I learned to knit back in twenty-ought-four, following a night of patient teaching from my friend Leah. I’m not an expert knitter now, but I’ve knit a few sweaters, endless dishcloths, and a menagerie of other things. (I’m on Ravelry, if you’re so inclined.)

Before I learned to knit, I didn’t get cables and bobbles, and I found overly complicated colorwork to be more distracting than impressive. After knitting for a few years, I realized why these things are attractive to a certain sector of knitters: it keeps things interesting.

Now that I can knit-purl-knit-purl with no problem, slip stitches and twist cables and make lovely seamless hats with robotically perfect ribbed brims, I find myself looking at patterns with an eye for a challenge. I find myself looking at things that might be considered grandma-esque sweater patterns by the average observer. (No link for that one, as I’m not going to be a dink and link even to an anonymous online sweater picture for ridicule. Picture sailboats and ducks and crazy stitches; you know what I mean.)

It was a crazy realization, made somewhere in my interminable knitting of dishcloths with more and more garish colorways. The weirder, the better. Leaves? Bats? Boobs? Owls made of cables? Yarn that goes green-orange-blue-yellow-grey-green? Bring it on. If you just knit basic top-down stockinette sweaters for the rest of your life… well, I don’t think you could, really. I can’t. And it is, of course, enormously satisfying to feel like you’ve tamed one of these deliberately difficult patterns. Fortunately, even sweaters are relatively small mountains to climb.

I went to the Grand Canyon today for the first time with Kimberly, one of my nearest and dearest. We drove through south central, central, and northern Arizona on the way. The terrain varied so much I felt like I drove across three separate planets: saguaro cactus-laden Scottsdale, striped mesa-filled Sedona, and finally the scrubby plains and hills of northern Arizona, so abrasive they look like they’d bring the shine out of anyone if given long enough. It’s the mesas that got to me, and the canyon itself. There were infinite stripes of infinitely subtle colors that have been brought to the surface by the Colorado River and rain and tectonic movement, so many that my meager rods and cones weren’t quite up to the challenge. My circa-2004 digital camera sure as hell wasn’t. I took a few pictures, but mostly I just stared, amazed that my depth perception seemed to stop – I knew I wasn’t taking in true distances after a point.

And suddenly, I understood something. I’ve long wondered why artists would paint what I’ve considered boring-ass landscapes – amateurish (or not) oils trying to capture Southwestern vistas but forever falling far short, usually ending up in the bland, revoltingly neutral realm of motel art. And yes, probably that’s why a lot of it exists: the world has a sad, unquenchable need for inoffensive art. However, I think many artists make these places into their white whales. Most photographs will never capture it; instead, they tilt at their canvases, trying to reproduce it.

The paintings are still, in my opinion, heinous, and will forever remind me of those ORIGINAL ART BLOWOUT SALE WHOA ads I see on TV when I visit my grandma in St. Louis. But I’ll be a little more understanding about them now.

See? Hopeless.