Knitlandia

by Clara Parkes

  In 1930, the camp began keeping track of who’d caught the biggest fish of the season. The names hung on a plaque over the coffee station, older ones written in perfect gold lettering, newer ones in sloppy pen. Arthur Howe took the lead that first year, for nabbing a four-and-a-half-pound, nineteen-inch bass. He was unseated the following year by N. S. Davis, who was knocked off the pedestal in 1932 by none other than a Mrs. N. S. Davis. After what I imagine to be a very long winter, he finally seized the lead back from his wife in 1933. The fish continued to be caught, even during the war years. I wondered what the story was with Thomas B. McAdams, who took the trophy, in 1948, “for trying.”

  Most people were taking two six-hour workshops that week, but I’d signed up for just one: an embroidery class taught by artist Joetta Maue. The class was called “Thread and Memory,” and it incorporated elements of visual storytelling. Ysolda and I showed up just as the class was beginning in a nearby cabin, a fire already roaring in the fireplace. Joetta was young, with a long floral skirt and hair in a loose bun. Her thick-rimmed glasses kept slipping down her tiny nose, and she rolled her Rs around on her tongue when she spoke.

  We began with another guided meditation. This one was for five minutes, intended to settle us in a grounded, creative place. Fine, I told myself, I’ll do your meditation, but so help me god, I’m not coming back after lunch. But as it turned out, there may have been something to those guided meditations. Not only did I come back after lunch, but I found myself unable to put down my embroidery for the rest of the day.

  You do a lot of walking at Squam. As you walk, you find yourself staring into the windows of each cabin you pass, wondering what it must be like inside. Elizabeth took notice, because this year she added a Thursday-night Cabin Crawl. We’d all been given a small painting. Those who wanted to open their cabins to visitors simply needed to hang the painting on their door. You could walk from cabin to cabin, peek inside, meet people. The only question became who stayed in the cabin to welcome visitors and who got to tour the others. I wouldn’t know how this played out because our cabin was at the end of a long path and we decided to keep our door shut for the night.

  While I toiled away at my tidy little embroidery project, Ysolda, always one to go big, had opted to embroider the entire map of the Squam property over a bedspread-sized piece of gossamer fabric. Meanwhile, Jess had taken a rug-hooking class that day and was sitting next to me, her rug-hooking frame awkwardly perched on her lap.

  “There were a lotta hooker jokes today,” she sighed. “A lotta hooker jokes.” After a pause, and another sigh, she added, “I don’t think I’m going to be taking up rug hooking any time soon.” She reached for a jar and handed it to me. “Olive?”

  Meanwhile Casey played DJ over a small Bluetooth-powered speaker, with regular input from Ysolda and Bristol, the resident young’uns of the cabin (both under thirty).

  On Friday, while everyone else began their second class, I had the day free. Ysolda did too, so we spent most of our time together. Gudrun was teaching her short-rows class in our living room. Thus booted from the cabin, we took our coffee and our knitting out onto the dock.

  As we spoke, I looked out onto the placid waters of the lake and noticed a tiny disturbance. A beautiful dragonfly had somehow flopped onto its back and was trapped on the water. Ysolda was talking about the historic significance of women’s baseball leagues during World War II, but all I could think was that a dragonfly was drowning, and I couldn’t just sit there and watch it die. I love dragonflies.

  We had two kayaks tied to the dock, rented by Thea aka BabyCocktails as a gift to the cabin. I undid a knot on the first kayak and slipped off my shoes.

  “What are you doing?” Ysolda asked, and I explained.

  “I think it’s dead,” she said, looking over her shoulder.

  No it isn’t, I thought. I would paddle to the dragonfly and save it.

  “I really think it’s dead,” Ysolda said again.

  I lowered myself to my knees and stepped into the kayak, first one foot, then another, but I forgot how narrow kayaks are, and I hadn’t quite adjusted my weight accordingly, and when I reached out to my left to regain my balance, I reached too far and, with a big splash, found myself in the water.

  “It’s dead,” Ysolda repeated.

  My splash had pushed the now clearly dead dragonfly well beyond reach. And now I had a new problem: I was fully clothed in the lake. My cabin was just fifty-three feet away, but it was filled with students, all sitting in a living room through which I’d have to walk if I wanted to get dry clothes. By the grace of whoever had designed the cabin, they hadn’t seen what I’d done.

  Ysolda suggested I just strip and let my clothes dry on the dock, as if being naked on the dock in front of a cabin full of students was somehow better than being wet but fully clothed. We decided on a plan B: She would go into the cabin and get towels.

  I had been wearing a sweater that was to be the center of my talk in just a few hours. A sweater that was now sopping wet. I carefully took it off and handed it up to Ysolda, who began blotting it with towels. Then I pulled myself out of the lake and onto the dock, something impossible to do with any degree of elegance whether in a bathing suit or, in my case, fully clothed. I wondered if this was what Elizabeth had in mind when she urged us to own the fullness of who we are?

  For the next few hours, I sat on the dock with Ysolda, wrapped in a towel, trying not to shiver, feeling quite embarrassed and pretending I wasn’t, until I looked dry enough to be able to walk past everyone in the living room without it being obvious that I’d just dunked myself in the lake.

  “Hey, maybe the dragonfly is your spirit animal,” Jess suggested later that night over chips and salsa. “You should look it up and see what it means!” Remembering Elizabeth’s skunk story, I thought what the heck and pulled out my phone. Was this my skunk moment? Would my life be forever changed?

  “The dragonfly,” I read, “is a creature of the wind. It portends change.” The words gave me goose bumps. I read on, “The dragonfly carries messages that relate to our deeper thoughts. It holds the wisdom of transformation and adaptability in life.” Hmmm.

  Half the power of Squam, at least half, has to be place. Its remoteness and innocent beauty invite a return to one’s childhood, whether real or imagined. You couldn’t get that from a Radisson by the airport. People are the other half. Their collective sincerity, enthusiasm, and eagerness to surrender and go deep creates an environment for introspection. We come with the perspective (and the wounds) of adults. But here, in this place, we’re given an opportunity to reassess, reexamine, to grapple with ghosts, and quite possibly emerge a slightly more healed person. There’s a lot of sitting on docks staring out at the lake, walking through woods, and then sitting in chairs staring into a fire. Even surrounded by people, you have a lot of time to think.

  The sound of lapping water becomes a presence. You get used to glimpsing the sparkle of the lake through the leaves. It beckons, and inevitably, you need to go in. On Saturday afternoon, the day after I’d given my talk, Ysolda and I kayaked to lunch. We returned to our cabin’s dock, where people were knitting. Several others had donned their bathing suits and swum out to a float. While I paddled around aimlessly in my kayak, Ysolda ran up to the cabin, changed into her bathing suit, and did a perfect dive off the dock.

  As my brain was processing what she’d just done, she came up far too soon. She stood upright, holding her face. Her back was toward the people on the dock, but from my kayak, I could already see the blood streaming down her hands. The fact that she was standing at all, waist high, where she’d just dove, should have been our clue. She’d hit a very big boulder.

  I guided her back to the dock, where first aid kits were brought out, then packs of ice. Having determined that she didn’t need stitches, we propped her in a chair with her knitting. She strapped the ice pack to her head, like a pirate. Certainly this wasn’t the fullness Elizabeth had urged us to find in ourselves?
Ysolda laughed, I presumed, from both shock and embarrassment. But the vision of her dive would haunt me. I know each of us silently echoed thoughts of just how very bad it could have been, and how lucky we were that she was okay.

  That night was the Squam Art Fair, a massive marketplace that brings vendors and even more customers from as far away as Canada. More bunting and twinkle lights were hung, and freshly carved ice lanterns illuminated pathways to the market building. Part of my arrangement with Elizabeth was that I got a spot in the marketplace to sell skeins of my Clara Yarn and help recoup my transportation costs. But when I went inside and asked where I should set up, they gave me a funny look. Didn’t I know? I wasn’t in here. I was in the small cottage across the road, where the Ravelry VIP lounge would be set up. Only I knew from talking with Jess and Casey that they weren’t planning on being there this year because of the baby. So basically, I would be all alone with a keg of beer in a cabin across the road from everyone else. It was impossible not to feel lousy, to take this expulsion personally.

  Amy Herzog helped me absorb the new reality of my situation, advising which yarns should go where, stacking precious skeins of painstakingly sourced Cormo and Shetland wool, until my little table area—aided by props Bristol brought down from Portland—looked, dare I suggest, rather magical.

  I tried not to glance across the street at where the real action was, at all the vans and cars and trucks streaming in, vendors unloading and setting up. I closed the door of my silent cabin, walked to dinner, and gave myself a pep talk. “You are not going to indulge in self pity,” I told myself. “Do. Not. Cry.”

  Mid-macaroni and cheese, my phone buzzed. It was designer Hannah Fettig, who’d come down with her husband, Abe, for the night. “They’re lining up!” she said. “Better get down there!”

  As I got closer, I saw not one line but two: One leading to the main marketplace, the other straight to my little cabin. Amy directed me around to a back entrance. I slipped in, readied myself, and opened the door.

  What followed was the knitterly version of It’s a Wonderful Life. One by one, they came. And they kept coming, smiling, eager, friendly, open, arms laden with my yarn, for three solid hours. Instead of sitting alone and pretending it didn’t matter, pretending I wasn’t humiliated or that this didn’t symbolize every doubt I had about my career up to that point, I was swamped.

  My cabinmates never left my side. Each kept offering water, restocking help, beer, even just a smile to boost my energy. At some point in the night, vendors had jammed the Wi-Fi signal across the road and couldn’t process credit cards at all. “Are you able to get online?” Casey whispered over my shoulder after I finished with one person, “Because I can get you online if you need. Just let me know.” Here was the grand wizard of Ravelry, offering me his secret backdoor access to the Internet. And better yet, I didn’t need it.

  Casey and Ysolda, whose face was now swollen and bloodied as if she’d not only seen that bear but gotten into a fist fight with it, were deftly operating the keg while I sold almost every skein I had brought to a line that never slowed. Ysolda had wisely pinned three Ravelry buttons to her sweater. On them she’d written: “I’m OK! (Really),” “I dove off the dock,” and “Yes, that was stupid.”

  I’d made a joke to Casey earlier that day, while on the dock with him and Auggie, a joke about his rapidly expanding empire. It’s something we all secretly think about, the powerful behemoth that Ravelry has become.

  “I hope not,” was Casey’s reply. When I asked what he meant, he explained, “Ravelry already supports four families. Shouldn’t that be enough?”

  He popped a pea puff in Auggie’s outstretched hand and added, in a quiet, sincere voice, “I just hope people keep knitting.”

  The dragonfly wasn’t lying. I’d known for some time about the change it was foretelling, the transformation and adaptability it signaled. The industry has undergone a sea change since I started reviewing yarn in 2000. As for my own interests, they, too, have changed. I’ve wanted to work more on reviving our domestic textiles infrastructure, telling its stories, supporting its few remaining players, in ways I couldn’t as a critic. In addition to being a storyteller of other makers, I wanted to become a maker myself. It’s been a slow, cautious shift, but each step has opened my heart to people in surprising new ways. My time at Squam, the validation of its community and even the message from that poor little dragonfly, really did help me glimpse the fullness of who I might continue to be.

  That night we stumbled back to our cabin, to a roaring fire and yet more s’mores, and to the last of Ysolda’s hot toddies. We got in our pajamas and brought our blankets closer to the fire. There we curled up, telling stories, nobody quite willing to acknowledge that it would all end in the morning. Then, after we were all tucked in bed, Bristol and I whispering to each other in the dark, the loons began a hauntingly exquisite series of wails and tremolos that lasted for minutes and left us speechless.

  There was no closing ceremony on Sunday, no formal parting, no collective goodbye. Just a series of hugs that went on and on, from dining hall to dock to cabin, until the last suitcase had been shut, the last kale chip eaten. Five days is brief in the grand scheme of things, but it was enough to boost our creative spirits. We were baptized by the lake, serenaded by loons, bitten by bugs, and even bashed by boulders. In need of some quiet and a nap, I packed my car and drove home, back into a slightly more beautiful world. Maybe there was some magic in those woods after all.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I love a good story. The ones Melanie Falick told in Knitting in America inspired me to start writing Knitter’s Review. As we became friends, she encouraged me to venture beyond crimp and ply, trusting me and pushing me ever forward. I’m honored to work with her.

  While I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting Paul Theroux, his sublime travel narratives have kept me eyeing the horizon and always striving for that better sentence. I thought of him often as I wrote this book, wondering what he would make of our knitting world.

  I’m grateful to my parents for never wavering in their encouragement—or if they have, they’re really good at hiding it. My father faithfully wears his handknitted cashmere scarf; my mother displays my books and collects my yarn even though she doesn’t knit a stitch. My brothers and their families have graciously allowed knitting to intrude upon their own lives, too, overtaking conversations and, occasionally, impinging upon vacations. And my heart, Clare, has become the most knitting-aware non-knitter I know, always inspiring me to be a better version of myself. To them—as well as my friend and agent Elizabeth Kaplan—I humbly give thanks.

  Nothing exists in a vacuum. My largest debt of gratitude goes to the generations of knitters who came before me, who set the stage for our current culture to flourish, and to the readers of Knitter’s Review, who, for fifteen years, allowed me to experience the world of yarn in my way. I had no intention of becoming a knitting journalist when I started on this path. I had no clever business plan, no ten-year strategy to cash in. I was simply following my heart. Which, as it turns out, is the best way to do it.