the closest America gets to a samurai sword-maker

it's time for the first edition of Essay Club

It’s time for our first foray into Essay Club. Hopefully you’ve all read ‘Unity with the Universe’ by Wright Thompson and are ready to share your comments with me in, funnily enough, the comments.

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‘Dawn’ by Russell Chatham

“A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.” — Thomas Merton

Here is what all great non-fiction aspires to: Consideration of the very large through the very specific. The rendering of important-if-opaque ideas through stories you can actually get your head around. Abstract notion articulated by specific action.

It is life in fishing rods.

A good story, according to Wright Thompson, is about “people and place. It needs to be about people. If the readers feel when the story is over that they’ve been to a place you’ve done your job. You want to give people a road map in the story so they don’t feel lost in the desert, but also in a cinematic way that’s interesting to read.”

So, what is ‘Unity with the Universe’ about? It is about love and loss, learning and yearning. It is about finding your calling, or, here, ‘your song’. It is about transience: of the earth, of the body, of time. It is also about fishing rods, yes. It is about a man and a woman who fall in love, even as a body is betrayed by disease. It is about communication and dignity. It is about rivers and Montana and migrating birds who only mature when they return home. It is, briefly, about ‘the poop wars’. It is not a story about bamboo or fibreglass, not even a story about fish, nor even one romanticising rugged outdoor meditations in foot-high streams. It is a story about a relationship held together by the same thing that is slowly driving it apart: perfectionism.

“The idea of a feature isn’t to tell readers all the info about something,” writes Thompson in a brief guide to writing scenes on an old Bleacher Report blog. “It is to create a world. People should understand the subject of the feature; just telling them lots of cool facts and formative moments isn’t enough. It’s only halfway there.”

In creating that world, the hills of Montana, the streams and creeks and switchbacks, in the homespun atelier of paralysed rod-maker Tom and his wife Gerri, Thompson establishes the motivation.

Perfection does not exist. And it is that impossibility that keeps our main character, Tom, alive. If he finds it, it is the end. "Once you know," Tom’s friend, another famed rod designer, says, "then it's dead. The search is over." He knows it, everyone knows it. Tom is in pain but finds peace in his work. Others are in pain, too — boredom, frustration, longing — but find peace in his art, seeking out the quaint little ranch where he finds unity with the universe, evoking the spirits as he instructs his crew — two assistants and his wife, Gerri — to reach for the beyond.

Gary Smith, the legendary sportswriter, has a rule for telling stories. Paul Kix, Thompson’s former colleague at ESPN, paraphrases it as: “Every person has a central conflict in their lives, says Smith, and a daily manifestation of that conflict. Find the central conflict, find its daily manifestation, and what you’ve actually found is that person’s soul.”

But while we find Tom’s soul, we search for Gerri’s. His work keeps Tom moving, perfectionism slows Gerri down. She has become, in Tom’s esteemed estimation, the best crafter of fishing rods in the world. But this is his dream, she says, not hers. Tom is the closest America could come to a samurai sword-maker. But she plans a trip to France with friends. Her husband of two decades, of whom she is the sole carer, slips into a quiet depression as he waits for her exit. But, as Thompson writes, if she doesn’t do something for herself, she might look up and be too old.

As with all satisfying stories, the foreshadowing hits us right where it matters. In the classic Southern gothic style, Thompson — a total fucking romantic — throws in the name of a wild bird as if we already know it but, knowing we’re in the hands of a truly great writer, we know that the bird is not there for nothing.

Towards the start of the second section, the couple sit in their home looking out of the window at the clouds rolling in:

"The storms don't often come over us," Gerri says. "It just sort of splits. We watch them to see which way they're gonna go."

They are surrounded by nature, and while living in a tactile world once defined Tom, he is now a spectator. It's April, a year ago, and in a few weeks, the lazuli buntings will land in their yard, completing a long flight to their breeding grounds. Tom, who is 71, can relate to them. Each male has a unique call, but the yearlings leave the deserts of the south without one. They depart the place of their birth voiceless, and only when they reach Montana and begin looking for a partner do they find a song of their own.

When you see a section like that, you already know how it’s gonna end.