Jack Butler recently spoke “In Praise of a Good Stick.” Having come across a New York Times profile of a stick-devoted Instagram page that examines the best of branches and the superiority of staves wherever in the world they may originate, Jack uses the profile to praise those simple objects around which childhood epics have been created since long before Moses.
Anyone with some woods-romping in his childhood can recall the hunt for a good stick, and the pleasure of finding a particularly satisfactory one. I myself can recall a few treasures. One, like a find the Times covers, resembled a handgun. Another held almost the exact shape of a small sword, similar to Sting. And perhaps my greatest find seemed an exact replica of a wizard’s staff. I was fortunate to have read and watched The Lord of the Rings at a young enough age for the comparisons to suggest themselves readily (as was the case for one of the sticks the Times mentions).
My childhood, spent in Sheboygan on the shores of Lake Michigan — a city that participated in the Arbor Day Foundation’s “Tree City USA” program, according to the signs all over the place — had the twin merits of plentiful twigs and sand. In preparation for winter, the city would create long berms with the sand, perfect emplacements for a history-afflicted kid who imagined that the Germans, Dutch, Soviets, Vietcong, Confederacy, or any other villainous and amphibious force would one day invade the Midwest (my ignorance regarding the St. Lawrence route and its attendant challenges was helpful in allowing for enlarging the viable foes).
Selecting one’s armament was crucial. Flotsam had its uses. A water-polished log became a howitzer, a crooked bough a saber, and a three-foot-long branch with a crook at the end a Garand M1 rifle — if one were lucky, a bit of sand fencing would be on the ground connected by some wire, and you’d have a M45 quad mount. It was a lot for one kid to foil the Luftwaffe while simultaneously keeping the heads of Johnny Reb down, but surrendering was for the French, so a kid just had to pull himself up by his velcro and keep the lead flying. Sheboygan saw the sinking of the Bismarck, Merrimac (CSS Virginia), and Akagi all in one afternoon, thanks entirely to the shedding of trees and their bottomless magazines.
The immediate benefit was that I was out of the house. The intermediate benefit was inadvertently cementing more firmly in place the accounts that I’d read at the library. In the long term, I learned how to productively entertain myself while constantly reinventing new scenarios that would demand flinging one’s body over the embankments. Mortarmen needed instructions, medics required dispatching, and the general staff needed correction. Watching Patton, Gettysburg, and VeggieTales offered additional color and wrinkles to the events (in that sense, media was an aid rather than a distraction).
Sticks would later comprise forts, have a significant role in baseball, and act as jockeys in the game of Pooh sticks (where one drops his twig of choice upstream of a river and then cheers on that bit of shrub, hoping it’s first to appear on the bridge’s downstream side). A good stick discovered is the crowning achievement of a hike, though, like a man with his vehicles who retires too early, a kid can find himself trading in the latest acquisition only a short time later. The internal negotiations and comparing the variable merit of one branch to the other is part of the fun. Younger siblings are often the unwilling recipients of the second-place sprig.
I second Jack in his hope that kids can recapture the liberating simplicity of recreating out of doors with whatever is at hand. Mud pies, boulders, and sticks are what childhood is made of.