I opened the book and tumbled headfirst into it. Cromarty, a boxy, intricately cabled pullover, grabbed me by the neck and shook me. In the pattern, the lanky redheaded model lounges on a rocky shoreline. Wild fiber lust filled my body. I had to have that sweater. Wearing it, I knew I’d probably end up spending a lot of time on a rugged coast too. It was inevitable in a garment like that.
In the pattern description, Starmore mentions the incorporated Celtic crosses, knotwork from the Nigg stone, and the Pictish stones of Eastern Scotland. Pictish! I didn’t even know what the word meant; I just knew I wanted to have something Pictish in my life. It sounded magical, as if the sweater itself would be casting runes for me. And a Nigg stone? Who knew? Who cared? It would be mine.
I blogged about wanting to make the sweater, and Michigan’s ThreadBear Fiber Arts offered to give me yarn if I knitted it as a shop model for their store. They’d display it for six months, and then they’d mail it back to me, a win-win situation. I agreed, and they sent me fifteen skeins of Koigu Kersti in a luscious variegated brown.
I sat down and picked up a US size four needle. I’m a loose knitter, after all. This was an important sweater—I was actually going to do a gauge swatch. I cast on. It didn’t work. I went down to a three. Then a two. Now, gauge is a bear sometimes. I tried not to care that while swatching I couldn’t get the right gauge in the DK-weight yarn until I went down to a US size one needle. It would be the same amount of stitches, no matter how tiny the needle was, right? How hard could it be?
Answer: so hard. I was used to knitting projects that could be worked in loud, crowded bars without difficulty. Cromarty was not that kind of knitting. I had to pay attention to the chart at the beginning of every single row. I started to wonder if the ThreadBear boys had placed too much trust in me. Maybe I just wasn’t a good enough knitter for this.
Ripping back, something I rarely did, something that normally reduced me to fits of swearing, became old hat. Knitters gasped as I pulled out the intricate inches of cable work. “No one will ever notice that miscrossed cable,” they told me, still pale from witnessing an hour of work unravel.
That had always been my line. I’d never understood why people needed their knitting to be perfect. People who reknit sleeves because they didn’t fit exactly right into the sleeve caps made me crazy. Instead, I’d push and pull, jiggering pieces of sweaters until they finally looked approximately right. Of course, that meant that while I ended up with some great sweaters, others hung oddly from my shoulders, and my bind-offs were sometimes a bit wonky. But it would never be noticed from a trotting horse, I thought (not that I’m around many folks on trotting horses), and I was fine with that.
But not so for Cromarty. She had to be perfect. Since I was making her to be placed on display, errors that I’d allow in other sweaters couldn’t be tolerated. When it was hung in the store, people would fondle the display model, pick it up, try it on, examine the seams. My name would be on it. I have a knitting blog. I write novels about knitting. I couldn’t bear the thought of the knitting world finding me out as someone who couldn’t knit a Starmore, and the nervousness was getting to me.
I thought about quitting and sending the yarn back.
I was never, ever going to finish this damn sweater, and, if I did, it would probably be ugly, only good as an around-the-house sweater, one that I’d wear while writing on cold afternoons when I knew I wouldn’t see anyone else, taking the place of the green Cal Poly sweatshirt with its ketchup stain.
But quitting would mean that I’d failed. So when I’d discover a miscrossed cable, I’d ladder down to it, correcting it on my way back up. While doing that, I’d see another incorrect cable to the side of it, so I’d rip back six or eight painful rows. Knitting back up, I’d inevitably find another error. The reverse side was always purl, so I’d rest on those rows, knowing the next row would kick my ass.
I gave myself permission to cry whenever I had to rip more than ten rows at once. I’d never cried so much over a piece of knitting. If I wasn’t actually on a rugged coastline, I was creating my own salt sea.
It was taking forever and the going was painful. But I tried to believe it wouldn’t beat me. I’d abandoned sweaters in progress when bored with them, but I’d never quit a sweater because it was too difficult. And while not an astonishingly fast knitter, I’m usually pretty speedy, averaging a sweater a month or so. Three months into knitting Cromarty, I was only done with the sleeves, and I already felt as if I’d given my whole life over to the project. I couldn’t think about anything else. I gave myself mini deadlines—knit to Row 62 by midnight—and I’d race to make them, introducing even more errors as I went. What’s more, every time I looked in the mirror I found more prematurely gray hairs, and I was pretty sure they were a direct result of Cromarty. I thought again about quitting but then rejected that idea as impossible. I was committed.
One night, as I drifted off to sleep thinking about the bottom hem of the back, I realized I was…perhaps a little obsessed. Okay, a lot obsessed. But where was the harm in that? I wasn’t out drinking in every bar in town, I wasn’t on drugs—my problems were soft and squooshy. Who cared? I forged ahead, dreaming of being the redhead on the coastline in the Cromarty photograph.
When I was three-quarters of the way through the fifteen skeins the shop sent me, I had a feeling that I might be in very real trouble. I’d finished only the sleeves and part of the back. There was no way I’d have enough yarn, and the Koigu was hand dyed by small batch in Canada. The shop sent more to me in the same colorway but from a different dye lot. It was awful, three shades lighter, completely unusable.
I sat in a corner gibbering for a little while. Cromarty was bigger to me now than just a display sweater, more than just a challenge. I wanted to be on that rugged coastline already, dammit! Only I was becoming a little nervous that the shore in question was actually going to be the Cromarty Firth, the bay in northeastern Scotland in which, just before World War II, the Royal Navy had laid out thirty miles of cable in order to detect and destroy German U-boats. I felt like I was swimming underwater laying the cables, but the cables weren’t made of steel, but merino, and it was getting difficult to hold my breath.
Koigu asked for a sample from my remaining yarn, and I shipped it northward along with prayers for favorable winds and excellent dye-pot luck. They sent back ten new skeins that matched perfectly, for a total of twenty five—my myriad cables gobbled the yardage, and I ended up using all of them.
When I sewed the sweater together and bound off at the neck, Cromarty was dense as felt, heavy as leather. With its gauge, though, the drape was lovelier than I could have predicted, and the intricacy of the cables was truly magnificent. It was a showstopper. I’d made it into the bay, safe and sound, and could finally come up for air. Now I had to find that coastline.
The finishing was strangely anticlimactic. There was no applause. Digit didn’t care. I took a few pictures and then, with nothing else to do, I packed it into a box and sent it away. I fought silly tears. Would they take good enough care of her there? Would customers be too rough with her? I couldn’t bear to think about it, so to get my mind off her, I cast on for a top-down raglan in heavy worsted wool. It felt like back floating after the underwater maneuvers I’d been performing, and I finished the simple stockinette sweater in two weeks.
Months later, when the box came back to me, I opened it carefully, reverentially. I lifted the sweater out, and even though it was a warm fall day, I layered it over a T-shirt, put the top down on my convertible, and drove across the Richmond Bridge to Dharma Trading in San Rafael. I didn’t even feel like shopping—I just wanted someone else to see it and recognize it for what it was.
It worked. As if it had been scripted, the first woman I saw in the store let out a yelp when she saw me.
“Starmore!” she cried. “Which book?”
“The Celtic Collection,” I said, blushing furiously in pleasure.
“Cromarty.” Another wom
an nodded. “I did that one too. Almost killed me.”
“I did this on size ones,” I said, unable to hide the pride in my voice.
The gasps were audible.
And there, surrounded by people who spoke my language, I was finally proud of myself. I’d done it. I’d made the sweater of my dreams, and I loved the way the accomplishment felt on my shoulders.
On my way home that day, I drove out to the Albany Bulb. The scrubby little outcropping of land juts into the San Francisco Bay and is populated only by wandering artists and people walking their dogs. As I walked in the wind, I considered the Pictish cables I was wearing. I’d researched them, finally, and learned that Alice Starmore had been inspired by the patterns for them from a stone from the late eighth century, found in a churchyard in Nigg, just across the bay from the town of Cromarty, where, twelve hundred years later, the miles and miles of cable would be laid underwater. Across the water from me, I grinned at the cables of the Golden Gate Bridge—each cable made of twenty-seven thousand strands of wire twisted around each other. For me, this sweater was my Golden Gate. It was my ridiculous challenge, accomplished.
I wore Cromarty on the rugged coastline and knew I was finally the knitter I wanted to be.
TREE OF LIFE
I wish I could show you the invisible lines of strata in my knitted socks—where I was and what was happening when each inch was made. After all these years knitting, though, my stitches are generally pretty even, so it’s impossible to know exactly where I was when I made which stitches. But if suddenly the lines of time were somehow made visible on my sock-in-progress, I’d show you that here, at the toe, you’d see I was home on the couch, my border collie, Clara, at my side. Two inches up, I was waiting in line at the post office when a bouncing child joggled my arm before wanting a demonstration of what I was doing. When I turned the heel, I was at a funeral and used the completed toe to dry my eyes, and this long, straight section of ankle was done at work. Yep. I know. I get to knit at work, making me one of the luckiest people alive. I work 911 dispatch, which can be a wonderful, frustrating, sometimes frightening job, and believe me when I say that stress-management tools are necessary for the profession. Knitting fits the bill.
Some of the rows in this sock were knitted while I was thinking about the man who accidentally dropped his child down a flight of stairs. The ones just above it were knitted while I worried about the forty-three-year-old woman who was transported to the hospital after a seizure, unconscious, barely breathing. Who would be there when she woke up? Did she have someone to hold her hand? I’m not often one for prayer, but when I do pray, the wishes get tangled in my stitches until the item itself feels like more than just a piece of fabric.
Not all my rows are complicated with emotion. Some of the knitting I do at work is relaxed, the stitches smooth and even. If I could point them out, I’d show you where I was knitting with my brain turned off, passing time between 911 calls and radio transmissions.
There are many myths about 911, but the most widely held myth is that all dispatchers sit together in one big room sharing a great pool of knowledge, that they can control events and safety with a flick of the switch. They know, instantly, how big an earthquake is or when the power will be restored to your area. If you call 911 for your aunt who lives in another state who was having difficulty breathing while she was on the phone with you, the dispatcher will be able to transfer you quickly to the right agency.
Wrong. While these are nice ideas, 911 isn’t like that. In your town, there’s a good chance you have at least a couple of different dispatch centers that you might get patched through to on a bad day (no one calls 911 because she’s having a great day and wants to share). In many cities, including mine, police and fire are dispatched separately—the police agency is the primary answering point, and if the PD dispatcher decides your call needs fire or medical help, she transfers you to a center with specially trained dispatchers, like mine. And if you call for someone far away, chances are the dispatcher is going to have to Google the department’s phone number to transfer you.
I’ve been a dispatcher for twelve years, and I think it’s one of the best jobs in the world. On any given shift, I actually get to help—I give instructions to the woman whose husband has just passed out, or to the parent whose child is choking on a piece of carrot. I tell people how to do CPR. I instruct men on how to deliver their wives’ babies. It’s not a job that involves a lot of paper pushing—it’s a job that requires you to be able to multitask and prioritize while real lives hang in the balance.
It sounds exciting, and it is. My busy jurisdiction serves almost half a million people. In the fall, when the rains start and cars skid off the roads, we’re busy dispatching engines and ambulances to traffic collisions. In winter, when people first start their fireplaces and propane heaters, structure fires abound. Spring brings ATV accidents, and summer brings vegetation fires. And always, everywhere, people need medical help.
But it’s another myth that 911 is always busy. Even in the busiest centers, there are down times. Dispatchers aren’t paid to dust or clean or perform market research—they’re paid to know what to do and who to dispatch when the plane goes down or when the gas line explodes.
When it’s quiet, though, unlike firefighters, who have sleep time built into their shifts, dispatchers are paid to stay awake, which can be difficult in the middle of a silent night. Some read books, some chat with coworkers, some watch TV if their center allows it.
Many dispatchers knit.
To me, knitting is perfectly suited to the job. Knitting is typically portable, though I wouldn’t try to knit a full blanket in dispatch; and once the knitter is proficient, the work can be dropped instantaneously in the lap when the phone rings. (When the knitter isn’t proficient, she learns to accept imperfections, because stitches will jump when she does, as she catches the phone on its first ring.)
Many of the twenty-five dispatchers at my agency knit. My favorite knitting coworker, Cristian, is one of the toughest guys I know. A young veteran who lost his legs—one below the hip, one at the knee—in Iraq, Cris walks with two prosthetic devices, and sometimes the pain of walking on them makes him scowl. But he moves deliberately, his Humvee backpack slung over his shoulder. He never complains, which is astonishing to me. I whine if I get a paper cut. He tries not to drink much water during our long shifts, so that he doesn’t have to make the walk to the bathroom often—I call him the camel and nag him to drink more water—and sometimes when his leg battery is low it beeps softly, like a dying cell phone.
Jim, another macho knitting coworker, taught Cris to knit during one nightshift. “I showed him the basics,” said Jim, “but then he just picked up the rest of it on his own.” I once saw a photograph of Cris hunched over his needles in front of the dispatch console. He was frowning, eyes intense, and if someone gave me that look in a dark alley, I’d run the other way. But he was busy making his wife a scarf in the Oakland Raiders colors: silver and black.
One morning, just after I’d heard he was knitting, I passed him on the walkway—I was leaving work, and he was coming on shift. He stopped me with a jerk of his head. “Hey.”
“Yeah?” I was sleepy, ready to head home.
“I got this problem.”
“You do?” I was surprised. Was he mad at a coworker? Was he mad at me? Had he had a bad call and needed to process it?
He paused and then looked up and down the ramp, making sure the coast was clear. In a low tone, he said hurriedly, “If I want to use two strands at once, do I have to get two different balls of yarn?”
I knew he wouldn’t appreciate either the grin or the hug I wanted to give him, so I just said, “You can knit from both ends of the ball at once.”
His eyes widened. “The inside and the outside tail.”
“It’ll tangle a little, but you can handle it.” I’d assumed he’d just been fooling around with the needles, bored during the night. I’d never thought he would be one to won
der about technique, to do more than just garter stitch.
“Yeah,” he said with another tilt of his head. His voice was gruff. “Hey, thanks.”
“Any time.”
Cris is busy with his wife and two kids at home, and I know that in his downtime he likes to play video games, watch shoot-em-up movies, and buy Oakland A’s bobble-heads on eBay. He may not be the typical candidate to get caught up in knit and purl. But his stitches are tight and even, and the scarves he turns out are lovely. All of the women in his life clamor for his creations.
I asked him once what he liked about knitting. He shrugged and said, “Just something to do, I guess. Something to pass the time, that’s all.”
“You’re really good at it,” I said.
“Yeah, but I only make scarves.”
“That’s something,” I said, and I meant it.
At work, we sit in our chairs for twelve to eighteen hours at a stretch. Our breaks are taken at our terminals. For some of us, knitting in our downtime is our break. When the phone rings, we all drop our work in our laps and race each other to help someone who’s scared and in pain. I can’t tell from looking at my knitting who called us when; I can’t see the places where I was stressed out as opposed to whiling wee hours away.
I bet Cris’s knitting is the same way. I’m sure that when Cris’s wife, Blanca, wears her scarf, she doesn’t think about the people her husband talked to, the way his voice got softer when the caller started crying, the way he just picked up his work afterward and added more tight, deliberate stitches. I wonder if he ever considers the energy he’s bringing to the work through his hands, but I’m a little too shy to ask. I think it’s something beautiful and rare, a tough young veteran like him performing a traditional craft, and I don’t want to scare or embarrass him into quitting by asking something like, “Do you pray when you knit?” Perhaps he’s never considered the invisible lines that run through his knitting, like they do mine.
A Life in Stitches Page 6