to enter into Spain, May 24, 2008.
I have found my new hiking stick! I came upon it last week and have been working on it ever since. Already it’s looking great and I think it’s going to be just perfect when completed. It will never replace my old Camino stick but that’s not what it’s intended to do. Hiking is what I do all the time. Camino, that’s a whole other journey. This is the tale of my Camino stick.
Though I bought all kinds of high tech hiking gear for Camino, I wanted very much to find a stick to become my Camino stick. Using a man-made hiking pole just didn’t seem right for my pilgrimage to Santiago. I wanted something more traditional, more European and more personal. Not to mention that I felt that a stick just looked way cooler, at least to me!
Back in January, I didn’t know that walking the Camino would transform the way I think and feel. I didn’t even know then that it would mark a real turning point in my life, that one week after returning, I would move from the town in which I had lived nearly my entire life to a new town I had come to love over the past five years. Lose touch with old friends, make new ones. Back in January, I only knew that I would soon be putting my house on the market and that life was about to change. I so needed change. So I wanted my stick to come from someplace new, someplace fresh, not from the Pine Barrens where I was born, raised and grew to middle age! I decided to begin my search at the Barclay Farmstead.
I found a pretty good stick almost immediately. It was the perfect height and though it was narrow, it seemed nice and solid. When I took it back to the office and started to "peel" it, the bark practically fell off, revealing a very pretty tortoise shell kind of pattern on the wood. Before doing anything else with it, I decided to try it out on a few more lunchtime walks, just to make sure it was right. It definitely seemed to be. Until a few days later when my Camino stick started calling to me!
Really, that damn stick was calling me and wouldn’t let up. I was walking my final loop at the Farmstead, in the last section of wooded area before the path leads up to the farmhouse grounds. That’s when I first heard the stick. Okay, I didn’t hear voices or anything dramatic (psychotic)! But somehow, that stick caught my attention even though it was lying on a big pile of other downed limbs and branches. I took a look, considered for a moment then moved on, too big and ugly. Next time I passed, same thing. I walked over picked it up and immediately threw it back down. Way too heavy and soggy. When I walked by that Friday, the stick again did its thing and I’m like, alright already! I lugged it up to the entrance to the Farmstead and left it there. If it was still there when I came by with the car after work, I would take it home. It was, I did.
That evening, I peeled the bark off the stick. It was slow and tedious work and I kept getting bits of bark stuck under my fingernails, like that bamboo torture thing. Once the wood was revealed, it wasn’t very attractive, dark and mottled looking. I propped it up by the fireplace to let the wood dry out.
After a little more than a week, I checked the stick out. The wood remained very dark but it wasn’t so bad looking. The top of the stick had broken off at an angle which looked pretty good, so I sawed off the rough spots and kept the angle. Now that it was the right size, I decided to try walking with it. That’s when I discovered that the stick had a little curve in it that make a perfect handhold. Overall, the stick had a really good feel. I sanded it and decided to take it on a couple of training hikes just to make sure it would work. It did, far better than a hiking pole. I had really found my Camino stick. Or I should say it found me!
I considered staining it to give it a nicer color but opted against that and just covered it with multiple coats of polyurethane. As a finishing touch, I hammered in a big upholstery nail to protect the bottom and covered that with a rubber chair leg cover. I was quite proud of my Camino stick. It really looked great!
I don’t know if my Camino stick ever made it back from Santiago. But that’s a story to be told at the end of the tale of my Camino. I loved that stick but it just felt right when it vanished at the end of my Camino.
Now as for my new hiking stick, that’s my next post!
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