Pioneer Town  by Melissa Halvorson    

Eight years ago, I left my home in Washington State, bound for New Paltz and a long sought after sense of community.  Quite literally, some friends and I relocated to the Hudson Valley, with its spotty history of gringo ashrams and artist communes to form a utopian society.  We disbanded due to the unfortunate sale of our headquarters, “the compound,” not as so many other intentional communities, to the megalomania of our leader or tax fraud. The end of the compound as I had envisioned it, meant I was thrust back into a world where I was forced to find my place.

Often, usually while driving back into town from one of my odd jobs, catching the New Paltz skyline from the “flats,” I would ask myself why the hell I was still living in this ridiculously small, upstate college town.  I wasn’t raising kids, I didn’t need safe streets and reliable daycare—in fact, I needed 24 hour restaurants and supermarkets, good thai food, multiple first-run movie theaters, decent live music, and the option of buying a pair of underwear on a hanger, not in a plastic bag of 12.  I struggled with the notion of home and its meaning for years; through a marriage, a master’s degree and a new career; never secure in the feeling that I had found it.  I maintained to everyone I met that I was just here for the time being, but didn’t know where I would eventually end up.  When asked if I liked New York, my standard response was that I was, “in the habit of living here.”  Last year, when my relationship ended, I took that to mean that my New Paltz story had reached its logical conclusion. Thrust back into the uncaring world for the last time, I went back to Washington.

Moving across the country past the age of eighteen carrying substantially more than a guitar, a bag of drugs and some Tupperware, is not much fun.  Enormous containers full of “necessities” were shipped via Amtrak from Newark, NJ to Portland, OR.  My ’89 Volvo station wagon was filled to capacity and driven across by two loyal friends in exchange for plane tickets home.  Bank accounts were closed, documents burned and all but the emotional ties to the East Coast were severed. 

About a month or two later I did it all again, in reverse. 

As much as I crave my family, friends and even the landscape of the Northwest, I had found something in this god-forsaken little town that had eluded me elsewhere and to which I was powerfully and inexplicably drawn.  Embarassed and ashamed of my indecisiveness, I asked a friend how many times one person can move back and forth across the country conscionably, to which she replied, “as many times as it takes.”

During my brief stay back home, my parents and I acquired a small flock of fiber goats (three angoras and a cashmere).  As strong believers in hobbyism, if nothing else, my family encouraged me to indulge my need to spin yarn on my new wheel every day, usually 7 to 8 hours at a time.  Fragile, confused and openly weeping much of the time, I spun to focus, relax and create something durable out of something once weak.  Spinning yarn has been famously used as a metaphor for childbirth in literature, mythology and art; women producing from an amorphous blob, a functional being. 

As fresh starts go, the one I was about to undertake was radical.  I would abandon my career as a high school teacher to open a small yarn shop on Church Street in New Paltz where I would sell handspun yarn from the fiber of the family goats!  Brilliant!   

The opening weeks of my wool-selling enterprise were marked by record-breaking high temperatures in the 100’s.  In spite of the heat, I was visited by hundreds of friends, townies and vacationers those first couple of months.  My fellow shopkeepers on the block were warm and giving, mentoring me through the dark and unknown forest of retail.  In September we began a weekly street festival in the image of a charming European marketplace.  I set up a small table on the sidewalk and spun yarn for the public.  It was at this point that I began to hear myself referred to as “the yarn shop” or “goat” lady even by people in my immediate age group.  Large crowds of young families with overflowing strollers and leashed dogs would gather ‘round the spinning wheel, hypnotized by the rhythm of the treadle.  I usually tried to dress nicely in order to make a good impression of my business and the product, which had the inadvertent effect of making me appear like some kind of neo-Mennonite.  After a few successive Sundays of live spinning, I realized the image I was projecting was not necessarily an accurate one.  Because of its association with fairy tales, home-making and delicate femininity, being a handspinner seemed to convey to people something about my personal purity, and traditional values.  Once, an attractive young man holding an infant girl was unable to persuade his 4 year old away from my wheel.  The three of them sat down on the chairs next to my table, effectively completing what looked like an idyllic family portrait.  When a sweet-faced older woman, through a broad and knowing smile inquired about the baby’s age, I had to reply, “I don’t know, ask him.”  In the retelling of this story I referred to the man and his daughters as my “pretend family.” When another couple walked past the store one sunny Sunday afternoon, catching a glimpse of the spinning wheel and antique skeinwinder out front, the man was overheard exclaiming to his partner, “look, honey, a pioneer shop!”  My friends and I joked about how my life had actually become an elaborate prop designed for tourists, like the plot of a David Mamet play about the emptiness of contemporary living and how one woman’s sad attempt at creating an authentic experience made her a street festival curiosity.  No, it’s all real!  This is what I do for a living and it’s f----ing great!

I am extremely lucky to have a die-hard group of regular customers already who spread the word to their friends about my humble shop.  Often when the folks who’ve only heard of it come in for the first time, they are visibly surprised by the proprietess behind the counter whom they had assumed was a jolly, elderly woman who smelled pleasingly of fresh baked goods.  Instead they are met by me, a thirty-something woman, only occasionally  jolly, who smells vaguely of cigarette smoke. 

The reality of our existence rarely measures up to the imagination.  Luckily my current life is as good as or better than any I could’ve imagined.  I have learned about the unpredictability of life and that constantly trying to find the right place on this earth had prevented me from appreciating the places I’d been.  A year ago I had no way of knowing I would be who I am today—the Yarn Shop Lady of Pioneer Town.

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