Walking backwards into the future

By M. John Fayhee

It was an otherwise fine autumn Saturday, one that would have been much better spent hiking, biking, napping or reading, but my wife had forewarned me that there was a little accent table she wanted us to romantically eyeball hand-in-hand in one of Silver City’s beaucoup “antique emporiums,” so, well, that was that and there I was, beerless in husband hell.

After feigning intense interest in said table, I began drifting nonchalantly toward the exit in a manner that made it look as though I, like my darling betrothed, was seriously scrutinizing the myriad mildewed offerings scattered about this Escher-ish retail outlet. Back in a dark corner, my attention was thank-godfully grabbed by something I actually gave a shit about in absolute, rather than just very, very relative, terms. There, connected by an entire Tim-Burton-movie’s worth of cobwebs, were a dozen or so hiking sticks. I ran my fingers along several, but I really only fixated on one, like it was a spindly fetish. Despite its grimy resting place, it had been recently waxed, and it had obviously never been used. Though it was stacked haphazardly against the paint-peeling wall of a junque shoppe, it was not old; it was not someone’s grandfather’s well-used stick that had come to this resting place from rural England by way of bequeathment or an estate sale. Someone had “made” it specifically to sell.

I removed it from its litter of sticks and ran my hands down the shaft’s shiny entirety. It felt good, like little electrons of bonding and recognition passed between us. The stick was the perfect height (to each his or her own on this), its rounded crest hovering up near my scapula, and at the place to where my hand naturally gravitated — about solar plexus level — the girth was perfect, neither so large as to result in hand fatigue over a long distance, nor so thin as to feel like it lacked the DNA-level substance that all good hiking sticks must have when one is relying upon their enchanted cohesion while crossing the Gila River at flood or making one’s way up the slidy side of Big Hatchet Peak. I looked back towards Gay, stick happily held high (she told me later that, at first sudden peripheral glance, given the intensity of my unkempt hirsuteness, she thought Gandalf’s long-lost lecherous drunkard half-brother (the other half being Rasputin) had happened into the establishment with the specific goal of laying a serious curse on all antique emporiums), and told her I would meet her later over at the Buffalo Bar. I put the stick back where it had been leaning, and left, my well-crafted hiking-psyche roots showing signs of much recent wear and tear.

But that stick mentally came with me as I pondered implications deeper than were likely merited either by the piece of wood itself or its surprisingly steep $25 price tag. For you see, for most of a long-distance backpacking and hiking career that has spanned thousands and thousands of miles and has lately gone off on some perplexing zig-zaggy tangents, I carried with me a stick. Then, for reasons that were far more accidental and coincidental than premeditated or calculated, I stopped doing so. What happened was that, during one of our in-between-residences periods, during which my wife and I were traveling for months on end somewhere where you ought not drink the water unless doing so with a medicinal tequila chaser, we stored the meager sum total of our domestic possessions at Gay’s parents’ house, and, during that time, my stick was lost. It did not take long for me to become accustomed to stickless perambulation, and I had given little thought to hiking sticks in the interim. Until my wife dragged me into that little Harry-Potter-esque shop, that is.

Time was when just about everyone who stepped so much as four inches into the woods did so with a stick in-hand. Somewhere along the social evolutionary line, hiking sticks (and I have, I guess, as further evidence of my proletariat upbringing, always referred to them as “sticks,” rather than the more-cultured “staffs”) went the way of clunker leather Raichle hiking boots, flannel shirts and Sierra Cups carried on one’s belt. Hiking sticks in the hyper-synthetic days of outdoors Here & Now have long been sure signs in most contexts of terminal fuddy-duddy-dom.

It would be easy to point to nothing more than “simple” technological advancement as the main reason for the demise of once-ubiquitous hiking sticks. Once poles made the evolutionary leap from cross-country skiing — where they were as integral to the activity as the skis themselves — to snowshoeing — where they were an aid but not a necessity — their application to non-snow trail uses was inevitable, especially when eventually mated with scads of focused R&D departments and the resultant adjustable height capabilities, carbon-composite materials, ergonomic grips and, of all things, anti-shock springs. But it wasn’t just a technological leap that spelled near-doom for hiking sticks; it was also a backcountry-wide perceptual shift.

Whereas once the “goal” of most backcountry travelers was to become, at least in their own minds, either something of a Gandalf of the woods (being able to converse with birds and see the Little People) or a Jeremiah Johnson wannabe (being able to track rabbits through rock fields and make fire in a deluge from flint-and-steel as the Indians were attacking), the goal since, say, the late-’80s (about the time Steve Ilg presciently came out with his seminal book, “The Outdoor Athlete: Total Training for Outdoor Performance”) of many folks inclined to tromp through the mountain boondocks has become more focused on bagging as much vertical terrain and distance in one day as possible, with a record of such being logged into their all-in-one chronometer/altimeter/pedometer/heart-rate-monitor/caloric-expenditure-calculator. It’s like the woods are now populated by boot-wearing Lance Armstrong clones, people who look at the backcountry as little more than a workout facility with views that are often not seen. (And please understand, as the long-time owner of the aforementioned chronometer/altimeter device, the finger I am herein wagging is as much at myself as anyone else. I wish I could claim some sort of enlightened cultural immunity. Alas, I cannot, as I have lamentably grown to be that which I am chastising with these words.)

Here’s the thing: An undeniable mid-life crisis, combined with a recent reverse migration to the very town that was my home when I first moved to the Mountain Time Zone, has caused me to realize and understand how much more I liked the West — especially the backcountry part of the West — 35 years ago than I do now. The main reason that I liked the West better then was that there were way fewer people walking around where I was walking around. But, at least as important was the fact that people back in my halcyon days of yore moved down the trails and along the rivers significantly more deliberately and contemplatively than they do today. And I believe it is more important than ever on about a gabillion levels in these counter-productively frenetic times for folks in every societal circumstance, but especially out in the woods, to … slow … the … fuck … down. To breathe. To ponder. To reflect. Rather than just to do (and to do quickly). And the single most representative item that I can perceive that is directly associated with a time when backcountry travelers did just that was, you guessed it, a simple, low-cost, low-tech, of all things, goddamned anachronistic fuddy-duddy hiking stick. I guess it’s something to do with the powerful juju inherent in wood.

As I sat at the Buffalo Bar, I pondered the hiking stick I had just held in my hands. I thought of nothing else through the course of far, far too many bottles of Fat Tire. Verily, my entire hiking life passed before me, bubble by bubble. And, eventually, I arrived at the point where I wondered if a hiking stick would even go with a trail ensemble that now includes, rather than a battered ancient Kelty external-frame pack and a bulky pair of Raichle Montagnas, the likes of a GoLite daypack and soft La Sportiva boots and more micro-pile than flannel and a digital watch that boasts a half-dozen or more chronologically based “functions.” I did not return that day to buy that stick, mainly because, by the time I left the Buffalo, it was well nigh on midnight. But I went to the antique emporium several times over the course of the next week, and, every time, it was closed for the kinds of inexplicable and often amusing reasons that once defined commerce in the West. Slowly, the thought of that stick left my head altogether. Then one day, with my mind a thousand miles away, I found myself standing directly in front of that musty little store, and it was open. $25 made its way from my wallet into the local economy.

That stick has now been with me for three months, and already it has more than 100 miles on its CV. The bottom is admirably scuffed and the spot where I place my hand has been worn smooth. And here’s the most captivating thing about all this: I had no earthly idea how many other people there are out on the trail these days with all manner of wonderful sticks. (I must have been hiking too fast lately to notice.) And, hearteningly, a lot of those people are as young as I was when I moved West back in a simpler and slower time. “Yeah, like, all kinds of places are selling hiking staffs these days,” one charming and effusive young lady told me while showing off her recently procured rainbow-colored stick, which she had purchased at a local gear shop. “Everyone I know is using them now. They’re, you know, like, cool.”

Well, whaddayaknow, hope springs eternal.