All Wound Up (2 page)

Sometimes I wonder whether knitting, despite being really productive, doesn’t
look
productive to nonknitters. Knitting looks relaxing (at least once you’re past the initial sweating, staring, and swearing phase). It looks peaceful, restful, pleasant, and calming, and you know what? It is all of those things. A whole lot of knitters (myself included) knit because it makes us better people. Way better people. Without my knitting, I have a lot of trouble even being polite to great swathes of humanity, never mind being relaxed about it. When we sit there, knitting away, we’re having a grand time, and while we know it’s an intricate activity that’s great for our brains, to the uninitiated it may not look like we’re doing much. Well, not much except, at its best, a complex, repetitive, visual, spatial task that develops hand–eye coordination, enhances neural connectivity, and uses both hemispheres of the brain at once. That’s all, but people can’t see that, and maybe because we look like we’re relaxing they think we have all this time on our hands. No, wait. It can’t be that, or popping a DVD in the player and lying on the couch wouldn’t be considered a better way to spend time by so many people.

Perhaps it’s simple defensiveness. Perhaps the people who say “I don’t have the time” are trying to justify their own slacker ways. Maybe, just maybe, when they see me using my time to churn something out while they’re just sitting there, some little voice in the back of their head is judging them. Perhaps, there is the briefest flash of insight, as my hands move and theirs don’t, as I make something and they don’t, as my time is spent and theirs is wasted, and they have a creeping little feeling deep down inside—a feeling that they don’t quite know how to identify, a feeling that’s super complex. Out of nowhere, out of the depths of their very souls, perhaps a little resonant voice says, “Well, look at that. That looks more interesting than just sitting here; we should knit too. Wouldn’t it be nice to be productive? Isn’t there something wrong with a life that has this much idleness in it? Aren’t we colossally bored by it all?” When that happens, I think the regular part of their brain panics, because it’s starting to look like the status quo is getting questioned, and that part of the personality in question—that part that likes things the way they are and loves stereotypes and embraces consumerism and sees no joy in work—picks up a metaphoric big stick and says the only thing that it can say in the face of an uprising. It says, “No, we can’t knit. We’re not smart enough, we don’t know how, learning something new is scary… and besides… we, um… we don’t have time! We’re too busy. Yeah, that’s it. With that, the idleness of a modern life is sanctified, most people slip back into compliant waiting and watching, saving time by buying what they need, confident that it would be a waste of time to make it, understanding that only grandmothers and terrifically boring people knit, and that if they knit like I did, sitting here in a government office, watching each other’s hair grow, it would be curtains for any sort of social life that they may have hoped for themselves.

It has to be that, I tell myself, as I fill empty time with action. It has to be, because the alternative is that a whole lot of people have started thinking sideways, and that we live in a culture suddenly chock full of people who think that this simple, productive work that I’m doing is a sign that I don’t have enough real work to fill my hours, that the way I’ve chosen to fill idle moments is a sign that I am, indeed, more idle than they are, and that, for the record, watching TV with a bag of chips in your hand would be a lot more valid, a lot easier to understand, than choosing not to just sit here.

That has to be it. I’m sure of it.

t is January. January means, here in Ontario, Canada, that things are cold. Not the sort of cold that’s an interesting footnote to the way that Mother Nature does things, but cold in the way that can kill people if they aren’t careful. It is cold that freezes the hairs in your nose the minute you take a breath, cold that makes your hands hurt and your feet ache. Cold that can cancel school, even without a snow day, because it isn’t safe to be outside long enough to walk there or even to wait for the bus. It is crazy, stupid cold that makes the snow squeak and the air sparkle, and it isn’t even “really cold” compared to other places in Canada. On this night, it is about –20º C / –4º F, and to go to the store I’m wearing my store-bought parka but have added handknit socks, a vest, a sweater, a hat, leg warmers, wristers, a scarf, and two pairs of mittens. Clad as I am, in handknits from head to toe, I trudge through the snow and cold, and I imagine that other people are looking at me and wishing that they could be me. I feel sure that they too wish that they were a knitter with the intelligence and skill to fortify themselves against the Canadian winter. They had to cop out and go to the store for their mittens, but look at me! Clearly, in any honest war against winter, I would be heralded as the winner. This is what I imagine they are thinking when they see me. In reality, they’re probably wondering why that crazy lady looks so proud to be wearing so much mismatched clothing… but they’re missing the point.

This cold is hard to explain to knitters who live in other places. It’s something that I struggle to explain to many of my friends in the United States. Almost all of your country, I remind them, is south of here. I know it gets cold in a great many places there. I have compared notes with knitters in Wisconsin and been satisfied that they know the kind of cold I’m talking about, but that’s just my point. That conversation only happens between one person who lives in the southernmost part of her country (me) and a knitter who lives in the northernmost part of theirs. Move a little bit in either direction and we have little to discuss. What gets lost, once you move out of that really narrow geographic point of comparison, is that this is the sort of cold that doesn’t suffer any fools. This sort of cold means that it matters if your car breaks down on a back road or if you lose your house keys. Here, it matters if you are wearing your mittens.

A few years ago, when I was on a book deadline, a friend let me stay at their cabin. It was north of here, and it was isolated. It was more than a kilometer to the deserted road, and that kilometer wasn’t plowed, so the way in and out was by hiking, with snowshoes and a sled to pull your things on if you were lucky, and an exhausting trudge through the snow if you weren’t. (If you live in one of those aforementioned southern places, you might not have ever experienced a sincere desire for snowshoes. Walking through deep snow is exhausting—like walking through water. It adds resistance at best, and obstruction at worst. As in water, one cannot run in deep snow. Snowshoes mean that you walk on snow, rather than through it. They are a miracle.) This place was so far out in the middle of nowhere, and the Canadian winter so cold, that I was advised that if something went wrong, I should not hike out for help. It was around –30º C / –22º F when I got there, and that means that exposed skin can freeze (read: frostbite) in less than twenty minutes. In that sort of cold, no matter how quickly I walked, the cold would get me before I got to people. Being the sort of person who plans for emergencies, I asked what I should do if I were in trouble—if I couldn’t go for help, and I was there alone, what exactly was to be my plan? The gentleman I asked cocked his head and laughed. “Be smart,” he said. “Don’t get into trouble.”

I took that to heart, but the woods around the place were beautiful, and I wanted to walk in them. I decided to be smart. The cabin was in a part of Ontario that is on the Canadian Shield. That means that everywhere you go there are huge shelves, cracks, and chunks of Precambrian rock. It’s dangerous to walk on in the summer if you’re not careful, but in the winter it takes some extra intellect, since the snow covers the rock and you can’t see what dangers lurk beneath. There are ways around this, though, and if you’re smart, you’re safe. I decided to brave it. I headed out, warm and cozy in layers of alpaca and wool, and glanced at my watch as I left. At –30º C I had about twenty minutes to walk before I needed to worry. From the cabin I could see a ridge that overlooked the river, and I made that my goal.

The way to walk on shield rock in the snow is to follow deer track. The deer know their way around, and they live there all year round. If you walk where they walk, then you know that you won’t fall, because they haven’t. (Similarly, a place where the deer won’t walk should be avoided, and a frozen deer lying in your path can only be interpreted as a bad sign.) I was walking along, stepping in the footsteps of the deer who had walked before me, when I got to a place where the deer I was following had taken a long stride, and I (with my legs that are not quite as long as a deer’s) stepped between her hoofprints.

Instantly, my leg shot down into a crack in the rock, and in the beat of a heart I’d thrown myself forward to lie down (just as you should if you fall through the ice) and stopped falling. I crawled forward, out of the crack that had nearly claimed my life. When my heart had stopped pounding, I looked back at what I was sure would be a cliff that had been revealed by falling snow and avalanche, and felt immediately stupid. It wasn’t a big crack at all. I sat there for just a few minutes, gathering myself and looking back at the deer track. There, right before the crack, were two deer prints exactly side by side. That’s not a step. That’s a jump. The deer, in her infinite wisdom, had jumped over the crack she knew was there, and I had failed to notice. That wasn’t smart. I could have easily broken an ankle or gotten my foot caught, which is a bonehead move at the best of times but could be deadly in temperatures like this.

I picked myself up and brushed most of the snow off so I didn’t get colder faster, and I started to walk back to the house, following the deer track precisely, stepping exactly where they had stepped. Back in the house I made tea and knit for a bit while I watched night come, and I thought about what it’s like to be isolated in weather like this. I could see how it would be pretty easy to kill yourself just by getting lost. I’m sure that given an unlimited amount of time I could always find my way back to the cabin, but when it’s cold you don’t have an unlimited amount of time to apply your intellect to the problem. If I got lost up here I’d have twenty minutes to solve the thing. After that it could cost me a toe or two—or worse. If you’re not smart enough to realize that there’s no way to really get the upper hand on nature, then natural selection is going to take you out for your frailty.

Sitting by the fire in the cozy cabin, looking out at the snow and fierce cold, I thought about the people who lived here before me, way before me. Before wood could be delivered for the stove, before electricity, before hot water and phones. How did they do it? I wouldn’t have lasted an hour out there that day, and that’s even allowing for my modern boots and coat. What was it like to live in this country when all you had to keep you warm was your furs and knitting? My stack of woollies was drying by the fire. My mittens, hat, leg warmers, sweater, scarf—all of that to fight the cold with, and I still would have been in very serious trouble right quick if I had made even a minor error.

I’m sure the people who lived here were smart and tried not to get into trouble. Some of them probably froze to death anyway. I like to think that those were the stupid people, but I also like to think I’m smart, and I very nearly could have ended it all out there because I misinterpreted the track of a deer. I’m sure that the Canadians before me got lost, fell down cracks, miscalculated the time, got caught in blizzards, and never found their way home in the snow. I can even imagine them, putting on all their knitted stuff to go to the barn, winding a long scarf around their faces while thinking, “Stupid cows. I hope I come back alive from this.” In weather like this, in a place like this, for all my bravado and pride in being swathed in handknits to fight the cold, as sure as I am that I am better off than non-knitters in any battle against the winter, the truth is that without your brains, this place will have you. In weather like this, my knitting is simply a very minor insurance policy. My alpaca hat gives me maybe ten more minutes to get myself out of trouble. My wool socks, perhaps an extra fifteen before frostbite interferes with my ballet career (it could happen—don’t dampen my dream). In this place, knowing how to knit might be something that buys me a little more time to figure my way out of a mistake, something that I think, as I cast on for another pair of mittens and look out at the snow, might qualify as being smart and not getting into trouble.

rom time to time, an appliance comes into the life of a human and finds its way into her heart. I know that seems unlikely, considering that in this love affair one being is animate and the other doesn’t appear to be so, but such was the love between my washing machine and me. Intellectually I understand that he was an inanimate thing, but the truth is that my washing machine was there for me in a way that transcends all fact, and to me, he was a real and cherished personality in the house. That’s why the day that my washer lay in the basement, disemboweled and de-hosed, ashamed, with his parts hanging out and some mysterious organ lying disassembled on the living room coffee table, in surgery, I felt real loss.