Forty-One States, Nine Stories, One Truck

Eleven consecutive nights, four hours each, in the rain, and nothing. Then forty seconds. Then three more nights of nothing.

That is the Point Pleasant notebook and it is the best work I have done, and about half the letters I get about it are from people asking why we printed the nothing.

Because the nothing is the measurement

If I tell you I saw something over a river, I have told you almost nothing. The claim has no denominator.

If I tell you I saw something over a river once, in 611 hours of standing beside that river, I have told you a rate. A rate is a fact about the world. A sighting is a fact about me.

Every outlet that covers this beat publishes the numerator. I have not found one that publishes the denominator, and I have looked, because I would like to steal their format.

What the field actually teaches you

Not patience. Everybody says patience and it is wrong; you can be patient in a chair.

It teaches you what ordinary looks like at 3 a.m. in that specific place, which is the only thing that lets you recognise something that is not ordinary. I have watched four hundred herons. That is why, on the fourteenth of June, I could write in my notebook that the thing did not flap — because I know exactly, in my body, what four hundred herons flapping looks like.

An observer who has not put the hours in cannot make that judgement and, more importantly, does not know they cannot.

The bit I get wrong

Size. Every time.

I estimated 2.4 to 3.1 metres. Two witnesses who were standing thirty metres from me said "hang-glider" and "big as a man, no bigger." Our ornithologist says eyewitness size estimation at dusk without a reference object is worthless, and says it about her own students, and she is right.

So now I carry a metre rule and a folding target and I put one in shot whenever I photograph anything at all, and I feel completely ridiculous doing it, and it has already made two of my photographs useful instead of decorative.

The rule I would give anybody starting

Write down the empty nights in the same notebook, in the same pen, at the same time, in the same amount of detail.

Not a separate log. The same one. Because the temptation, on night nine of nothing, is to write nothing and go to bed, and the discipline of writing nothing. waited four hours. light rain, no wind, two barges is what makes the notebook evidence instead of a scrapbook.

My publisher asked me last year whether I would consider cutting the empty nights from the book.

I have a new publisher.

Field Notes appears monthly on the opinion pages.