No, wake up, kids, this scrap of trivia could win you money on Jeopardy some day. It’s a little-known fact that my small and placid island was once the seat of an international conflict. In 1859, when the easterners were preparing to blow each other to bits, an American settler on San Juan Island shot a marauding pig belonging to the Hudson Bay Company and sparked a twelve-year conflict, complete with forts and garrisons and five British warships, that we like to call the Pig War. Happily, no one else was killed, except for someone who was accidentally shot by his bother and a few British sailors who imbibed a little too much grog and fell overboard. There’s a song about it that we all learned in the fourth grade. It goes like this:
Let me tell you of the story of the San Juan pig / It wasn’t worth much, ’cause it wasn’t very big. / But it rooted in a garden and it nearly caused a fray / Between the king of England and the U.S.A.
And so on and so forth for another umpteen stanzas, with which I won’t torture you. The territorial dispute was finally arbitrated by Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany (he’s in the song, too), who chose to make us Americans rather than Canadians. But it was a near thing, you see? The point is, Friday Harbor could have been a town in Canada. It would be an equally lovely place; possibly even lovelier, because doubtless fewer Californians would have decided to build monstrous second homes there. And if I did hail from the Land of the Beaver, the socks I’m knitting right now might make a little more sense.
I give you the Friday Harbor socks…sort of. (And pardon the non-existent lighting in my bedroom on a winter morning.) Nancy Bush cognoscenti will immediately spy that, due to some excessively sloppy chart reading on the part of yours truly, these are not really the Friday Harbor socks. You’re supposed to see a nice string of uninterrupted diamonds all the way down the shin and foot, with each line of the “wake”, as Nancy thinks of it, extending out to the ribbing. Instead we have… headless birds? Mustachioed men in Chinese hats? Siamese Fighting Fish swimming upwards? I’m not rightly sure. At any rate, I was knitting along so merrily (Size 2 needles are enormous! 49 stitches is hardly any! Fleece Artist rocks! I love this colorway!) that I didn’t notice my mistake until I was all the way down to the heel. And honestly, I didn’t even consider frogging for more than a few milliseconds. I like what I’ve produced, even if it isn’t what Nancy, in Her Infinite Wisdom, had in mind. But I don’t feel quite right calling them Friday Harbor socks, either. And so, I dub them… Pig War Socks. Because let’s face it, I was up to some pretty subversive sh*t with these socks already. The colors are not Friday Harbor at all. We don’t have anything that looks like this, ever. These are maple leaf colors, my people. And the yarn is Canadian, for Pete’s sake!
I’m owning my coulda-been Canadian citizenship. Hey, I could have married a Canadian, too. My little friend Josh did ask. (I declined and informed him that I’d be marrying my brother, “because I really like him, and he lives here, you know.” We were four.) Maybe I’ll plan to wear my Pig War socks to the Canada v. Germany hockey game in Torino. They’ll match the maple leaves I’m painting on my cheeks so perfectly.
