The Square Knot

“Left over right, right over left. Left over right, right over left. Now you say it.” My son Lucas held the limp, dangling piece of rope in his hands, giving me that eyebrow he gives me when he thinks I’m talking down to him.

He stood next to me at the dinner table in the kitchen. He had asked me to help him learn how to tie knots for his upcoming scouting weekend. In order for his next advancement, he would need to demonstrate a few important knots. He asked me to show him the ropes, so to speak, but he wanted demonstrations, not mantras. This was not what he had in mind.

Lucas rolled his eyes like only a ten year old knows how, “Dad, just show me. You used to do this all the time.”

“Okay, sit your butt down!” I kicked the chair next to me out and motioned him to sit.

“Ughh,” he huffed, plopping down in the seat.

“I’m trying to teach you the most important knot in scouting, the square knot. Heck, it’s the most important knot in our family, for goodness sake. And I’m teaching you the same way I learned when I was in scouting. Same way I taught it when I was a scoutmaster.”

“Why is this knot so important?” he asked.

I thought for a second before I responded, “Well, you know that there’s a lot of knots in scouts. Knots for woodworking, for camping, for boating. All kinds. Learning knots is a rite of passage in scouts.”

“Okay…”

“If you want to join two ropes together, there are lots of different knots to do this,” I grabbed the rope out of his hands and started lashing the two ends together, “You can do this. It’s a straight double-knot. We used to call this a ‘granny knot’.”

“Why?”

“No clue. That’s what my dad and my grandad called it. And as you can see, it does a pretty good job holding the two ends together. Am I right?” I tossed him the rope.

He inspected it, “Yeah, I guess,” he said.

“Now untie it.”

He pulled and tugged, struggling. He pinched with his fingernails, huffed, and finally used his teeth to pull at the knot until one end came loose. Once he got a foothold on a loosened piece, he worked it with his fingers until the whole knot unraveled. Separating the ends, he looked at me with a touch of pride, “There.”

“Good job,” I told him, reaching for the rope and taking it back. I retied the double knot and showed it to him, pulling the two ends tight, “See, this is a good knot. Easy knot. Secure. It does the job. It isn’t pretty, but it’ll hold. There’s only one problem: untie it now. While I hold the rope.”

I pulled the knot tight, keeping tension on both ends of the rope. He leaned in and started trying, but to no avail. He plucked at it with his fingers, and each time, I pulled on it with a little more strength. He reached in and tried to get a bite of it with his teeth, maybe loosen it that way. But nothing. He pulled his head away, giving me a frustrated look.

“See,” I said with a smug look on my face, “this looks like a good knot. And if all you wanted to do was lock them together, maybe that’s all you need. But you put a little stress on this knot, and if you ever want to separate them, you can’t. A little bit of tension and this knot becomes unusable.”

I released the tension, untied the knot, and whipped together a solid square knot, “This, on the other hand, is a square knot.” I loosened the knot so he could see how the different angles of the rope fit together, “It resembles two loops, one holding on to the other, almost like two hands holding. In scouting, this is a symbolic knot, because it represents the brotherhood that we all share, how we learn and grow more together than we do apart.” I pulled the knot tighter, and he could see the two loops sliding together, holding onto one another. “But not only does it hold tighter than the granny knot will,” here I pulled on the two ends as hard as I could, “but when you are ready, it is even easier to untie.” Here I pinched the two ends where the two ends tied together; with pressure on each side, I pushed, showing how the two ends separated easily when you knew how to do it.

“Strong when you need strength. Flexible when you need that, instead. Two loops hold tight to each other. That’s why the square knot is the most important knot in scouting.”

I handed him the rope, tied. Lucas admired it. “That easy, huh?” he smiled.

“Right over left, pull, then left over right. Pull tight.”

“Okay,” he untied and retied the knot. He held the two ends parallel, then he wrapped the right end over the left, pulled, readjusted his hands with one end in each. Then he pulled the left over the right, and he pulled the knot tight. He beamed joyfully with his new accomplishment, “Okay, I get it. I get it.”

“Good,” I ruffled his hair, “and now we build from there. But once you get the square knot down, your Scoutmaster will be pleased.”

“Alright, but what about our family?” He made a habit of jumping subjects.

“I’m sorry— what?”

“You said that this knot was important to scouting AND to our family— how’s that?”

I grinned at him amusedly, “You remember I told you I used to be a Scoutmaster?”

“Yessir. You were in college. You and your roommate.”

“I had just turned twenty-one, in fact. We did it as a favor to my granddad, because he was my Scoutmaster, and I couldn’t tell the man ‘no’ to save my life. We had to teach about fifteen kids in this old, country church how to tie knots. It was a Saturday morning, these kids wanted something to occupy their time, and the adults in the room weren’t much older— and definitely about as mature— as these kids. We were kind of winging it.”

“And this is how you taught them?” he asked me. I’ve talked with him about things like this many times, but this time, he seemed genuinely interested.

“Eventually,” I smiled, “but to start off with, we were just talking and demonstrating, and it became very clear that they were losing interest. Fast. So my buddy John thought, in a pinch, to dump all the ropes onto the floor of the church’s meeting hall. He yelled, ‘This is boring. Quick quiz time! Y’all have five minutes to tie us up in as many knots as you can, and if it takes less than five minutes for us to escape, then we get to tie y’all up and leave you here the rest of the day!’ They perked up fast after that!”

“How’d they do?” he asked, devious grin on his face.

“Awfully. After their five minutes, he and I struggled with the knots for about a minute, but eventually, they all started slipping loose. So one kid, Jamari (he was my favorite, if you remember), hollered ‘They’re gonna get loose! Get ‘em!’ and he dove onto my back. Next thing I know, I’m wrestling an army of preteens trying to hold us down and retie the knots as fast as we were slipping out of them. It was a blast!”

“They whipped you?”

“Nobody whips your Daddy,” I stared through him, clutching my fists together, grinning, “But when everything settled down and we were all done laughing, I was able to say ‘Okay, we’re gonna leave today with at least one knot in our pockets.’ So I taught them the square knot, the exact method that I just taught you.”

“But what does that have to do with our family?”

“Remember Jamari? The little kid that I loved so much?”

“Yeah,” he turned up an inquisitive eyebrow.

“Well, he was so proud of himself and the knot I’d taught him, that he dragged me over to the chapel. His Sunday School teacher was there; she was a volunteer from the university, same as me. Jamari wanted to show her the amazing new knot he learned— and he wanted to introduce us together. You know: his two favorite people should meet, right?”

“And who was that?” Lucas asked.

From a few feet away, blissfully balancing bacon on the stove and pancakes on the griddle, Mom spoke up, “It was me, baby.” She said it softly, a beautiful smile on her face and a single tear welling in her eye, “Jamari was showing me what he’d learned.”

Lucas smiled and understood. He stood from the table, walked to his mother, and wrapped the rope around her wrist, tied wonderfully with a pristine, masterful square knot. I smiled at her, too, as her single tear fell into the pancake batter.