The Walking Stick
I was walking into town to stock up on food and supplies before a coming storm. The dirt road over the hill had been cleared, so my snowshoes stayed strapped to my backpack, but I found myself wishing I had a walking stick on the uneven ground. I resolved to check at the general store to see if they had any cheap ones for sale, and if not, to whittle one myself out of a fallen branch sometime soon.
Closer to town I reached the paved roads, and my thoughts drifted to other subjects, until I was a hundred yards from the store and passed a sign at the sign of the road: “Hand Crafted Wood Products.” A hand crafted wood product is precisely what I wanted! The sign was in front of an old wooden house, with no obvious storefront or showroom, but I couldn’t keep on walking without investigating further.
I walked up the driveway and found a large shed, two pickup trucks, and a small barn attached to the back of the house, but still no hand crafted wood products in sight. The barn did have a door on the side, so before giving up, I knocked on the door. A few moments later, a man of about 80 with a moustache, dark sweatpants, a henley shirt and no shoes opened the door.
“Can I help you?”
“I saw your sign out front. I’m looking for a wooden walking stick. Would you happen to have anything like that?”
He looked up at the sky over my shoulder for a moment, then raised an index finger.
“I think I have just the thing. Let me put some boots on.”
The door closed again. While I waited in the driveway, I wondered what I had just gotten myself into. Was I going to be shown an ornate staff hand crafted by a master woodworker? An expensive work of art that I would feel obligated to purchase after knocking on his door, but would feel too nervous to actually use as I hiked trails and forded streams?
The door opened again, and the man came outside.
“Follow me,” he said as he walked toward the large shed, where I saw stacks of firewood and a small John Deere tractor. I figured his woodworking shop must be at the back of the shed, but instead he walked behind the tractor and reached up to a high shelf, then pulled down two simple walking sticks, nicely shaped but crudely hewn out of unfinished wood
“I used to talk to kids about woodworking, and I’d have them make walking sticks, since they’re an easy project. They’d often give me the sticks afterwards. These are the only two I have left, but see if one of them appeals to you.”
I chose one, a gently curved stick about shoulder height, with a cloth wrist strap in rainbow colors where a rawhide strap might typically be. I felt its heft, held it in front of me and tested its strength, and told him that it was just what I was looking for.
“Come on, let me show you what I do,” he said as he walked back toward the barn. He opened the side door again and went inside. I followed, entering a large space full of wood. Raw wood, carved wood, finished wood, light wood, dark wood, you name it. He led me to some large tables on one side of the workshop, where simple wooden bowls and rectangular boxes were set out.
“Everything I do is 18th century,” he said. “Everything.”
I thought he was only talking about the bowls and boxes he made, but when he said everything, he meant everything. He was an avid reenactor of 18th century wars like the French and Indian War and the Revolutionary War. The rectangular boxes I had seen on the tables weren’t just boxes; they were intricate recreations of 18th century crafts: an ammo box with a tray for cleaning one’s musket balls, and a traveling kitchen box, with two removable cutting boards and a space for carrying one’s knives. When he picked up one box and showed me the contents, I learned why he only had two walking sticks left–it turns out that if you cut walking sticks into thin discs and poke holes in them, then they are excellent reproductions of 18th century wooden buttons.
Woodworking was his domain, but man cannot survive on wood alone, so there’s a division of labor in the reenactor community. He showed me his militia uniform, handmade with cloth woven in the 18th century manner. He showed me pelts and skins for which he had traded his woodcraft. Buckskin, sheepskin, goatskin, and a full coyote pelt given to him by a trapper buddy. White goatskins are particularly sought after, he said, because they bound books with white goat hide in the 18th century, so if you want to be authentic, any old goatskin won’t do.
The life of the modern 18th century man does have its comforts, like antibiotics, Ford F-250s and cell phones, but it has its own set of hassles too. Mustering 300 French Canadians to fight a battle against American colonials can apparently be a challenge when it requires crossing a modern international border with 6 foot long, 16 pound working muskets.
By the time I left the workshop, I’d heard about his early life as a hunting guide in upstate New York, the protests of local farmers against the onerous Stamp Act in the 1770’s, and his getting drafted and sent to Vietnam (“Agent Orange is not my favorite color,” he told me after mentioning some health troubles). When I was about to move on to do my shopping and get back to my cabin before the storm arrived, I held up the walking stick.
“Can I give you something for this?” I asked.
“No,” he said definitively. “No, you’re good.”
Somehow I felt like it was I who had gotten paid. We said goodbye and I walked away toward the general store, with my new walking stick tapping out the rhythm of my steps, like the beating of a marcher’s drum.