365 True Things: 132/Knots

Prusik hitches are on left, braking

I spent much of the day tying knots: double and triple fisherman's knots mostly; also prusik hitches. We were cleaning out and reorganizing the SAR rescue trucks today, our training day, and a couple of the trucks were missing prusik loops (two varieties, short and long: used to brake a load on a rope by gripping the loaded rope tightly—yes, it works). So my friend Steve and I cut many lengths of green and red 8 mm cord, to 57 and 65 inches respectively, then fashioned them into loops using double fisherman's knots.

Later, we needed to make some more prusik loops out of 5 mm cord to attach to 8 mm cord using prusik hitches, to make a new "mule team pre-rig": a rope system that we use at front and back of a wheeled litter to haul and brake. "Mule team" is accurate.

I am now very good at fisherman's knots and prusiks. I could probably tie them in my sleep, hands behind my back.

Lately, too, I've been practicing—in random spare moments (I keep a length of cord around, yes I do)— bowlines, directional figure-eights, butterfly knots, and clove hitches. The only one of these we use much, to attach a harness system to a litter, is the bowline, and I could never get the whole rabbit-hole-tree thing. But our team leader, Jesse, figured out a very spiffy, rabbitless, way to tie a bowline. Not that I have anything against rabbits.

All this knot tying had me thinking of Annie Proulx's The Shipping News (1993), a novel that I adored. Each chapter begins with a description and diagram from a 1944 book called The Ashley Book of Knots. The various knots serve as metaphors. Chapter 1, for example ☞, introduces the protagonist, Quoyle, who—like the Flemish flake that illustrates the chapter—gets walked all over, at least as the book gets going.

Without the inspiration of the Ashley volume, which she picked up for a quarter at a yard sale, Proulx said, her book "would have remained just the thread of an idea."

In 1999 in an interview in the Missouri Review, she explained more about how these "threads of ideas" form and evolve:

Where a story begins in the mind I am not sure—a memory of haystacks, maybe, or wheel ruts in the ruined stone, the ironies that fall out of the friction between past and present, some casual phrase overheard. But something kicks in, some powerful juxtaposition, and the whole book shapes itself up in the mind. I spend a year or two on the research and I begin with the place and what happened there before I fill notebooks with drawings and descriptions of rocks, water, people, names. I study photographs. From place come the characters, the way things happen, the story itself. For the sake of architecture, of balance, I write the ending first and then go to the beginning.

Much of what I write is set in contemporary North America, but the stories are informed by the past; I like stories with three generations visible. Geography, geology, climate, weather, the deep past, immediate events, shape the characters and partly determine what happens to them, although the random event counts for much, as it does in life. I long ago fell into the habit of seeing the world in terms of shifting circumstances overlaid upon natural surroundings. I try to define periods when regional society and culture, rooted in location and natural resources, start to experience the erosion of traditional ways, and attempt to master contemporary, large-world values. The characters in my novels pick their way through the chaos of change. The present is always pasted on layers of the past.

The research is ongoing and my great pleasure. Since geography and climate are intensely interesting to me, much time goes into the close examination of specific regions—natural features of the landscape, human marks on it, earlier and prevailing economics based on raw materials, ethnic background of settlers.

I read manuals of work and repair, books of manners, dictionaries of slang, city directories, lists of occupational titles, geology, regional weather, botanists’ plant guides, local histories, newspapers. I visit graveyards, collapsing cotton gins, photograph barns and houses, roadways. I listen to ordinary people speaking with one another in bars and stores, in laundromats. I read bulletin boards, scraps of paper I pick up from the ground. I paint landscapes because staring very hard at a place for twenty to thirty minutes and putting it on paper burns detail into the mind as no amount of scribbling can do.

Ashley's illustration

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And she goes to yard sales and picks up this and that. A book of knots sparks her imagination, gives it a direction in which to head.

All her talk about geography and time, of memory and roots, I find just wonderful. Although I'm not a big fan of historical fiction, I love this layering of the present day on top of the past. It probably explains why I enjoy her writing so much. "From place come the characters, the way things happen, the story itself." Of course!

And now I'm inspired to pick up that book and read it again.