Bunch of Amateurs Read online

  Copyright © 2012 by Jack Hitt

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-95518-0

  Illustrations by John Burgoyne

  Jacket design by Christopher Brand

  Jacket photographs: (Astronaut) Francesco Reginato/Getty Images; (barn) Samuel Hicks/Gallery Stock

  v3.1

  For Yancey and Tarpley

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1. GUNGYWAMPING

  2. ONCE MORE, TO THE GATES

  3. THE TRUTH ABOUT BIRDS

  4. A CONFEDERACY OF DABBLERS

  5. MIGHTY WHITE OF YOU: A COMEDY OF AMATEURS

  6. EYEING HEAVEN

  7. THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

  Acknowledgments

  1

  GUNGYWAMPING

  n a forested bottomland of southeastern Connecticut, amid stony outcroppings and strewn granite boulders, lies an unusual cluster of nine beehive-like stone shelters. As far back as anybody can remember, including the Pequot Indians, the area has had a funny name: Gungywamp. When I first heard about the place, I called around and found David Barron, then the president of the Gungywamp Society. He invited me to join him on a walk in the woods with some fresh recruits, mostly married couples in their fifties. He told me that Gungywampers believed the odd stone huts are Celtic dwellings, an abandoned camp left by Irish monks who visited America fifteen hundred years ago.

  After parking our cars on the side of a remote road, a dozen of us slipped into the woods. Barron, a tall man with sprouts of white hair exploding out from under a Greek fisherman’s cap, marched with vigor, bubbling with enthusiasm. As a guide, he cut a familiar figure. He possessed a partiality for crippling puns. When someone had to peel off early from the group, he shouted to them, “Shalom on the range!” He smoked so much his white mustache was tainted yellow. He had a salty way of sprinkling his comments with innuendo that amused the wives, yet affected a Victorian coyness about cursing. When I found some trash—beer cans and cigarette butts—obviously left at one shelter by some teenagers, he let fly the foulest term possible: “Sheitzen!”

  Then Barron led us to a large rock. He wanted to know if we noticed anything. There were some lichens on it, not much else; we stared intently. Barron explained that the rock had faded carvings on it and that one of them was a Chi-Rho, a symbol that superimposes the letter X over the stem of a capital P and served as an early emblem of Christianity. We all squinted.

  “This particular style of Chi-Rho was common among Irish monks during the fifth to seventh centuries A.D.,” Barron told us excitedly, linking the symbol to a time when a certain Brendan the Navigator of Ireland, according to legend, sailed west in search of the Promised Land of Saints. “Do you see it?” We all leaned over, carefully scanning every blotchy divot. An uneasy silence, broken only by the cracking of twigs beneath our boots, seized the forest.

  Slightly annoyed at our befuddled postures, Barron turned an exasperated, upturned palm toward some mild indentations. He sneeringly referenced skeptics at Harvard and Yale who had looked at this evidence and were unimpressed. “Haaaavard,” he said with thick snark. Right away you got the sense that there were two kinds of esoteric knowledge at odds here. The elite evidence-based world of “Yaaaaa-uuuull” and this other kind of knowledge—Barronic knowledge—that meant you had to see things differently. Barron took a piece of chalk from his pocket and traced over some worn dimples and there it was. A white Chi-Rho leapt off the speckled gray of the boulder like a 3-D trick. Many in the crowd ooo’d and aaah’d. It was an emotional moment to stand in this quiet hardwood bottomland and suddenly feel it instantly transform into a place of antiquity. A new idea had us in its grip, this notion that Irish mariners once stood right here fifteen hundred years ago. Then again, a few of us eyeballed another nearby chiseling, smoothed down by weather in much the same way, and we wondered what runic name it went by: JC III.

  When you come across a guy like David Barron, you think, Haven’t I met him before? The eccentric demeanor, the cocksure certainty for his ideas, that panting cascade of arcane information about things like Chi-Rhos. He’s the guy with enough self-accumulated knowledge about local archaeology and medieval orthography and lithic architecture to cobble together a theory about this place. He’s a type, right? Individuals like Barron can be men or women, old or young, but chances are their gusto for their singular obsession is captivating (or irritating, depending on your mood that day). And one other thing—I’m speaking from personal experience now—part of this package typically involves an unusual hat.

  We all know these people. They are recurring American characters. These people are amateurs.

  I say American characters not because the rest of the world doesn’t have amateurs. Of course, every place has them and they are everywhere. At its most fundamental, an amateur is simply someone operating outside professional assumptions. The word derives ultimately from the Latin but comes into English via the French word amateur, meaning “lover” and, specifically, passionate love. Or obsessive love. This powerful emotion usually indicates someone’s embrace of a notion (invention, theory, way of life) as a compulsive passion for the thing—not the money, fame, or career that could come of it. But there are differences.

  In Europe and on other continents, the word hints at class warfare. Credentialism in the Old World suggests the elevation of those occupying a certain station. Amateurs may be taken seriously but, almost by the power of the word, are kept in their place: isolated outside some preexisting professional class, some long-standing nobility.

  In America, amateurs don’t stay in their place or keep to themselves. So once the word crossed the Atlantic Ocean—whether by St. Brendan or a more traditional way—it came to mean all kinds of, often, conflicting things. “Amateur” can signify someone who is nearly a professional or completely a fool. The word also encompasses a sense of being pretentious (mere amateur) or incompetent (the meaning one first hears in this book’s title). In fact, look it up in Roget’s Thesaurus and it’s a wasp nest of contradictions—falling under five rubrics of meaning: dabbler, dilettante, bungler, virtuoso, and greenhorn. In America, we’re a little touchy about this word, and for good reason.

  Historically, our amateur ancestors grew out of the Ben Franklin tradition of tinkering at home. In the mid-nineteenth century, the homebrew style had to contend with a societal drive to professionalize, a movement that accelerated with the arrival of the Industrial Revolution. That was an era when, for example, the American Medical Association (formed in 1847) sought to distinguish legitimate doctors from snake-oil salesmen, itinerant abortionists, and other makeshift charlatans peddling miracle tonics. Many disciplines organized professional guilds like the AMA or created university departments to grant credentials to the serious practitioners of a craft over the self-schooled.

  But the outsiders never really went away. American professionals have had to grow up right alongside their striving, awkward, amateur cousins in the same way that the first attempts at gentry in the Old South had to contend with their toothless cousins named Fishbait or Elrod, sleeping in the bushes outside the mansion. The embarrassment of our amateur origins, in every estate of American endeavor, is always lurking just around the corner.

  In European popular culture, amateurism is practically feared. It’s Europe that g
ave us the “mad scientist”—an amateur straying into the realm of forbidden knowledge—whose models are Drs. Frankenstein and Jekyll. In America, we soften that image from mad to absentminded. We admire that kind of risk-taker. Our amateur scientists might resemble the character in Back to the Future played by Christopher Lloyd (whose hair has a passing resemblance to Barron’s). The mad scientists of Europe spawned monsters. Our absentminded professors created flubber, an absurd confection whose most unusual property is that it enables our dopey hero to attract a girl.

  So we think amateurs are hopeless dreamers, made practically adorable by their obsessive love for some one true thing, and each and every one of them charged with the potential of being a genius and making a crucial discovery. There’s something quintessentially American in that version of the character, isn’t there? The lovable Poindexter who just might possibly stumble upon the next big thing.

  While the word may be complicated and full of contradictions, the American amateurs that constantly pop up throughout our history are, basically, one of two kinds of characters. They are either outsiders mustering at some fortress of expertise hoping to scale the walls, or pioneers improvising in a frontier where no professionals exist. If every country forms its national character at the trauma of birth, then we are forever rebelling against the king or lighting out for the territories.

  On a late afternoon, Barron and I hung out for a while at the Gungywamp structures. They are charming shelters—about the size of a good tool shed built with flat stones stacked closer together as they get to the top, which is formed by a large, flat capstone. The entire construction, except the opening, is often covered in dirt, which in turn is overgrown with grasses. Being inside feels extremely ancient. Barron wanted to show me the main building. He believed it to be an oratory, a one-room chapel, examples of which are still standing in Ireland. These edifices began going up in Ireland after A.D. 400, when the Christian church opened for business there. In this particular hut, there was a “vent hole” whose orientation, it was accidentally discovered in 1987, admitted light only twice a year—on the equinox.

  Barron gave me a sharp look, flaring his eyes and nostrils. His hat seemed to pop up a bit and meant to signal that the proof was fairly conclusive, right? That I was a convert, right? I flashed a neutral smile. Earlier that day, I had spoken to Connecticut’s state archaeologist, Nick Bellantoni. He let me know right away he was quite tired of this crowd and couldn’t they see already that the stone buildings were just colonial root cellars or pigsties?

  Across from the vent hole was another small opening at the ground level that Barron wanted to show me. In Ireland, Barron continued, such doorways were common in these chambers. They led to hidden rooms where Celtic farmers might wait for the passing of an invading horde of Vikings. The dark hole was not more than a foot and a half square.

  “A secret passageway,” Barron said. So I crawled in.

  When I originally hung out with Barron, I loved all this. Stories about crackpot amateurs like the Gungywampers are a journalistic chestnut. First and foremost, they require a slightly oddball protagonist who can supply lots of character detail (some editor is always urging the writer to “make it zany”—that word is practically jargon in the modern magazine business). And in order to really bring it—the zany—you not only need a Gungywamp zealot who curses in weird German like Barron, but you also need his foil, an official expert bristling with skepticism. So I was good to go, article-wise. I had the two key characters in the crackpot subgenre.

  I was thinking about all this when I crawled out the other end of the secret tunnel. I was in another conical room also shaped into a rounded pyramid. It was just tall enough for me to set my six-foot self into a crouching stand.

  I sat down on the dirt floor in the secret chamber and illuminated the drywall masonry with my flashlight. Even though this story was coming easily, some of the details weren’t dovetailing. Sitting in this little room, and touching these old stones, I began to ask myself: Why would any colonial build nine very labor-intensive root cellars so close together? A collection of outbuildings like this doesn’t occur anywhere else in the United States, and how many storehouses for potatoes and squash do you need in the eighteenth century? Who would ever build a solar-oriented root cellar? Why would any farmer create a crawl space in a pigsty that led to a hidden chamber? So instead of rushing to my computer to write the usual crackpot story, a new question popped into my mind: What if David Barron were right?

  The first thing one usually hears about the era of the self-taught theorist and the garage inventor is it’s supposed to be dead. The Golden Age of American Amateurism is over. You can read all about it in countless books with tombstone titles, such as Thomas P. Hughes’s classic American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm 1870–1970, or any of a shelf full of books with titles beginning The End of … More broadly, the entire American experiment seems to be shutting down, if you read Naomi Wolf’s book The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot.

  I’m not sure I’d write America’s obit just yet, for the same reason that I wouldn’t write the closing chapter of amateurism either. Every generation likes to think that its time has grown too complex and sophisticated for any real homebrew breakthroughs. But then, each generation also discovers that what they thought were very expensive, highly unobtainable technologies suddenly turn into the next generation’s play toys.

  A few years ago, the technology for looking through surface materials—like those full-body scanners at airports—was incredibly complicated and expensive. Already, amateurs online have hacked the technology and created cheap DIY versions involving little more than certain cameras, a combination of filters, and specific wavelengths of light. This homemade method for peering beneath people’s clothes is about to do for those old “X-ray specs” ads in comic books what the cell phone did for Star Trek’s “communicator badge.” Make it real, and cheap. Like it or not, nude imagery is about to undergo the same change-up that personal information on Facebook did only a few years ago. And on we go.

  Like so many trends in this country, amateurism is no different. It’s not a moment that ends, but a cycle that’s always coming around.

  Business scholars have attempted to deconstruct how such amateurs succeed and one noted theory, published in the Harvard Business Review, argues that outsiders are not burdened with the “curse of knowledge.” It turns out that ignorance is bliss and, in many cases, a more productive perch to start from. Not knowing anything about something is often precisely what’s needed to see something new. And then the cycle starts over.

  That’s why, in the 1970s, IBM’s top executive could say that the world would only need a few computers, because that’s how they saw it. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were not cursed with such presumptions and so famously went into Jobs’s Cupertino garage and roughed out an early desktop computer from parts sold in the local electronics store or improvised with skills picked up at the now-famous Homebrew Computer Club.

  Amateurism mysteriously summons America back, like some Great Gatsby imperative, to that very mythological garage to begin once again the work of thinking about things far away from expert prejudices. It’s not a coincidence that Hewlett-Packard recently restored the original garage at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, California, where Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett first formed their company in 1939 (and then provided Disney with some of the sound equipment used in making Fantasia). That quintessential location is the temple of American amateur ingenuity, and after stepping out to report the stories in this book, I found that plenty of folks still hie to this sacred space (literally) every weekend, hoping to make the big breakthrough.

  In the pop culture itself, the evidence is constantly emerging that Americans are figuratively returning to this fertile place too.

  There are the thriving new magazines like Make and a host of others catering to the resurgence of the DIY—do-it-yourself—impulse in America. Contests summ
oning amateurs to their workbenches and offering millions in rewards are now sponsored by the Pentagon (to invent robot cars), NASA (new lunar technology), the X Prize Foundation (space tourism), Congress (hydrogen energy), Al Gore (carbon emissions abatement), and even Google ($20 million reward for a robot that can get to the moon and explore).

  There is also a steady stream of interest in weekend hobby clubs, where Americans have long retreated to tinker—depending on the decade—with their radios, remote-control vehicles, computers, and robots. The Internet has set loose a massive new style: open-source amateur collaborations that completely restructure entire disciplines. My own field of journalism is being thoroughly undermined, crashed, and rebuilt by the blogosphere, Slate, the Daily Beast, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. There is now open talk among the most fuddy-duddy editors that the dead-tree format—i.e., the newspaper—may be the illuminated manuscript of the twenty-first century. The old financial models are crumbling. Between 2000 and 2008, Craigslist alone eliminated about 49 percent of newspaper revenue that once came in from classified ads—as bloggers swarm every news story with fact-checking and commentary. They’ve created a heightened sense of being observed and have fundamentally altered the way journalism now gets reported and written.

  There is almost no field that isn’t experiencing similar tectonic quakes. Just casting about, it’s not hard to find outsider collaborations. Amateur weather freaks, “storm spotters” who now communicate online, have long been relied upon by local governments and are acknowledged by the National Weather Service as “the Nation’s first line of defense against severe weather.” The world of biodiesel (not to mention the latest emblem of American freedom—the solar-powered car) has launched a thousand backyard inventors, as well as roving salesmen peddling devices that home-brew gasoline from table scraps. Google maps have inspired a new generation of self-appointed spies to scout enemy landscapes. Do-it-yourself builders of submarines, or “personal submersibles,” now explore the ocean floor (PSUBS.org). Thiago Olson is a kid in Oakland Township, Michigan, who is now classified as the eighteenth amateur to create nuclear fusion in his backyard. It’s the number 18 that’s arresting.