Among the Fanatics by Ron Rash
They are invariably called by their first names. “You need to talk to Phil,” a secretary at the Society of Train Engine Historians may tell me, or “Margaret will know,” an administrator will say when I contact the American Museum of Hearing Aids. I’m given contact information and, sometimes, a warning: “Margaret will expect you to be conversant with every brand of hearing aid manufactured before 1936,” or “Phil can be rather unintelligible on days his meds aren’t working.”
But I contact them anyway. Although my initial correspondence is by e-mail or letter, my goal is to ask the actual questions via phone, because a telephone conversation allows the fanatic to free-associate and bring up esoterica I’d be incapable of putting in a question. My initial call is often an act of groveling debasement. Invariably, I am assured that a layman can never understand the intricacies of the Shay train engine or the differences between the 1927 Acousticon Model 28 hearing aid and the 1928 Acousticon Model 56. Who am I to be brash enough to presume I could understand, their tone makes clear.
I assure my interviewees that I agree totally, that I know I’m just a dim-witted novelist capable of only the most rudimentary understanding of their area of expertise. Such an admission usually makes a big difference. Although the tone of condescension may l linger, as well as the belief that, as countless movies and novels have shown them, I’ll still get it wrong, they answer my questions and offer additional details they believe may be helpful. A very few eventually accept me as a kindred spirit.
Such was the case in 2006 while I was researching Serena, which led me to these temples of obscure and strange information, and to others as well.
I wanted something in the novel’s middle that would ratchet up the loggers’ awe of Serena and make her almost otherworldly to both the loggers and the reader. Because I knew men cutting timber in western North Carolina were sometimes bitten by rattlesnakes, and that eagles hunted rattlesnakes in the wild, I came up with the idea of Serena killing the snakes with an eagle she’d trained. I contacted the North American Falconers Association. After speaking to a half-dozen people, I was informed that “Scott would know.” Scott turned out to be Scott Simpson, one of a dozen or so people in the United States who hunted with an eagle. Yes, Scott said to my question, an eagle trained to hunt rattlesnakes would be unusual but plausible. In that initial conversation, which lasted half an hour, Scott went into great detail about how such training would be done. After a few minutes I began to hear a chirping sound over the line. Thinking one of our phones was on the blink, I asked Scott if he heard the sound as well. “That’s my eagle,” he said matter-of-factly. “It lives in the house with me.”
Over the course of the next two years, Scott answered questions ranging from whether an eagle could kill a Komodo dragon (yes, at least a small one five to six feet in length) to how someone could ride a horse and carry an eagle at the same time. I also found out about how Kazakhs traditionally trained eagles, how to calm a nervous bird, and how to “cast off” a bird from the fist into flight. It was a fascinating education, given with generosity and patience, and I found myself asking more and more questions irrelevant to my novel. Scott sensed a potential convert and told me that he’d given up a well-paying job and a beautiful home in North Carolina to relocate to Wyoming so he could hunt with his bird. “Be careful,” Scott warned, “or you’ll end up doing the same thing.”
My time with Phil, the train engine historian, was of a shorter duration, but nevertheless memorable. One twenty-minute phone call, to be exact. I wasn’t sure I would get that. When I told Phil what I wanted, he told me he was a busy man “with responsibilities.” “Go ahead,” he said, “but make it quick.” I asked my questions about the Shay engine, and he responded thoroughly but tersely. I thanked him for the ten minutes I’d taken of his time, ready to hang up so he could get back to his more pressing matters, but Phil stopped me and proceeded to go on a ten-minute rant about anachronistic train engines in movies. It turned out that one of Phil’s “responsibilities” was watching movies (primarily Westerns) with fellow train engine enthusiasts, the purpose being to point out engines that wouldn’t fit the period. Phil then gave me a long list of particular movies that had outraged him and his cohorts. I thanked him again and hung up.
* * *
Sometimes, however, instead of my contacting the fanatics, the fanatics contact me. When this role reversal occurs, the already tenuous line between enthusiasm and insanity can be breached. Just after publishing a novel that dealt, in part, with a Civil War–era massacre, I received a phone call from a woman who informed me that my novels weren’t products of my imagination but instead true stories transmitted from the dead to the living, giving contemporary literary criticism a new take on Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author” argument.
At about the same time, I received an e-mail from a self-proclaimed paranormal investigator. His team had visited the massacre site and obtained “compelling evidence” from one of the murdered men that a detail in my novel was wrong. “We have real jobs,” the paranormal investigator assured me, though what off-duty ghostbusters do to pay the bills went unstated.
Bizarre episodes indeed, but I suppose no more bizarre than being contacted without warning by a total stranger who demands meticulous information about something he knows nothing about, a stranger who spends much of his waking life creating imaginary people and imaginary worlds, yet who’s also obsessive about placing the correct factual details within a three-hundred-page “lie” that he’s spent three years making up. And so it is that whether I contact them or they contact me, I know that I am, perhaps more than I might care to admit, among my own kind.
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