Bunch of Amateurs

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 gave 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.