Knitlandia

by Clara Parkes

  At last I returned to my street for a final bowl of pho, this time in the company of Ysolda. We fantasized that she was going to buy houses all over the world, and that I would move to the United Kingdom. She warned me that the winters were barely better than in Maine.

  “People don’t realize how far north we are,” she said. “It’s dark at 8:30 in the morning and it’s dark by 3:00 in the afternoon. If you’ve ever wondered why I get so much done in January, it’s because . . . there’s nothing else to do.”

  That night I lay in bed trying to fall asleep, my mind going into over-drive processing everything I’d seen on this too-brief trip. I could actually feel myself lending the imprint of past to this experience. I had to open my eyes to remember I was still here, that Edinburgh was still around me. I hadn’t left, but already my mind was preparing me for the odd reality of soon being back in Portland, Maine. Would this all feel like a dream?

  I thought again about Paul Theroux and his immense dislike for air travel, the sense-numbing way it forces us into a metal tube that’s flung at 500 miles per hour until it deposits us into an alien reality. He much prefers the slow train, the old-fashioned crossing. Even then, though, “You never come all the way back,” he’d written. But who has time for that now? Maybe that’s one reason I love knitting so much, because it lets me enjoy the experience of getting there, of watching the landscape change from cuff to sleeve.

  A glorious, ebullient bird song woke me up early, just one bird, but with the longest and most musical of trills. It was impossible to begrudge it. Soon I would be trundling my yarn-stuffed suitcase down the street toward Haymarket, passing under the yellow beams of each streetlight, trying to soak up every last moment of “now” before it became “then.” My airport tram passed a commuter train and I felt a pull at my heart, a wish to be on that train instead. I was ready to go, but not to leave.

  Boarding the plane for home, I heard a familiar voice welcome me. “Rick!” I exclaimed. “Clara!” We hugged one another like old friends. How was my trip? Rick asked. Did I like Edinburgh? I tried to talk and realized I couldn’t come up with words to express what I’d experienced. As I stuttered, he nodded and smiled. “I know. I know. It’s something, isn’t it?”

  While he expertly soothed a screaming baby a few rows back, I fell sound asleep and didn’t wake up until somewhere over Albany. Soon the plane was flying parallel to the Hudson River. To our east stood the empty Rhinebeck fairgrounds, still ten months away from holding their next sheep-and-wool festival. Straight ahead, our decidedly unromantic but necessary destination: Newark.

  I like to imagine the people in the plane who were looking out the window, seeing this same view for the first time, and finding themselves unable to control their own smiles, their own butterflies. For them, this was new and exciting and oh so glorious. Even the dirty snow, the garbage, the long TSA line after customs, it would all take on a golden hue.

  As for me, I would continue my way home to Maine, comforted in the knowledge that I’d added not only to my yarn stash but to my community of friends, and that I’d gotten to witness something very special in its infancy.

  ROMANCING THE LOONS: Holderness, New Hampshire

  I AM A CAUTIOUS OPTIMIST by nature. Show me any happy couple and I’ll show you potential heartbreak in the making. Having witnessed the dissolution of my parents’ marriage, I knew at an early age just how fallible adults could be. All remaining shreds of gullibility had been sent into hiding by my older brothers’ merciless teasing. Yet I still knock on wood and read my horoscope and make a wish when I see a shooting star. All of which is to say that when I received my invitation to speak at Squam Art Workshops, a five-day retreat renowned for its woo-woo qualities, I was skeptical but also secretly excited.

  Prior to launching these creative gatherings in 2008, founder Elizabeth Duvivier was an adjunct professor of English literature, composition, and creative writing at the New Hampshire Institute of Art. But in terms of the knitting world, she came out of nowhere, with a name that seemed to belong in flowery cursive on the cover of a romance novel.

  So, too, did Squam come out of nowhere. One day, everybody who was anybody in the knitting world was there, posting pictures of a dock, a lake, twinkle lights, and women in handknits holding hands as they wandered through the woods. They all proclaimed the same thing, that Squam was magic.

  In 2015, Elizabeth invited me to come give a talk about my work with the American textiles industry at the spring retreat. “Naturally, you don’t need to stay the whole weekend,” she wrote, “but if you wanted to, you are so welcome!” Having long been curious about the inner machinations of this event, I accepted.

  When I told other knitters I was finally going to Squam, they all sighed wistfully and said, “You’ll love it.” Nobody was able to explain exactly why I would love it, they were just incredulous that I hadn’t yet been. When pressed for details, they could only add something along the lines of, “It’s special. You’ll see.”

  My mother had booked my first therapy session when I was eight. She exposed my brothers and me to est and consciousness-raising, self-help gurus and crystals, to such an extent that as an adult, whenever I encounter a group of people who gather in the woods and can’t quite explain what happens, only that it’s magic, all my cult bells go off. Could it be that Squam Lake is breeding ground for more than one kind of loon?

  Wary but hopeful, I packed my flip-flops, my mosquito repellant, and my trusty flashlight, and I set out for New Hampshire.

  Squam Art Workshops take place at the Rockywold Deephaven Camps, an old-fashioned family vacation resort on Squam Lake. This sublime 6,791-acre freshwater lake straddles three counties in central New Hampshire. It’s just a two-hour drive from Portland, but it felt a world away. Roads got narrower and narrower as I went, one landscape more exquisite and bucolic than the next. At last, once my wheels touched dirt, I opened the windows and was hit with a rush of rustling leaves, birds, and, in the distance, the waters of the lake, which sounded like a thousand dogs lapping at their bowls.

  It is, without exception, the most exquisite place I’ve ever been for a knitting retreat. This same lake was immortalized on film in On Golden Pond, starring Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda. Here you’ll find childhood summertime nostalgia perfectly preserved as if pressed within the pages of a diary. The sprawling camps date back to 1897 and 1901, when two neighboring properties (Rockywold and Deephaven) began offering wholesome summer getaways for families. The properties were combined in 1918. Year after year, people returned, families grew, cabins were added. Today, guests can choose from among sixty-two lakeside cabins—each unique and equally charming—and three larger lodges, each with names like Easterleigh and Sheltering Pines.

  Rockywold Deephaven Camps operate from May to September. Reservations start each spring in what is really more of an application process, with layers of priority and seniority that pretty much guarantee that the same families will be there during high season, year after year, generation after generation. Payment is accepted in the form of cash or check only, and a family of four can easily spend more than $5,000 a week.

  It’s old school to the core, with a Thursday-night talent show, Friday-night square dance, and a weekly all-camp barbecue on the ball field every Wednesday, weather permitting. Your full American plan includes assigned tables and a dress code in the dining room. “Casual sportswear is acceptable for breakfast and lunch,” notes the forty-eight-page guest manual, “but more appropriate dress is recommended for dinner (non-athletic shorts, pants, collared shirt for men; dresses, skirts, pants, non-athletic shorts for women).” As guests of the camp, the dress code applied to us as well.

  The spring Squam retreat is the camp’s first big shakedown sail of the season, and the fall retreats are the last few easy cruises before they drain the pipes and lock everything up for the winter. Our June retreat had 175 guests, giving us nearly full run of the camp. But once the season is operating at full steam, a staff
of 125 serves the needs of 450 guests each week.

  I was staying in what Elizabeth called the teacher’s cabin, Eldorado, a seven-bedroom cottage just fifty-three feet away from the lake. All the bedrooms but one were shared, everyone thrown together like summer campers on their first trips away from home. Some of my cabinmates were strangers, there to teach classes on drawing and book altering. But most were actually longtime friends and colleagues, including Bristol Ivy, Amy Christoffers, Amy Herzog, Kate Atherley, and Gudrun Johnston. Also in our cabin, but not teaching, were Ysolda Teague and the founders of Ravelry, Jessica and Casey Forbes.

  You can’t really talk about Squam without talking about Ravelry. To a certain degree, the former wouldn’t exist without the help of the latter. As Casey explained to me one night over s’mores, Elizabeth had attended an arts retreat on the West Coast and decided to start up something similar in New Hampshire. She remembered that her old friend Jessica had just started a knitting site called Ravelry. She asked for help, and Jess gave her a list of people she should approach about teaching knitting classes—pretty much the top names in the industry at that time. Ravelry commanded such renown and cred that its unofficial endorsement helped Elizabeth woo the best. Jess promoted the event on Ravelry, and it filled.

  That was just one year after Ravelry’s own launch, but the site’s galvanizing effect on the knitting community had been swift and profound. We’d already begun the migration from a small, tightly controlled analog universe to a democratized digital one. But here, in Ravelry, we had a one-stop shop for knitters to connect, to learn and share, to find out about yarns and patterns. Readers eagerly populated the site with content, and designers found themselves able, at last, to sell their patterns directly to the public.

  Such sophisticated technology would have been impossible for any fledgling knitting player to afford, but this one had a secret weapon. Founder Jessica Forbes, who had only learned to knit in 2004 from the books Stitch ’n Bitch and Knitting For Dummies, was married to Casey, a brilliant technologist with state-of-the-art Ruby on Rails programming skills. They launched Ravelry together, and theirs was a killer combo. Ravelry didn’t just disrupt the industry, it created a whole new one that has become what many people now think of when they hear the word knitting. By the time we arrived at Squam, Ravelry had just topped 5.3 million registered users.

  We all gathered on Wednesday night after dinner in an old building that overlooks a pair of well-preserved tennis courts. Knitted flowers twisted along the backs of benches and up the porch railings. Colorful bunting and twinkle lights, pompoms and a roaring fire transformed the playhouse into a magical space. We sat, happy, eager, apprehensive. The smell of wood smoke mingled with mosquito repellant. A woman in a linen wrap dress with long, flowing hair ascended the stage and spread her arms out to welcome us—Elizabeth.

  “I . . . I just need to ground a moment,” she said somewhat breathlessly, waving her hands and closing her eyes. We smiled and waited. “Let’s close our eyes and breathe,” she said in a singsong voice. “Breathing in . . . out . . . in . . . out . . .” I listened to our collective exhales, measuring my sprinting distance to the door.

  Elizabeth came to life. Excited, she wanted to tell us how much she had changed since she launched Squam in 2008, and how even the event was a completely transformed experience. In fact, she hadn’t played any part in planning this year’s retreat. It was all the work of others, who we cheered and applauded when she asked them to stand. Another exciting transformation was that she would be teaching a workshop on writing this year (more applause).

  It was all, she said, because of a chance encounter she’d had the previous fall, the night before her fall retreat was to begin. She had gathered with some friends. She’d left her cabin to find a suitable spot to work some moon magic for the group when a loud hiss came from the cabin porch: “Skunk!” (We all gasped.)

  Sure enough, standing on the path between her and the cabin was a great big skunk. Elizabeth was filled with terror. Tomorrow, she thought, 170 people would arrive, each expecting a hug from her. How can you run an event when reeking of skunk?

  Heart racing, she slowly inched toward the lake—only to have the skunk follow her. (More gasps.)

  Elizabeth was a skillful storyteller. She deftly led our collective anticipation ever closer to the brink of disaster. Only then, at last, did she tell us how she opened her eyes and saw that the skunk had walked away. The minute she knew she was safe, Elizabeth told us how she felt a powerful rush of confidence come over her, a rush of pure fearlessness.

  She had looked up the symbolism of the skunk, wondering what kind of message the universe may have been trying to send her. “The skunk,” she explained, “is a symbol of protection, independence, and self-respect.” She held up a small figurine of a skunk that she has carried with her ever since. We cheered again.

  One by one, she invited the teachers up to introduce themselves and to break the ice by answering a question: What are your favorite shoes? We heard talk of Converse sneakers, of Dr. Martens and Frye boots, of original wood-bottomed Dr. Scholl’s, and of preferring to go barefoot.

  In closing, Elizabeth urged us to own the fullness of who we are, to use kindling only for starting fires, and, on Saturday night, to carpool to the marketplace because parking would be tight.

  “There are gifts waiting for you in these woods,” she told us, “and I hope that you find them.” I knew that the woods offered ticks and mosquitoes and apparently skunks, but I don’t think those were the gifts she meant. The woods also offered bears, like the one that tried to break into the teacher’s cabin a few years ago.

  “Bears I didn’t get to see,” Ysolda complained on the walk back to our cabin, “because Franklin [Habit] has the completely wrong priorities.” His priority had been to scare the bear away rather than wake up Ysolda so she could Instagram it. “For the record,” she added, “if you see a bear and I am in the building, I would like to be alerted.”

  We stumbled through darkness, our path lit by small flickering pools of light from LED headlamps, cell phones, and the little Duracell flashlight I’ve had by my bed since college. Once safely inside, door closed against marauding nature, Ysolda set about making us all hot toddies while someone else built us a roaring fire.

  The cabins are perfectly preserved examples of what a wealthy Bostonian rusticator would have wanted at the turn of the last century. Which is to say, they have no phones or TVs, no stoves, coffee makers, hair dryers, or microwaves. Wi-Fi access has been reluctantly added, but it’s spotty. The only heat comes from your fireplace, which is stocked with perfectly cut, split, and seasoned firewood supplied every morning by a brigade of handsome young men. Beds all have thick comforters to keep you warm—and it will be just you alone in bed, because every bed on the property is a twin. (I guess those rusticators didn’t believe in hanky-panky, either.)

  Like bank robbers on the run, we had stocked our cabin with enough food for a month-long standoff. We had potato, corn, and kale chips, as well as olives, cheeses, salamis, sesame snacks, crackers, coconut water, every kind of coffee and tea, and of course, a full supply of graham crackers, marshmallows, and chocolate bars for s’mores. Jess and Casey had even thought to bring sticks for roasting the marshmallows over our fire.

  While cabins have no refrigerators, they do have their original iceboxes. Preserving the spirit of authenticity, they don’t just truck in the ice, they actually cut it from the lake each January and store it in sawdust-filled ice houses. Yet more handsome young men come to the cabins each morning with freshly painted green wheelbarrows of ice, inspecting and replenishing each icebox as necessary.

  Our icebox was full of booze, every kind of beer, wine, and cider. Sharing the cabin was teacher and designer Thea Colman, better known under her moniker BabyCocktails. (“If you Google ‘Thea Colman’ you’ll get a porn star,” she said when we met.) In keeping with her nickname, she had brought a big bottle of gin, a bag of limes, and plenty of t
onic.

  I would be bunking with Bristol Ivy, who had recently fledged from Brooklyn Tweed and was striking out on her own as a designer—and who also happens to live one block away from me in Portland. Ysolda was bunking with Gudrun downstairs, closest to the door through which any bear might try to pass. Jess and Casey had brought their baby, August, who goes by the name Auggie and whose face is so sincere and expressive that it would melt even the most hardened of hearts. Jess had brought foam earplugs for everyone just in case he started screaming in the night, but he ended up being the quietest among us. Their older daughter, Eloise, was enjoying time alone with her grandma back home.

  We assembled early the next morning, spraying ourselves with an array of bug sprays according to our personal philosophies about chemicals and itching, and walked through the woods to get to breakfast. In the morning light, I could see that the paths had been dotted with yet more pompoms, a tiny knitted flower here, a garland there.

  Meals were served in a huge old dining hall, with a cold buffet of fruits and yogurts and a hot buffet fully stocked with eggs, sausages, bacon, pancakes, and the like.

  “The real maple syrup is over here!” Jess grabbed my elbow and steered me over to a table with a big pump-topped jug of New Hampshire’s finest. “Can you believe it?” We quickly discovered that we shared similar snack cravings, and whenever Jess reached for a bag or box, she brought it over for me to try.

  The camp is spread across 200 acres, and many people preferred to drive to meals, which caused a bit of a traffic jam outside. At breakfast, and every meal thereafter, announcements would be made about which car was improperly parked. “A Subaru Forester is blocking the offices,” we’d be told, prompting all twenty-one people owning Subaru Foresters to get up and head for the door simultaneously.