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The Perfect Stick
By William Least Heat-Moon
In conjunction with our special report on pleasure, we asked three famed writers to reflect on the pastime that gives them the greatest joy
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Far more than I would like, my name as a writer—thanks to my first book, Blue Highways—stands linked with vehicles and roads, wheels and asphalt. Since its 1983 publication, I've had little success in getting across that I am more impassioned by feet and legs moving in concert across terrains and down lanes. I love walking in all its variations: the stroll, saunter, tramp, traipse, ramble, constitutional, cross-country hike. My second book, PrairyErth, did little to dispel perceptions of me behind a steering wheel even though I built those later travels around a series of pedestrious jaunts in the tallgrass prairie of Kansas.
The truth is, I drive because I have to, but I walk because I want to, and when I go afoot I carry something nearly forgotten in our car-crazed and auto-damaged landscapes—a walking stick. From across a meadow, you might take me for a man with a cane. That would miss the mark because a cane steadies the infirm while a walking stick buoys, in both body and spirit, the rambler. Once, a woman said to me, "Why, you're speaking of a staff!" No, madam. A staff does other than buoy. It serves to power a hiker forward and, at moments, steadies one; it's a kind of mobile tripod. What's more, a staff reaches to the shoulder, a walking stick only to the top of the hip.
Today I can no longer distinguish my vocation from several avocations except for one that can only be called a hobby—making walking sticks. I cut and finish them, usually finding the raw material in undergrowth or in freshly trimmed-off or fallen limbs. Silver maple, sycamore, Osage orange, moosewood, apple—I'm always ready to try a new species, one with overall straightness, strength, and a nearly imperceptible springiness.
I inherited a single object from a namesake great-grandfather, a man whose face I never saw, although I did see his hand, so to speak, in a splendidly knobby stick he made about 1910 after a stroll in a friend's Florida orange grove. This lone example drew me into the world of stickery and inspired me to cut and shape my first attempt from a wind-broken aspen I came across in the mountains near Durango, Colorado. In the quarter-century since, I don't know how many sticks I've made or given away. My friends who, like us all, spend too many hours atop the rush of wheels, then have a chance to take a saunter with a walking stick in hand and touch primal and sacred things of the earth that our vehicles cause us to ignore at our peril.
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