PW: You've written books about sports and business before, but Defining the Wind is a very different type of project.
Yes and no. When I co-authored the business book [From Worst to First, with Gordon Bethune], I was telling someone else's story the way they want it told, but I looked at the sports books the way I look at all nonfiction writing, as a form of cultural anthropology. You find a group of people who really love something, who make communities surrounding it, and you ask yourself, why? And why do I care enough to want to be involved to the degree of writing about it? This was the same sort of thing.
But the Beaufort scale doesn't have fans the way Nascar does, does it?
It's not like there's a Beaufort scale gang that gets together, no. So I started by asking why I love the Beaufort scale, and in every element I looked at, I found that it wasn't just me. There have been groups fascinated just by the descriptive writing aspect of it, another interested in the science of it, another in the artistic nature. I could infiltrate all these different groups, but there wasn't any one person who could climb the fire tower, look out over the forest and explain it all to me. So that had to be me.
Long before you made the formal decision to write the book, you'd been delving into the subject whenever you had a chance.
It was an extremely low-level chase. I remember once getting a job at a publication called the Scientist, and one of the things that excited me was that I could make international calls for my reporting. So every now and then, I'd bury a call to the Royal Society in my expense account. I'd call up with vague, weird questions nobody would quite know how to answer, and two weeks later, I'd get a letter in the mail suggesting I try this person, and I'd send them a letter.
And all because you found a dictionary entry about the scale while copyediting?
Exactly. To a copyeditor, a dictionary is what Playboy is to a normal person; it's like word pornography. When I started out as a freelance writer after several years of copyediting, I would still take copyediting jobs to keep body and soul together, and I felt like it was a dirty little secret, but now I look back on it as the best thing I've ever done. As a copyeditor, you look at language as a machine: you try to fix it, make sure it runs well and gets the job done—the job being to convey information from the person writing it to the person reading it. So you're always looking to shave words, to clarify sentences, anything to make the distance the information has to travel as short and as clear as possible. The Beaufort scale is copyediting principles made manifest; it's all right there in 110 words.
Would you say Beaufort and his peers had stronger math skills than people today?
Oh, absolutely. That's one of the things I love most, that these guys walked around with these vast toolkits in their heads. They could do trigonometry not because they'd taken it in high school, but because you needed it to get your work done. It had value and utility to them. When I was in eighth grade, I could multiply six-digit numbers in my head, and then in ninth grade I got a calculator, so I can't do that any more, and I regret it. I miss the ancillary benefits of mental agility and capacity, which I think those guys had in a very authentic way.
Have you exhausted your passion for the Beaufort scale now?
I find that I return to it more and more. I still read it and notice things I haven't seen before. Because I've had to dig into so many aspects of history and science, I feel like I've learned just enough to be dangerous in all these topics, and there's so much more I can still learn about them, especially in the sciences. I find that every time I do a book and think I can finally stop worrying about that subject, I just stay interested because there's lots more to know.
