Processes
The development of this kind of exposition will vary somewhat according to the nature of the subject. If you are explaining a process—how to make a campfire, or how to find the width of an unbridged river, or how to make bread—you will naturally follow the chronological order and tell what to do first, what second, and so on. If several materials are to be used in the process, you may enumerate them all at the beginning, for collection, or state them piece by piece as they are needed. For example, you may say, "In making a kite you will need so many pieces of such wood of such and such sizes, with paper or cloth, strong twine, glue, nails, etc." You may cast the whole process into a personal mood by telling how some one, perhaps yourself, did it on a previous occasion. This method, if it is judiciously used, adds interest. You must take care not to seem to encumber obviously simple directions, however, with the machinery of personal narrative so that the whole account is longer than it should be. In case you are treating some process in which mistakes are easily made, you can often help the reader by showing how some one—preferably yourself—did it wrongly and thereby came to grief. Or you can state concisely what not to do if there is chance for mistake. In developing films, for example, you may warn the reader not to mix any of the Hypo with the Fixing Bath; in picking his apples not to break the twigs of the tree; in paddling a canoe through rapids not to become excited. Note how, in the account which follows of how to handle a punt, the author makes the material quite human and personal—to the reader's pleasure.
You may get yourself a tub or a working-boat or a wherry, a rob-roy or a dinghy, for every craft that floats is known on the Thames; but the favorite craft are the Canadian canoe and the punt. The canoe you will be familiar with, but your ideas of a punt are probably derived from a farm-built craft you have poled about American duck-marshes—which bears about the same relationship to this slender, half-decked cedar beauty that a canal-boat bears to a racing-shell.
During your first perilous lessons in punting, you will probably be in apprehension of ducking your mentor, who is lounging among the cushions in the bow. But you cannot upset the punt any more than you can discompose the Englishman; the punt simply upsets you without seeming to be aware of it. And when you crawl dripping up the bank, consoled only by the fact that the Humane Society man was not on hand with his boat-hook to pull you out by the seat of the trousers, your mentor will gravely explain how you made your mistake. Instead of bracing your feet firmly on the bottom and pushing with the pole, you were leaning on the pole and pushing with your feet. When the pole stuck in the clay bottom, of course it pulled you out of the boat.
Steering is a matter of long practice. When you want to throw the bow to the left, you have only to pry the stern over to the right as you are pulling the pole out of the water. To throw the bow to the right, ground the pole a foot or so wide of the boat, and then lean over and pull the boat up to it. That is not so easy, but you will learn the wrist motion in time. When all this comes like second nature, you will feel that you have become a part of the punt, or rather that the punt has taken life and become a part of you.
A particular beauty of punting is that, more than any other sport, it brings you into personal contact, so to speak, with the landscape. In a few days you will know every inch of the bottom of the Char, some of it perhaps by more intimate experience than you desire. Over there, on the other curve of the bend, the longest pole will not touch bottom. Fight shy of that place. Just beyond here, in the narrows, the water is so shallow that you can get the whole length of your body into every sweep. As for the shrubbery on the bank, you will soon learn these hawthorns, if only to avoid barging into them. And the Magdalen chestnut, which spreads its shade so beautifully above the water just beyond, becomes quite familiar when its low-reaching branches have once caught the top of your pole and torn it from your hands.[57]