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       The bowline takes its name from a rope that was used on square sails during the days of barques and brigantines.

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       The other day I got to reading an old book I loved when I was young: We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea, by Arthur Ransome. It’s part of the Swallows and Amazons series. The books revolve around four siblings – John, Susan, Roger and Titty Walker – and their adventures messing about in sailboats.

       We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea is set on the English coast. The kids are left alone on a friend’s boat, the Goblin, and the anchor drags. They find themselves pulled out to sea by the tide in a fog, then fighting an awful storm. At the start of the book, the friend is coming into his mooring in the boat and throws a line to the kids, who are rowing in a dinghy. Roger catches the line, passes it through the metal loop on the mooring buoy and hands the end to John, who has formed a loop in the standing part.

       “He took the end from Roger, passed it through the loop in the rope, round the rope itself and back again down into the loop, and pulled it taut all in a single movement. ‘All fast,’ he called.”

       Of course I recognized at once what he was tying: the world’s most useful knot, the bowline. In case there was any doubt, Ransome supplies an illustration of it for the unschooled, lubberly reader.

       Ah, the bowline. It may seem a little odd to be so entranced by a knot, but it gives me pleasure every time I tie it. Up the loop, around the standing part, back down again. Voila, a perfect, fixed loop. I’ve used it countless times over the years for everything from tying down luggage on a roof rack to making a bear hang to hoisting a pail full of potato chips into a tree house. It is easy to tie and, just as important, easy to untie. You simply “break its back.”

       People have been tying bowlines for centuries, maybe millennia. It takes its name (properly pronounced BO-lin) from a rope that was used on square sails during the days of barques and brigantines. Sailors would employ it to secure a docking line to a bollard on the pier; connect two heavy towing ropes, or hawsers; and even lower a man over the side on a “monkey rope.”

       “It is so good a knot that the sailor seldom uses any other loop knot aboard ship,” pronounces Clifford W. Ashley in his authoritative The Ashley Book of Knots. In fact, he writes, it was often said at sea that “the devil would make a good sailor, if he could only tie a bowline and look aloft.”

       Today, it’s handy for all kinds of things. The bowline makes a good rope swing. The bowline makes a good makeshift safety harness, because the loop stays the same size even under pressure. The bowline works well when tying a boat to a dock ring. No wonder it is often called the King of Knots.

       I taught it many times when I was a not-very-good sailing instructor: The rabbit goes up the hole, around the tree and back down the hole again. On the dock at our sailing camp, I used to lay out a long heavy rope and get the kids to compete for fastest bowline. One of them, the knot tier, would hold the end of the line; the others would take the opposite end and run. The tier would have to complete his knot and drop the loop over a bollard before the line went taut. If he was still tying when it did, he risked losing a finger or a hand, which added a bit of excitement to the exercise. (Safety, shmafety. It was the ‘70s.) Of course the kids loved it and ran like hell with the line, hoping to maim their fellow cadet.

       When I had some spare time, I would work at my own bowline speed. I used the quick method: Lay the end of the rope over the standing part and turn your wrist. Here was one practical skill I was able to master. Though my brother may dispute it, I still tie the fastest bowline in the family.

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       I am not sure why it gives me such satisfaction. Mr. Ashley came close to it when he called tying a knot “an adventure in unlimited space” – transforming a single strand into a thing of beauty and utility. The bowline is a little work of art: simple, reliable, useful. I tie one whenever I get an excuse and never fail to feel a sense of awe at this ancient and ingenious bit of engineering.

       Now, you may ask, what does this have to do with the coming election, the vaccination rate, the growth of the national debt or the summer of wildfires? Answer: absolutely nothing.

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