The Indefinite Article (Episode II)

Just because it’s heavy, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t lift it

   I once met a man. His name was J. Richard McEwan, a Micmac Indian (back before it was spelled Mi’kmag) from the Bear River Indian Reserve in Nova Scotia. I sat in his living room with my Uncle Everett, and Mr. McEwan told me how his father bent and bundled ribs for the birch bark canoes he built.

   This gentle man and my good uncle reminisced about Bear River in its heyday. My host was 81 and my uncle was 65. Talk gradually, perhaps inevitably, turned to the feats of strength of its men.

   “The men would compete to see who was the strongest,” Mr. McEwan recalled. “One day, so-and-so picked up a 200-pound wagon wheel with one finger. It was said that after he died they discovered he had a double set of ribs.”

   Mr. McEwan signed and gave me a copy of his book, Memories of a Micmac Life. “Sincere good wishes J. Richard McEwan 10-march-1989.” He and my uncle are dead now. 
   I’ve often wondered about that double set of ribs.

   In my last post, The Indefinite Article (Episode I), I talked about unreasonable assignments that were too heavy, too big around and completely absent of the sort of camaraderie that those tough Bear River men enjoyed in front of the blacksmith’s shop.

   I would not want, however, to give the impression that freelancers can turn up their noses at big jobs. That’s a fast ticket out of the business.

   I’ve taken on my share of difficult assignments. Editors need writers they can turn to for tough tasks, writers who lose themselves in the challenge to tell a story well, even if the pay falls short of what the work deserves. They need writers with double sets of ribs.

   I used to write for a magazine called Air Traffic Management. It is by far the hardest-core techno-magazine in my portfolio of techno magazines. With the generous help of hundreds of interviewees, I taught myself about air traffic management and air navigation systems, two profoundly arcane fields in which humans and machines toil in the background to fly us, happily ignorant, around the planet.

   I loved that magazine. I loved the borderline insane challenge of writing competently and in detail to an expert audience about topics such as air traffic control training simulators, cockpit ground vision systems and other supertoys with acronyms such as ASDE-X, CTAS, ADS-B, WINN, GOMEX, STARs and CAATS.

   My editors gave me all the rope I needed to hang myself, but I survived and thrived. I chose the topic for almost every one of the 72 feature articles I wrote. I decided who and how many to interview. In fact, I set a career record of 16 interviewees for a single story in the course of researching one of my ATM pieces.

   I chose all the images, including a couple that my editors, on my recommendation, used for covers. One was a creation I supervised: an airport scene built entirely with a computer program used to make 3D airport simulator databases, custom-made by a Montreal company to my specifications for an article on using simulators for airport design.

   From a short-term monetary point of view, many of these assignments made no sense, but there were professional nuances that made them very worthwhile. Unlike the impossible-to-please, open-ended projects of Episode I, I chose where to put the fences around my ATM pieces. I was in charge. North America was my playground during my five years with ATM and I played hard and happy.

   Too, my work for ATM did not go unnoticed in the chummy world of magazine editors. Many of the subsequent offers of work editors have given me are doubtlessly due to the reputation I built during my ATM days.

   I’m a Mercenary Pen, but when my heart pounds and my brain glows red with the exertion of the chase, I throw out my calculator and use my double set of ribs purely for the thrill of hoisting my own metaphorical wagon wheel over my head.

Copyright © Carroll McCormick 2013

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