A Stick In The Mud

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In fact, I may have violated one of the main precepts of walking sticks by trying to make this one more or less permanent. For all of Dad's careful selection and obvious enjoyment of his sticks, he'd toss them at the end of the hike without even looking to see where they'd landed. It was an early hint that some things in life — good things, too — were expendable by nature.

Then again, in his later years my father had a stick that lasted a long time. It was just a dog-walking stick, and the dog, also in his later years, walked mostly on suburban streets. He still kept his nose to the ground, but I think he'd forgotten what he was supposed to be looking for.

A bestaffed Mother staffer.

The stick was a beautiful canelength piece of wood cut from a Chinese corkscrew willow tree: the kind of stick you'd expect to see in the hands of a gnome. Dad used it not so much to lean on as to poke things and sometimes to whack a big dog that tried to hassle Sam, the retired, white-muzzled beagle.

I came to associate that stick with my father and I wouldn't mind having it as a keepsake, but like all his sticks it too disappeared somewhere along the line. It could be that, sooner or later, everything disappears.

John Gierach works as a freelance writer, photographer and newspaper columnist.

Copyright © 1990 by John" Gierach. From the forthcoming book Sex, Death & Flyfishing, by John Gierach. To be published by Fireside/Simon & Schuster Inc. Printed by permission.

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