Essay of description
First draft due 4/20
Up to three revisions
100 points
Write an intense, highly focused essay that describes an object.
One goal of the essay will be to convey larger ideas through strictly descriptive writing.
The essay should be coherent but extremely thorough.
Producing an intense, thorough description will require an unusually patient and creative process of observation.
Ideal objects are intimately familiar to you, but typically must be reimagined in order to produce a usable description for
a reader who has no experience with this particular thing.
Aim for engaging, quirky, stylish, clever, personal, informal, funny, and memorable.
An extremely careful attention to audience is required to make this essay a success.
You can determine audience, purpose, and form within the terms of the assignment.
This essay is another common form for admissions essays.
Certain minor elements of the essay may be narrative but it is primarily descriptive writing.
A first-person perspective is ideal; you should be in your essay.
Avoid general, clichéd, broad, or abstract descriptions; anchor your writing in the senses.
Essay of description
First draft due 4/20
Up to three revisions
100 points
Write an intense, highly focused essay that describes an object.
One goal of the essay will be to convey larger ideas through strictly descriptive writing.
The essay should be coherent but extremely thorough.
Producing an intense, thorough description will require an unusually patient and creative process of observation.
Ideal objects are intimately familiar to you, but typically must be reimagined in order to produce a usable description for
a reader who has no experience with this particular thing.
Aim for engaging, quirky, stylish, clever, personal, informal, funny, and memorable.
An extremely careful attention to audience is required to make this essay a success.
You can determine audience, purpose, and form within the terms of the assignment.
This essay is another common form for admissions essays.
Certain minor elements of the essay may be narrative but it is primarily descriptive writing.
A first-person perspective is ideal; you should be in your essay.
Avoid general, clichéd, broad, or abstract descriptions; anchor your writing in the senses.
Essay of description
First draft due 4/20
Up to three revisions
100 points
Write an intense, highly focused essay that describes an object.
One goal of the essay will be to convey larger ideas through strictly descriptive writing.
The essay should be coherent but extremely thorough.
Producing an intense, thorough description will require an unusually patient and creative process of observation.
Ideal objects are intimately familiar to you, but typically must be reimagined in order to produce a usable description for
a reader who has no experience with this particular thing.
Aim for engaging, quirky, stylish, clever, personal, informal, funny, and memorable.
An extremely careful attention to audience is required to make this essay a success.
You can determine audience, purpose, and form within the terms of the assignment.
This essay is another common form for admissions essays.
Certain minor elements of the essay may be narrative but it is primarily descriptive writing.
A first-person perspective is ideal; you should be in your essay.
Avoid general, clichéd, broad, or abstract descriptions; anchor your writing in the senses.
I have this landing net, still. I can’t really believe it has survived so long. It’s an unwieldy thing, long and cumbersome
compared to modern nets which are sleek, strong aluminum and which telescope or fold or snap into convenient parts.
This net is made of glued strips of some rich brown wood, probably oak. When it was new it was arty and pretentious. I
got it on the cheap with my guide discount. I figured it would impress high-roller clients to net their big fish with an
antique net from Orvis. It didn’t work. I felt a little silly using a tool that belonged on the wall in a Wisconsin Applebee’s.
And the clients didn’t seem to notice. When the net came out they only had eyes for their big fish.
Now that it is dinged and chipped I have a much greater appreciation for it. The wood still looks great but the finish has
failed under 30 years of sun and rain. That’s where there’s any finish left; the first 18 inches of the ridiculously long
handle are bare wood because I fish from inflated rafts which means I stow the net by jamming it between the frame
and the fabric of the pontoons. On a warm day those pontoons expand, viciously squeezing anything they can reach, so
the wood looks like it has been chewed by a weasel. On the butt of the handle there’s an unsightly hole where a screw
shackle used to be, because this is the Orvis Guide Net, traditionally snapped to a shoulder belt and worn on the back by
a French-Canadian or Indian guide on some quaint salmon river in Labrador. I never wore the net, because it would have
looked ridiculous, and the screw shackle was torn out in some forgotten misadventure in the mid-90’s.
The hoop of the net is still strong and functional, which is of course the most important thing. This astonishes me
because I have abused that fragile arc of bent wood in a hundred ways. I once held the net out to a terrified kid who had
fallen off an innertube and was hanging on to a rock in the throat of a class IV rapid. The net held his weight while we
floated through the white water to safety. The mesh entangled his watch and yanked it off his wrist. He didn’t notice
and I handed the watch back once we’d made sure he would live another day to make another stupid, alcohol-warped
decision.
That green mesh net bag is the worst possible stuff to manage any kind of fishhook. New nets have solved this
problem with thick rubber cords or even solid silicone, but those highly effective modern miracle materials spoil the
Orvis effect so I am forever unlacing toothy fish and treble hooks from the string. To their credit, Orvis designed the net
for sleek, cooperative trout and salmon, not thrashing bitey sliming northerns. But it doesn’t fray or wear, somehow,
and I don’t seem to care that much—perhaps it’s that big-fish adrenaline. If the net’s out, everybody’s happy.
Of course, there’s fish. The landing net probably contains the ghost of all the great fish I’ve caught myself or
netted for my paying clients, but that’s boring. After you’ve fished for a few years, especially fished for pay, big fish
stories lose their appeal except as marketing materials.
By far the most common net use—even more common than its intended purpose—is to recover floating objects.
I’ll bet I’ve netted 500 hats, mostly my own because I have a freakishly large head which pops hats off at the merest
provocation. Plenty of floating litter, so I’ve been able to use the net as part of a passion play of annoyance and
disapproval—a common role for the fishing guide. Dozens of lost and floating lures, including more than a few that had
been broken off in a fish’s mouth then thrown by the fish. I mainly fish for smallmouth bass which are shockingly strong
and invariably jump, so when a client (or a guide) overreacts to the strike and breaks the line on a nice fish, it isn’t
uncommon for the fish to jump and throw the lure back to you. If it floats, and you have a long-handled net, you can
recover the lure and some of your pride. I once reacted quickly enough to net a $250 pair of Costa Del Mar sunglasses
that fell off the head of a client and were sinking slowly, wobbling expensively back and forth. I missed on my first pass
but felt a tap on the net handle and adjusted, going deep and blind and coming up golden. That was a big tip day.
Here are a few living non-fish I’ve netted with that old thing. Seagulls, which are notorious for eating fishing
lures. Arctic terns are easy to handle but also to kill because they are small and fragile and delicate even though they fly
the whole globe each year. Laughing gulls are the most common on the East Coast, and are notoriously aggressive and
stupid so wind up in boats all the time. A couple of herring gulls, which are bigger and scarier but become quite mellow
when you take away their power of flight with a few loops of monofilament line. One memorable gannet, which I quickly
learned has a wicked sharp beak and a quick jab. I once netted two wood-duck chicks from a backwater in the Potomac
River. A mink had trapped the whole family and was eating the chicks one at a time, snatching them under and then
popping up to munch them, still struggling, like an ear of corn. Eventually the mother duck tired of trying to get the
chicks out of there and flew away, so I scooped up the two remaining chicks and dropped them in the main current,
hoping the mother duck would find them again. I doubt it, though—life is tough for a tender duckling.
I’ve netted two bats of indeterminate species, both fooled by dry-flies at dusk on trout streams. You haven’t
lived until your false-cast suddenly yanks straight up into the air as if your fly had been Raptured. Bats are scary and do
not know to calm down when you wrap their head in a t-shirt, like birds do, so both of my bats didn’t survive the
encounter. I once netted an enormous bullfrog for the sole purpose of releasing it in my friend’s boat as a prank. It
worked beautifully. On the other foot, I once failed repeatedly to net a brown water snake that had fallen into my boat
from a tree branch. Brown water snakes are nasty, bitey bastards that do not know they are not poisonous. One part of
my brain was well aware that a landing net was an imperfect tool for capturing snakes, but the other part was screaming
like a schoolgirl so I kept scooping at him until he struck at the net and got tangled enough so I could fling him
overboard. Luckily he disengaged from the net bag on schedule, because I do not appreciate snakes and if he’d stayed
connected I probably would have thrown the thing in the river, which would have saved me the trouble of writing this
essay 20 years later.
I netted a smallish muskrat hooked and landed on a fly by a friend who to this day considers it one of his greatest
triumphs. This guy has caught 150 pound tarpon but his favorite fishing memory involves a smelly angry rodent. I once
netted a gray squirrel that had invaded my kitchen, though that was not a boat-based adventure so it may not count.
I fish less now, but I still carry that old net on the river. I own a modern folding version with a much bigger
capacity and convenient no-tangle mesh, and I’m glad I do when I meet the muskie or sturgeon or 20-pound channel cat
which make fishing in Minnesota so much more unpredictable than fishing back east. But when I am in my raft, I prefer
that scratchy, faded old Orvis net. I know how it will dig and scoop, of course, and I’m used to its tangly ways.