Write Sharply

When I was 12, I made friends with my cousin. He’s my cousin’s husband actually, but it’s all the same to me. They were recently married at the time. He and I became friends because it was summer and I liked to fish as much as he did. I couldn’t drive, so I’d ride shotgun in his 70’s Ford Maverick. The window crank on the passenger side was replaced with a pair of vice-grips. The floor was littered with empty chip bags and cigar butts. There were dented surplus military canteens and rolls of duct tape and little patches of sawdust and oilstains on the blue carpet. The tires were bald and underinflated. You could hear them squeal around mild turns in the highway as we drove up near the power station in the town of Snelling, CA. He took on the name “Maverick”, despite that he had sold the old blue monster long ago. The car had been converted from 3 on the tree, to 4 on the floor and it ran like a sewing machine.

We would sneak behind some failing barbed wire fences and through thickets of unkempt berry vines to the other side of the dam. Back there is where the spillway water pooled up deep. Big planted trout roiled in the dark, cold water. Deep and calm, there were plenty of fish in there to keep us busy in the long summer afternoons. We’d lure them out of the structure and cover with salmon eggs on a #8 hook and a few split shot lead weights pinched a foot or so above the bait. With little current, and careful attention paid to the drag adjustment, you could pull plenty of fish out. We did, over and over on 2lb test line. That’s the sporstmanship of it. You learn to fight the fish, to wear it out, to let it run and give it a fair chance against your skill. We’d make it home in time to have tacos prepared by 6:00 in the evening. While they cooked, we’d drink cherry 7-UP by an oak fire in the driveway. This guy taught me how to sharpen my pocket knives, how to tie a World’s Fair knot in monofilament fishing line. He taught me how to replace a starter motor in a pickup truck. Later, he taught me how to safely operate a chainsaw and how to handle various firearms. He taught me how to cook fish on a barbecue and how you can eat the eyeballs when they turn white. They’re high in omega fatty acids and vitamin A and protein, he’d say. I thought it was the coolest thing to do. My friends at school were fascinated by the stories.

This guy would crank the local rock station when we drove and tell me about all of the artists crackling in the door speakers over FM waves. This is Nirvana. Kurt Cobain was the lead singer and he killed himself in 1994. This is Metallica, their new album (at the time) St. Anger sounds a lot different than their old stuff, but it’s still pretty good. This is Foo Fighters, the lead singer used to be a part of Nirvana. This is Led Zeppelin, one of the greatest bands to ever grace any stage. This is AC/DC, they’re Australian. This is Def Leppard, they’re English. This is 311, This is Smashing Pumpkins, this is Korn, this is System Of A Down, this is so and so. Hear that? This was recorded live. These guys can play, man. He could talk for hours like that. I learned a lot.

At the time, he was cutting trees down for people on the side, and attending college to obtain a master’s degree in history. He’d drag me along to be a swamper on the big projects. That’s the guy who drags brush out of the way for the sawyer. The sawyer is the guy running the saw. I got promoted to marker at one point. The marker’s job is to walk along the felled trunks and branches with a ruler stick and a big red crayon to measure out appropriate firewood lengths before they are cut. I loved it. I’m still thankful for those lessons and those times. He paid me in cordwood that we burned at my folk’s house in the winter months in an old stove with frayed asbestos gaskets on the heavy squeaking doors. I remember my mother wiping soot off the walls in every room for many years.

Between jobs in the summer, he and I worked on writing essays for fun. I chose the topic of knots, and their vital uses throughout history. Each one has a different function. Some are for fishing, those need to be executed in a way that ensures a firm hold in slick material. Others are for hitching boats and horses. Those have to be tight until you pull the lead end and release the thing you had secured. There are hitches, bends, loop knots, and splices, typically. Knot theory is used in the development of freeway interchanges and such, where engineers have to understand the way that roads intersect and pass over and pass under and wind up going where they need to go. I still look down from a plane as the flight prepares to land and see those great concrete loops down below in the destination cities. Our infrastructure, all tied together. It makes sense.

There is another lesson here, deep in the achives of adolescent memory that serves me well to this day. It began with some embarrassment that quickly became an opportunity to develop discipline in the way I communicate.

It was summer, again. I had taken the skills that Maverick taught me in knife honing and started a small side gig sharpening kitchen knives for family. I’d charge a few bucks per blade and the family would pay me twice what I charged because they adored me. It all felt like real business, but it was just real generosity. I would spend long afternoons scraping the bevel on a stone and trying to shave the blonde hair off my chubby arm. My skills improved, but the jobs took forever and I needed to speed up the process somehow. I consulted the Maverick. In an email, I asked if it would be a good idea to invest in a bench grinder from the local hardware store. It might have been too expensive for a kid to pull off, but once it was in play, I could sharpen knives in a fraction of the time. It seemed brilliant, but it was best to get a second opinion on a serious investment.

My email was riddled with poor punctuation. Lower case letters at the beginning of a sentence, “U” instead of “YOU”, double spaces here and there, other words crammed next to eachother with no space at all. Sentence fragments. It was abismal writing. Maverick replied graciously and advised that the bench grinder wheel would be too coarse out of the box to avoid damaging the steel on those delicate paring and filet knives. Additionally, the speed at which the grinding wheel turned would generate enough heat to re-temper the blades, thus compromising their strength. Keep at it with the natural stone hand-sharpening, and increase your prices. That was the sentiment. The email ended with an admonition: you should pay closer attention to your grammar, punctuation, and spelling. I know what you are saying, but that doesn’t matter. These are important skills to hone, and important habits to have. It will stick with you for life as another important thing to keep sharp.

I felt small, but those words stick with me to this day and I appreciate them deeply. He was right. There is no excuse for shoddy writing born from a lack of effort. Since then, anything that goes on paper gets a double check, a re-working, a second glance. I’m always surprised to see the little mistakes hidden in a paragraph. The typos lurking in the body of an email to a new client. The double-words, misplaced commas, misspelled words, forgotten rules. Sometimes received is recieved. Look at it closely. oops. Sometimes their, there, and they’re make their way into the wrong context in a flurry of keyboard pounding. It takes diligence, it takes practice, it takes care. You have to pay attention at the expense of expedience.

Now, decades after my reprimand, a question comes to mind: what is happening to our language? I hope to answer that in the next post, and I think we can figure this out.