… Is a walking stick!

Now, before you start sending flowers, no I´m not with broken legs and crutches. The legs are serving me mighty fine these days, but, as any builder, carpenter, or firekeeper will tell you, a piece of wood can change everything. And nowadays its a good thing to carry Useful Objects of a Possibly Defensive Nature with you. You never know what might come at you.

My love of the walking stick started, like many things, in the desert.
The mission: to make my way to a remote nature reserve in the Mexico and camp for a week or two. I arrived in the late afternoon in a creaky, dusty settlement nearby, with structures made of adobe, the smell of goats in the air and the sound of dogs barking. I asked a boy playing football where to get water, and he says they only sell Fanta there (I later discovered his family has a tap drawing water directly from a spring underground). His mother gave me the Fanta and when seeing a picture of some kind of Good Samaritan scene on the wall, and understood that this was going to be my resting place for the night. I was happy, not being ready to face the coyotes just yet. After putting my backpack in the room I go and meet The Grandmother. An old Mexican woman with a very hooked nose and chin sits on the stoep next to her blind husband who doesn´t say much. She is wielding a mighty stick which she uses to whoosh away flies, shoo away the dogs, tap on the ground to make her point, and help herself up when she goes to feed the chickens. The lady is frankly terrifying.

As I went to bed, I pondered this image of the woman and stick. They really seemed to belong together. Clearly a matriarch; the stick was her magic wand. The plot thickened when I looked up at the wall and saw a calender with a picture of the dear Pope. Guess what? The man was holding a very large Religious Stick With a Cross On (whatever it´s called). It seems the stick or staff is a very old, very wise thing, used by witches, and by those who burned them.

The next day in the desert I find the most beautiful dried out cactus tree branch, full of holes and patterns. I want to decorate it with feathers and leaves, I feel like Gandalf. Then I forget all about this magical symbolism, and discover the stick is an absolute necessity when walking in a garden of cacti with sandals on, parting the thorny bushes and then walking through. Other practical uses: drawing arrows in the soil so you don´t lose your way; tying your sweater in a bundle and attaching it to the stick so you don´t have to carry something heavy around your waist; and most importantly, scratching your back.

I left the desert but the stick never left me. I moved to a green, well-to-do town far away, with cobbled streets and not a lizard or thorn tree for miles, but let me tell you, the stick has stuck. When walking my friend´s young dog in town it came in handy when a group of strays started growling and chasing us. And as a woman, walking alone at night is much more fun with my stick to hand. I can walk and enjoy rather than worry. I met my match in a Swiss girl who came to darkest Mexico, well-armed with a beloved and enormously heavy odd-shaped walking stick from a lake near her house. Apparently Swissair didn´t bat an eyelid at the check-in.

I don´t care if its old-fashioned or strange. It´s far nicer than the machetes you see sticking out of some people´s trousers around here. In fact, I´d like to see more people carrying sticks instead of knives and guns. In our modern world we have lost some very sensible forms of protecting ourselves, and picked up some alarming defense tactics in exchange. There´s something very fair and true about a stick, what you see is what you get.