|
In 1972, I bought an "Executive"
model Swiss Army knife from R.E.I., a camping supply co-operative
in Seattle. It cost me $7.50, a reasonable investment at the
time for a nice pocket knife. I instantly fell in love with
it! With the scissors and small screwdriver, and distinctively
elegant red handles, it came in handy for nearly everything my
old "Schrade" just couldn't seem to do. Later that
year, a good friend, seeing my enthusiasm for my little knife,
made a gift of an older model "Handyman" model to me,
a gift I used and treasured until a couple of years ago. Those
two knives cemented my lifelong love affair with the Victorinox
Swiss Army company, the maker of the knives.
In 1973, I bought two more Executive knives for two good
friends, and gave them as Christmas gifts. (Actually, it was
a good way for them to quit asking me for mine.) A couple of
days later, we went on a camping trip to the mountains of Southwest
Texas. We made stops at several roadside parks on the way to
Big Bend National park, had picnicked and hiked around. Upon
arrival at the national park, one of my friends discovered she
had lost the new knife I had just given her! She was heartsick
over such a little thing, that easily replaceable knife, but
we promised her that we would look for it anyway on the way back
home to the Texas High Plains. Texas is a mighty big place to
be losing something so small, and I figured we had very little
chance in finding it, especially because that part of Texas is
very rough country.
We stopped at the third roadside park on the way back, got
out one more time and performed a dutiful search of the boulder-strewn
area. Early January cold winter winds were buffeting us, and
the sun had gone down an hour ago. After twenty exasperating
minutes of search, Jim cried out, "I found it." We
called him over to the headlights of the VW bus to show us.
Marilyn, suspecting Jim of chivalrously offering his own new
identical knife, was dubious. For proof, she then demanded to
see all three. The silence, punctuated only by the increasing
wind, was tense as Jim reached into his pocket and produced another
knife. Used to such treachery from us, Marilyn demanded to see
mine. Realizing now the outcome, I smiled, slowly reaching into
my pocket and produced............my own knife, the third one!
Marilyn was as happy at that moment as I had ever seen her!
The story of the Swiss Army knife that was "lost in Texas"
was told many times after we returned.
The story of those three knives is not over. Two years
later, Jim took an extended trip out of town, traveling hundreds
of miles and visiting many towns. When he returned a month later,
his Swiss Army knife was missing. He had lost it somewhere on
the long trip! He chalked it up to bad luck, and forgot about
it. About a year later, somehow a knife conversation came up
with a friend of his at home in Lubbock. The friend told Jim
that a knife was found recently in a couch by a mutual friend
of both in Austin-the same couch that Jim had spent one night
on when he lost the knife during that month-long trip. Since
that time, the knife had been given as a Christmas gift to the
Austin friend's father, who happened to live in Lubbock. Jim
called him up and retrieved his knife. The father, we presumed,
got another.
Then, in 1978, I lost my little Executive,
the last one out of the trio of friends that had not been lost.
I had been bird hunting, and noticed it missing when I came
back. Thinking about all the plowed rows in fields I had walked
through, I considered it futile to retrace those steps, but looked
nonetheless around my house and yard in the hopes there to miraculously
find it. Two years passed, sprinkled with a few wistful hunts
around the premises for that wonderful knife that I actually
pined for on a regular basis. Then, during a birthday celebration,
I got a little wrapped package from my wife. I opened it up
unsuspecting, and there was my little knife, with the custom
mesquite-handle I had put on it after the original one wore out!
I was speechless, a rare event. It seems that, during a move
to another house, a box of clothes that needed mending was unearthed,
and my wife found the knife in the pocket of a pair of torn pants.
By this time, these knives had attained the status of precious
jewels or Egyptian tomb artifacts. There seemed to be cosmic
knife forces at work that we might not understand. We three
owners would joke about the immortal nature of these knives,
and speculate on the mystical attachment we seemed to have to
them, one that spanned across time and space, making it impossible
to be parted from them for good. Who are we to question such
things?
Jim again lost his knife in 1986. He had been hunting in
a sandy field, and noticed it missing when he returned home,
some 40 miles away. It snowed the next day, making a search
futile. The next week, when the snow melted, the sand began
blowing, as it does in West Texas. He made a special trip out
to that site to look for that immortal knife, and found it where
he had changed out of his hunting clothes, half covered with
sand. Lost and found again! His original red handles had also,
incidentally, worn out, and I had replaced them likewise with
wooden mesquite handles, so that made it doubly hard to find.
Jim, later that year, went fishing at White River lake,
about 50 miles from Lubbock. Returning home, he noticed the
knife missing. By this point, he had no choice but to go look
for that knife before someone else found it. So, he made a special
trip just to look for his knife, and did not find it. (He found
it at home a week later, misplaced the same day, much to his
relief.)
Jim again lost that little knife in 1991, on a hunting trip
with a friend. The two of them hunted a large tract of rough
country in the canyonlands northeast of Lubbock, riding out in
a pickup owned by a friend of Jim's friend. Noticing the knife
missing back at home late that night, Jim figured the knife was
finally lost for good after a day's hiking over hundreds of acres
of land, so he didn't even tell his friend. Months later, when
the man who owned the pickup cleaned it out in order to sell
it, the knife showed up, having fallen behind the pickup seat.
The man gave it to Jim's friend, who returned it to Jim thenceforth.
Jim's knife is truly charmed-as they all seem to be. He showed
to me in early 1992, mesquite handles worn through, the metal
shiny in places from constant tumbling for so many years in a
pocket full of coins. The knife, an object of loving use, is
a symbol of that which is indestructible in a person-the need
for tools, the need for friends, the need for a mythology that
is meaningful and relates directly to one's life. That little
knife is a tool of daily use, reflexively found and pulled out
to tend dirty nails, or to open a letter or snip an errant thread
from an article of clothing-small things, but things that make
us human and underscore the miraculous technology which surrounds
us and distinguishes our life form. It also reminds Jim where
he got that knife and under what conditions-a gesture of love
from a friend on one of many similar sojourns out into the undiscovered
country of this great state and nation, journeys of discovery
and the wonder of newness imprinting a permanent sense of adventure
on our young imaginations that has continued to serve us in our
separate paths. We loved so much those knives, but more specifically,
what they came to represent, that we laboriously and meticulously
replaced their red, ragged handles with mesquite-a native wood
from the arid land we loved to explore so much. And the mythology?
Why, the knife that can't be lost, of course. A tool that cuts,
yet it cleaves old friends together with the memories it continues
to invoke of a love for travel on the path of further, further,
further-a journey that will never die. A love for old friends,
new friends and friends to come is the promise of those knives,
because they represent a love for life and aliveness, a precious
gift celebrated through these stories that will endure long after
we (and the knives) will return to dust, lost finally in the
stellar matter of the cosmos, united in an alliance where separation
from knife, corpus and spirit is no longer a concern.
I talked with Marilyn late in 1991 about her knife, and she
assured me that hers was truly lost. Somehow I suspect that
it will, undoubtedly, show up. My knife? Why, I have it right
here in my pocket. Naturally.
The next sideline knife story has to do with that older Handyman
knife given to me by a friend, and a story that is less frivolous.
I used that knife all during my college years, on many a backpacking
trip and canoe trip, and it was a faithful, trusty and useful
companion. I even wore it to class, on my belt-an appropriate
accoutrement for the outfit of a High Plains outdoorsman. I
opened cans of oil and cans of peaches with it. I cut small
saplings for tent poles and sling shots with it. I used the
fish hook remover for a hundred other things besides removing
hooks. I used the awl to drill holes in wood, metal, and leather
belts that fit too loose. Its corkscrew, of course, opened many
a bottle of wine for many a damsel in thirst distress. I actually
scaled a real fish once with it. I filed my nails and my distributor
points with it. I loosened and tightened thousands of screws
with it. I used it to prop open the accelerator on my VW bus
to fast idle it when it was cold. I opened my bills, love letters,
semester grades, and Selective Service notices with it. I used
that knife for no telling how many things it was never designed
to do, but did. It became so endeared to me, I would reflexively
reach for it in the belt sheath when I was in my three-piece
suit and the knife was at home. I used it so much that it started
to get a little bit loose here and there, the scissors were half
missing, the lanyard shackle was broken, and the large blade
had been sharpened to a mere shadow of its younger days. It
needed some attention.
So, I wrote the Victorinox company in Vermont, asking if my
knife could be "tuned up." The company wrote back,
affirming my request and informing me that it would have to be
shipped to the Switzerland factory for the task. Two years later,
I had not heard anything, although the job was to take only six
months or so. After two un-answered letters, I called the factory
in January of 1987 and quite anxiously inquired about the location
of my cherished old knife, a model not even made anymore. After
talking several times to employees from shipping clerks to supervisors,
I sadly learned that my knife was lost by the freight company,
too long ago to initiate a trace. Perceiving my sincere grief,
the people at Victorinox very generously offered me a replacement
for that knife, although its loss was in no way their responsibility.
Their enthusiastic and warm attentions in this matter have affirmed
my belief that quality people are behind quality products. I
wouldn't trade any of my three Victorinox knives for a gross
of any other brand-but I wouldn't have even before this incident.
As for my old Swiss Army knife, if it goes the way of my other
one, it will come back around. I'll keep an eye open for it.
-S.J. June, 1992
|