Creating a Sweater Started in the Mountains

My next creation is finishing a lamb’s wool sweater in dark blue that I’m knitting for my daughter. Both my daughter and my oldest son want dark blue sweaters. Neither one wants purple or red or even royal blue, nor  blue like in the night before a storm, just dark blue.

I learned to knit from Jeanette, an older Norwegian woman who was a skilled knitter; she had been knitting for 50 years.  When I first lived at Holden Village, almost 25 years ago, she was probably the same age I am now. I can still picture the beautiful purple and dark blue sweater that she made in an intricate Norwegian pattern. She was a wonderful, patient teacher.

I wanted to live in the mountains and Holden was the best place imaginable to fulfill my dream. The village is nestled in Railroad Creek Valley, which is 50 miles by boat from Chelan, then twelve miles by sputtering, choking school buses up the mountain on a gravel road to an elevation of 3200 ft in the Cascade Mountains. The village is not accessible by car, or phone or radio or television. A visitor from Switzerland compared the view of the mountains to the Swiss Alps; the views of Buckskin, Dumbell, and Copper mountains are that spectacular.

The village had been built to house miners and their families for a copper mine in the 1937. The mine closed in the 1957. The Canadian mining company, the Howe Sound Company, gave the miners little notice so they had to abandon their homes. The Forest Service tore down the miners’ family homes after most of the roofs collapsed under the winter snow. But several buildings remained including the single miners’ dorms, the hotel, the village center with a gym, library and a soda fountain upstairs and a pool hall and bowling alley downstairs. The school, twelve chalets that had been the engineers’ homes and an outdoor hot tub with a first class view of the surrounding mountains, also survived. Those buildings were given to the Lutherans, actually they paid one dollar for the village and leased the land from the Forest Service.

The first year I lived there I stayed in one of the dorms. Number six. We lived upstairs over the wood/electric/plumbing shop; everything was fixed in the shop. I came in April and was asked if I would be the head housekeeper. My job was to open up the four guest dorms for the summer season. I had a staff of two so I also helped out at the museum. I enjoyed working in the empty dorms, turning them into livable rooms. But I especially loved giving tours to guests of the village, explaining the remarkable history of the village and taking them up to the museum.

In addition to experiencing life in a remote mountain village, I learned to knit. I'd always wanted to knit a sweater. So my first knitting project was a bright turquoise blue sweater with a lacy pattern. I used to sit by Jeanette during meetings. At first my hands felt awkward and I was a clumsy knitter. I couldn’t see how the pattern was created. So whenever I made a mistake I would hand my sweater to her and she would either correct the mistake or make it look like it was corrected. Gradually I began to see the pattern and could correct my own mistakes, but it was a hard day when she left the village and I hadn’t learned how to finish the sweater.
The next woman who was in charge of the Craft Shop made socks and couldn’t help me with a sweater. She was impatient that I had been allowed to start with such a complicated pattern.  But wasn’t it wonderful that Jeanette didn’t discourage me? Wouldn’t the world be better off if we were encouraged to create what we wanted instead of what was reasonable? I still have that sweater. Although when I finished it and laid it out, I was astounded at how large it was. Actually after all the work it required, I was horrified. Fortunately the lacy pattern allows it to drape so the size isn’t noticeable. My gauge has always been a little loose and I have since learned to pay more attention to it and correct it when it goes astray.

After four months I left Holden Village to be with a man; I returned a couple of years later to stay away from him. When I returned I became head of laundry. They didn’t need me in the summer so I volunteered as a wilderness ranger for the Forest Service, working in Entiat Valley, the next valley over. Sometimes I would hike to the top of the ridge and look into Railroad Valley, but I couldn't see Holden because the valley curved away from the spot I could hike to.

When I returned to Holden at the end of summer, I alighted from the bus as part of the winter staff.  The volunteer coordinator announced that I would work at the Craft Shop part time and head of laundry part time. I had to learn to warp the looms, track the inventory, and maintain the supply inventory, which meant I ordered yarn. Ordering yarn was like having Christmas once a month. I could order yarn wholesale, and any of the staff could join an order. We would wait for the trucks to bring up the supplies off the barge. We would help unload the trucks, carrying bags of rice, potatoes, crates of milk and buckets of delicious ice cream. Then we would spot the boxes from Harris Tweed and Brown Sheep and we would grab them and run to the Craft Shop. After we cut through the packing tape, the boxes would spring open with the fluffy yarn in a whirl of colors.  I left Holden at the end of the year  with skeins, and skeins, of Brown Sheep wool. Seventeen years later I'm finishing a sweater for my  daughter from some of that yarn.