The Butterfly Hunter: Adventures of People Who Found Their True Calling Way Off the Beaten Path - Hardcover

Ballard, Chris

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0767918681 ISBN 13: 9780767918688

Publisher: Broadway, 2006

Synopsis

Do we each have a dream job that we are, by nature or nurture, uniquely meant for? To answer this question, Chris Ballard set out to talk to people who found work they love way off the beaten path. The Butterfly Hunter is a rollicking narrative of what he discovered, and reveals insights the rest of us can use to find passion in our work.

The Butterfly Hunter begins its roundup of quirky characters in unusual professions with Spiderman Mulholland, a former Marine, who rappels to suicidal spots on sheer building faces to assess damage or make repairs. (And yes, that’s his legal name.) Through Spiderman, Ballard learns that one can find a calling by following one’s wildest idiosyncrasies. Along the way he learns the history of window-washing, why it is that some people enter risky professions, and the best way to jump off a 230-foot building.

His adventures continue as he meets America’s top lumberjill, an NFL kicking coach who has never kicked a ball in his life, a MacArthur genius who’s spent his life in remote jungles chasing butterflies, and the movie trailer voice-over artist known as the Voice of God.

These ten characters each reveal an aspect of the search for a life’s work, and reaffirm for Ballard that we, too, can discover a calling if only we look in the right place. As with true love, there aren’t seven steps to finding it, but The Butterfly Hunter teaches us what it looks like when it’s real.

About this title

About the Author:

After a string of oddball jobs, CHRIS BALLARD found his calling at Sports Illustrated as a staff writer covering the NBA and writing features. He has written profiles of people with offbeat professions for the New York Times Magazine and is the author of Hoops Nation, which was named one of Booklist’s Top Ten Sports Books of 1998. Ballard recently moved from New York City to Berkeley, California.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

ONE
THE SKYWALKER

Sometimes a wonderful confluence occurs and what a person does for a living not only makes him happy but also makes the rest of us happy. By that I don't mean that this person is providing some service that makes our lives better. Rather, I mean that this person being content, and, more important, occupied, is preferable for the rest of us, because God knows what he'd be doing otherwise. In the case of Spiderman Mulholland, he followed his own unusual interests and found not only a calling, but, in many ways, peace.

I heard about Mulholland when my friend Owen, who was then working at the Rocky Mountain News, in Denver, forwarded me a story from his paper, dated April 27, 2004, titled, "The Amazing Spiderman Saves the Day with Flag Fix." Here's how the story began:
BROWN PALACE HIRES HERO'S NAMESAKE FOR AERIAL REPAIR

A real-life version of classic Marvel comics hero Spider-Man created a spectacle for passers-by when he scaled one of the Denver landmark's rooftop flagpoles to make an otherwise routine repair before rappelling headfirst to safety.

The hotel flew in Spiderman Scott Mulholland from his home base in Pensacola, Fla., to fix a pulley that got stuck about six weeks ago at the top of a 40-foot flagpole at the edge of the 10-story building's roof.

The 42-year-old former Marine, who has built a multimillion-dollar business doing repairs and cleaning on what he calls "suicidal buildings," said he paid Marvel to use the Spiderman name for his business. He flashed his driver's license to prove he legally changed his own first name as well.
It seemed too good, or perhaps too weird, to be true. A former Marine who calls himself Spiderman and scales buildings. Unusual: check. Enthusiastic: check. Potentially unstable: also a check. But if so, he was certainly a functional delusional, and that is the most interesting kind (Howard Hughes being a prime example).

I pulled up some more newspaper stories on Mulholland, including an account of how he taught a Florida SWAT team to enter buildings by rappelling the exterior and then busting through the windows boot-first, like they do in action movies. Next, I checked out his Web site, which included what appeared to be an ad detailing Mulholland's work on the First National Bank of Mobile using a Dow Corning sealant. The ad read:
He's a wall climber. He is a curtainwall consultant, past president of the Exterior Design Institute, a forensic expert on waterproofing failures, and a certified waterproofing contractor in his own right. But at heart, Spiderman Mulholland is a wall climber. A life of foster homes, drugs and detention took a turn when Scott Mulholland joined the Marines and received specialized training in advanced rappelling, helicopter extractions, and skyrigging. His experience in the Marines led to his career choice--climbing walls.
This, I thought, was the kind of guy I was looking for. I called him one morning in the fall and reached him on his cell phone as he drove to a construction site. "Very, very, very few people do what I do," he said, his voice coming loud and fast. "Most people do not have this kind of passion for it, VERY FEW are willing to go up the side of a building for it, and very few understand forensic investigations."

He was extremely busy at the moment, he told me. His office was in Pensacola, Florida, so he was right in the midst of the devastation from Hurricane Ivan, the last in a series of four hurricanes that ravaged the Florida coast during a nine-week period in the summer of 2004, leaving 107 people dead and causing approximately $40 billion in damage. The hurricane had been disastrous for the general populace but a boon for someone who repairs buildings. As long as I didn't mind tagging along, Mulholland said he'd be happy to show me the ropes, in this case literally. "You and me, we'll go jump off some buildings," he said. "You ain't gonna believe it when you see it!"
There has been a fair amount of research done on why people are drawn to dangerous activities and occupations. In 1973, Bruce Ogilvie, who is considered by many to be the father of sports psychology, performed a study on 293 "high-risk" competitors, including skydivers, race car drivers, fencers, and aerobatic pilots. In contrast to the conventional wisdom of the time, which equated such pastimes with a death wish, Ogilvie found these people to be success-oriented, strongly extroverted, and, compared to the general population, above average in abstract thinking ability and intelligence. Rather than being reckless, he found their risk taking was calculated; he estimated that only 6 percent of the athletes he studied competed out of anger, because of an inferiority complex, or because they were trying to prove something.

Two decades later, Psychology Today did a story on risk taking in which the magazine culled the opinions of top researchers and psychologists and came to similar, if less ebullient, conclusions. The consensus among the scientists was that, among other things, an inclination to take risks may be "hard-wired into the brain . . . and may offer such a thrill that it functions like an addiction." Extroverts are more likely to be risk takers, the experts concluded, a finding that seems logical. But the researchers were divided on what propels the impulse; some argued that it is an internal drive, an urge hardwired into one's personality, while others argued that environmental factors play a large role. Marvin Zuckerman, a pioneering psychologist in the field, labels some people "high sensation seeking," or HSS individuals, whereas other researchers break people down into Type A, Type B, and Type T, for thrill.

For all but a few Americans, a job is not an outlet for sensation seeking. Unless you're a firefighter or a logger, the most dangerous part of most people's workday comes during the commute to work (though in Manhattan, it's probably a tie between taking a taxi and ordering a "salad," whether it be tuna, chicken, or egg, at one of the city's smaller delis or bodegas). So the HSS individuals among us take "expedition vacations" and summit mountains in faraway lands and spend our weekends eating cardboard-flavored carbohydrate bars and hanging off cliffs in neoprene outfits, all in search of an adrenal rush.

But not all can handle the heights. It takes a certain type of man, or woman, to seek out the sky. In 1999, 23 percent of Americans described themselves as "very afraid" of heights (technically, it's acrophobia). The only thing we are more afraid of as a country, at least statistically speaking, is snakes.

Mulholland claimed to be scared of nothing.

* * *

Not long after my initial phone conversation with Mulholland, I booked a trip to Pensacola. Even though it had been weeks since the hurricane hit, all the hotels within a 120-mile radius were full of storm refugees, an indication of how much work remained for people like Spiderman, so I stayed a ways down the coast.

The morning of my meeting with Mulholland, I awoke before dawn and drove to Pensacola. As the sky brightened into a pale orange, I began to see the aftermath of Ivan. The road ran parallel to the water; to my left a thirty-foot boat had been thrown up on the roadside like a child's toy, its hull pocked with puncture marks. Towering piles of debris, thick with garbage, uprooted trees, sheets of bent aluminum and wood, lay at regular intervals like so many unkindled bonfires. Everywhere there were reminders of the storm--the "Goodbye Ivan Clearance Sale" at the mattress store, the woman in the State Farm Catastrophe team T-shirt at the coffee stand, the bulldozers rumbling down the highway, the plaintive graffiti scrawled on one house that read, simply, IVAN SUCKS.

Mulholland lived inland but his house had still taken a beating. A tree branch had fallen through his carport, just missing his Escalade, and almost all the vegetation in his yard had been either flattened or uprooted. Defiantly, Mulholland, his wife, their seventeen-year-old daughter, and their thirteen-year-old son John (Mulholland's two older sons no longer live at home) had hunkered down during the ten-hour storm as winds battered the modest two-story brick home. This might seem rather foolhardy, but once I got to know Mulholland, it didn't surprise me at all.

When I pulled into his long dirt driveway, Mulholland fairly bounded out of his house to meet me. His handshake was akin to meeting an oncoming linebacker, fast and firm and delivered with no small amount of elbow-pumping force. Though a relatively squat man, about five nine and broad, he possessed a coiled energy, like a crouched cat stalking its prey. He was wearing his work "uniform," which consisted of a tucked-in polo shirt, jeans, black Rockport sneakers, and an ID badge clipped to his shirt that read spiderman mulholland, bennet shuman architects, the name of the architect he partnered with much of the time. He was exquisitely clean-shaven, and his full black hair was gelled into a politician's helmet. He looked less like a daredevil and more like someone who might sell me kitchen appliances.

We headed to his office, a one-story, three-room building separate from the main house, to talk about his work. Or, more specifically, for Mulholland to talk about his work. Best described as a one-way conversationalist, Mulholland doesn't interact so much as preach; it is as if he's speaking in ALL CAPS. He also likes to make an enthusiastic hooting noise before and after sentences, a sort of hybrid of "Hooo boy" and "Whoopee," and often follows particularly exciting declarations with a high-pitched, wheezing laugh that causes his face to scrunch up in a manner reminiscent of Jeff Daniels in the movie Dumb and Dumber. So, for instance, were Mulholland eating a sandwich, he wouldn't describe it so much as champion it. "WOOOOOO! ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Broadway
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0767918681
• ISBN 13: 9780767918688
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288