A Stick In The Mud

Image Gallery MAGGIE KANNAN

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Just when you thought you needed a hand, you find instead. . .

I JUST RECEIVED MY FIRST OUTDOOR sports—related injury of the season. I was crashing around in some thick underbrush in the grove of trees behind the house and somehow managed to drive a long black locust thorn into my ankle. It could have been avoided if I'd been wearing boots instead of tennis shoes, but you know how that is. It was just 50 yards from the back door. I mean, it wasn't an expedition or anything.

I was going to write it off as a normal scrape, but by morning it was infected, and I had to make a trip to town for a tetanus booster and short lecture from the doctor about acting my age, which I thought I'd been doing.

Chances are I'll live.

What was I doing crashing around in the bush? I was cutting walking sticks. Every year I try to put in three or four good ones; not like those you pick up here and there as they're needed that are always too long, too short, too heavy, too light, too crooked or so rotten they break. I mean "perfect" sticks that are a little better than elbow high, reasonably straight, seasoned and stout—but not too heavy. The sticks you always look for when you need one, but can never find. I try to keep a few leaning against the woodpile on the front porch and another one handy in the back of the pickup.

Why three or four? Because they have this tendency to disappear.

You'll be out hiking and will come to a place where you need both hands to climb some rocks, so you leave the stick where you can find it later. But then you come back a different way and don't go out of your way to look for it. After all, it's just a stick. The woods are full of sticks, right?

Maybe you use it as a wading staff while fishing a rough stream and, coming back a different way again, leave it lying on the far bank. Or maybe it floats away while you're not looking. A stick will do that.

That's happened to me so many times that I now carry a length of decoy anchor cord with a dog-leash clip on one end as part of my normal fishing gear. The clip fastens to a D ring on the fly vest and the loose end gets tied to the stick—either the one I brought or the one I went to find when I saw how fast the water was.

Last year I gave a stick to a friend who was having trouble wading trout streams because of a bad knee. I liked his attitude. He didn't say he couldn't fish in certain places, he said he thought he needed a stick in order to forge ahead.

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