In a departure from the usual Amos Fortune Forum format on Friday night, Andy Davis did not give a lecture, but did what he does best – told a story.
Weaving his own story with that of an Alaskan explorer and a Scottish folk tale, Davis spent an hour regaling the audience with a story of personal growth and faraway adventure.
Davis has been a storyteller for 30 years, having gotten his start in Mexican refugee camps, and has performed in locales that include Paris and San Diego. Davis spent part of the 1990s doing human rights work in Guatemala, where he met his wife, Andrea, and that is where he started his tale, “The Sweater,” on Friday night.
Davis recalled the moment he first saw his wife, and was struck by her beauty. She recalls the same moment, he said, but had a slightly different perspective.
“She looked across at me, laughing a little too loud and taking up a little too much space, and said, ‘I could be attracted to that guy. And it wouldn’t be a good idea,’” he said.
But she overcame that initial impression, Davis said, and as they got to know each other, she began to express her love for Davis by knitting him a sweater, with hand-spun blue Guatemalan wool. She knit the sweater across weeks in Guatemala, and on the way back to the United States, through Mexico and the southern United States.
“It was an aesthetic marvel. The blue was the blue of a crisp, cold, clear winter morning in the White Mountains just before dawn,” Davis said.
It became a solace to him, Davis recalled, when he was separated from Andrea, trying to earn a little money pruning apple trees in Vermont, living alone in a cabin on the property. That was, until one day, he couldn’t find it. Despite turning the small cabin upside down, it was nowhere to be found.
Interwoven with his tale, Davis also told a story a bit further from home, based on a book he had read on the life of Arthur Treadwell Walden, an Alaskan prospector and dog trainer and breeder who would eventually develop the Chinook sled dog breed, developed after he left Alaska and settled in New Hampshire.
Walden, too, was separated from his love, having left his eventual wife, Katherine Sleeper, to strike out for Alaska. But despite sympathizing with Walden on numerous fronts – as Davis was also facing February winter conditions while working the orchard – he couldn’t help but feel as though Walden wouldn’t have lost a sweater made over hundreds of hours by Katherine, if she’d made him one.
“She had gone into this relationship with a healthy amount of skepticism about the male species, and as the woman in the relationship, she had figured she was the de facto grown-up in the relationship. What would she do when she realized I had borne out her worst expectations?” Davis said.
As his job came to an end, Davis hoped once more to find his sweater amid his packing, but no such luck. Heart heavy, he traveled back to his mother’s house in Antrim, before being reunited with Andrea. After greeting his mother, his first order of business was washing every stitch of clothing he’d been wearing and then himself. As he stripped off his Anorak jacket, which he had been wearing the entire job, his knuckles felt the knobby texture of hand-spun wool.
“I pulled it over my head and was almost blinded by a flash of a brilliant blue – the blue of a a crisp, clear, cold winter morning just before dawn in the White Mountains. I had had the damn thing on the whole time. And Andrea would never need to know! Please don’t tell her,” Davis joked, as Andrea was sitting on the edge of the stage, listening to the tale.
As for Walden, he returned to New Hampshire, married Kate, and established the Chinook breeding line. And later, Davis read a history of Tamworth, written by a woman who knew Walden and his wife. It included one of his favorite stories to tell – about a sweater Kate had knit for him that he wore to the Arctic, and believed had been lost at Little America, a series of Antarctic bases. After a five-week exploration, he came back, disrobed and found that he had had the sweater on, “the whole damn time.”
“Isn’t it funny, how history repeats itself. How time just curls up, like a dog in front of the fire, and tucks its nose under its own tail,” Davis concluded his story.
The next Amos Fortune Forum is July 21 at 8 p.m. at the Jaffrey Meet inghouse, featuring artist Chris Myott of Jaffrey, speaking on the inspiration, influence and process of why he makes art.
Ashley Saari can be r eached at 603-924-7172 ext. 244 or asaari@ledgertranscript.com. She’s on Twitter @AshleySaariMLT.