of professionals.

What does happen in the finale? The Wizard is revealed to be merely a washed-up blowhard who’s been dining out on the tattered remains of a dated and jejune credentialism. And what is it that the Wizard offers the three great amateurs—the scarecrow, the tin man, and the lion? Emblems of expertise: a diploma, a testimonial, and a medal.

“Back where I come from we have universities, seats of great learning, where men go to become great thinkers,” the Wizard tells the Scarecrow, assuring him in most un-European terms that he’s as smart, if not smarter, than any credentialed thinker. “And when they
come out, they think deep thoughts—and with no more brains than you have.… But! They have one thing you haven’t got! A diploma!”

The adventure’s the thing, of course, but it’s always nice when a self-made pioneer winds up with, say, a genius grant—something that happens all the time in our culture. We’re Americans. We love that stuff. This is our temple and our American idol. We’re Gungywampers all the way down.

t’s spring in Paris, 1778, and I have always pictured this particular moment happening in front of the golden baroque gates of Versailles. One of the weekend rituals of King Louis XVI was the formal reception of arriving ambassadors in order to chat them up a bit and get a sense of just what kind of new men were in town. That day, His Majesty was scheduled to meet the latest American envoy—John Adams, the Yosemite Sam of the founding fathers.

By Yosemite Sam, I don’t mean that Adams was a short, barrel-chested, overly suspicious, fuming hothead with a fondness for flyaway hairstyles and a taste for poofy neckwear. That’s a
given
. Rather, I mean that Adams, like Sam, spent a great deal of his life aggravated that the world would not conform to the story line he thought should be playing out around him. Adams was a man of protocol and
schedules, reasoned decisions and a disregard for foolishness, all work and no play—the kid who always did his homework on time.

When he was twenty-one years old, he set down a schoolwork plan in his diary that would last a lifetime: “I am resolved to rise with the Sun and to study the Scriptures, on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday mornings, and to study some Latin authors the other 3 mornings. Noon and Nights I intend to read English authors. This is my fixed Determination, and I will set down every neglect and every compliance with this Resolution. May I blush whenever I suffer one hour to pass unimproved.”

Adams rarely blushed. Life was a homework assignment to John Adams, and the right answer to every question was always self-improvement leading to virtue: “I will strive with all my soul to be something more than Persons who have had less Advantages than myself.”

Impressed by his improved self, Adams got distraught if he thought his moral achievement wasn’t properly recognized. When it wasn’t, which was often, Adams would plunge into the colonial version of a pity party and unload to his diary or his wife, Abigail, just how unfair it all was.

“The English have got at me,” he wrote to Abigail regarding British press coverage of his reputation in Paris. “They make fine work of me—fanatic, bigot, perfect cipher … awkward figure, uncouth dress, no address, no character, cunning hardheaded attorney.” When he witnessed others getting ahead by cunning or luxuriating unpunished in debauchery, he flipped: “Modesty is a virtue that can never thrive in public. Modest merit! Is there such a thing remaining in public life?”