THE POPLAR WALKING STICK

judy's walking stick

This afternoon I sat on a step and whittled on a walking stick for my friend Judy. She and Lucas go walking when they're visiting, taking walking sticks found someplace. Nice sticks, old and dry. I made this stick for Judy, for her own personal walking stick that was made with her in mind. I cut the poplar sapling to length last year and let it dry after cutting off the limbs with clippers. Today was a sun shining day after a dry day following two wet days. Justin used the good weather to put a fresh coat of stain-sealer on the south side of the log house. I went to be there for company and for backup considering he was working on ladders. I sat on the step using my pocketknife, a Case XX stainless single blade with black handle. It's been my knife for over thirty-five years. It's called a "clod buster." Why? I don't know. I used to have pocket knives with two and three blades. I never used more than one. I like a knife with a single blade. I sat on the step to the deck shaving the top layer of the bark in careful slices. I wanted to leave the under layer of the bark, a light tan that would darken with oil. I whittled each place a branch came out from the trunk down to a smooth bump. Poplar wood is almost white. These places have a target in the center, the beginnings of rings, inside a white semi-circle, looking somewhat like an eye. I think of them as eyes to assist walking, watching for serpents in particular. A seeing eye walking stick. I don't like fancy walking sticks. Seems to me like a walking stick in these mountains is best like the way of life in the mountains, plain, uniquely itself. It's designs, the circles, I thought would make a good repeating pattern along the length of the stick showing the pattern of the branches growing out from the trunk. The pattern of its design is itself, its unique and solitary self.

the handle

 

I was of two minds about finishing the stick. I wanted to leave the rough marks left from slicing strips of bark onto my lap and the step between and around my feet. I wanted to sand it too, make it smooth. I liked both ways of seeing it in my mind's eye, though preferred smooth. I chose to leave the upper foot of the stick, the part the hand holds, semi-rough to let the beauty of the shaving lines have their place. Instead of being a length of it like a handle grip, I made the end of it rough and smoothed it slightly down the part I think of as the handle, fading into smooth the rest of the stick's length. It is forty-six inches, two inches shy of four feet. A walking stick really doesn't need a crook like a cane. A crook becomes an obstacle to deal with using it for a walking stick. A cane is more for keeping balance and favoring a leg. A walking stick is for moving ahead, sometimes an assist uphill or downhill when a third foot would help. The stick is smooth from one end to the other with soft bumps for the eyes, no sharp edges to snag a finger. The skin that is the under layer of the bark has intricate patterns of vertical flow lines similar to the lines on the outer bark. The lower three feet are a soft light brown and smooth as a woman's leg in panty-hose. The tung oil is bringing out the honey brown of this layer of bark I'll call the skin. The end of the stick on top is whittled into a smooth hump and sanded even smoother. Three rings for the heart of the tree and the white wood around them makes another eye, an inch in diameter. Poplar is a deceptively light weight wood. The stick has a few of my mistakes on it, places I cut too deep and exposed the white wood. No problem. It's the accidental element in the design, the human element that says a machine did not make this stick out of lumber. I want its design to be the flow lines of its life. I thought for a short time about carving a ring around it to designate handle. It was too conscious an interruption from outside the stick. I didn't want any of its design to be made by my mind. I thought about stripping a band down to the white around it in places where I slipped and exposed the white. No. Mind again. Let a few unintended nicks make their own design.

 

the human touch

 

I want the only part that is of the human mind to be the stick itself. It did not cut itself to this length or whittle itself. A walking stick is a human thing, a product of the human mind. As a walking stick, I hoped it could be its own design. A poplar is a beautiful tree. A pair of tulip poplar trees were in full flower the first time I saw this house toward making the decision to pick up and go to the mountains and start my new life working a farm in the place where all ladders start, in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart (WB Yeats). Thoreau's Walden was one of the first books I read upon moving in during winter. Thoreau was instrumental earlier in my life by way of civil disobedience learned toward dealing with the madman at home. My first lesson in the Tao; resistance by way of nonresistance. I wanted to face solitude, learn to handle it. Comfort with solitude took awhile taking root. The tulip poplar flowers struck me at the time an affirming sign. Poplar leaves turn yellow in the fall. They will be all yellow and the leaves drop, one at a time, until the tree has a sprinkling of leaves like stars, and they hold the look for quite awhile. Not far from here on the road to Whitehead, a stand of poplars on a ridge in the near distance makes a sight a photograph only diminishes in the fall when the leaves are gone and these poplars sparkle with random yellow leaves like stars. I know a place in the woods where the ground is so nearly straight up and down, rock for the ground covered with layers of decayed leaves, very difficult to walk on. Need a fifty foot rope to walk in that place. It has the biggest poplars I've seen. They're giants that grow straight up, huge trunks. In the 1920s or 30s, lumber companies came through these mountains buying all the timber, causing erosion problems that washed away sides of mountains. Evidently, they couldn't reach these trees. Yes, I'm a tree hugger. I hugged one of them, honored them for being the elders of the Air Bellows trees.

poplar bark

The woods on the mountain are all new since the mountains were stripped of their trees and the owners of the land made a little bit of money to help paying for a new house, and new fields cleared to plant oats and corn on. I think of the forest here virgin forest. The trees and growth in the woods all started growing less than a hundred years ago. Some less long ago, having been corn fields for cornbread and oats and hay for the horses. What's left of hay fields has largely gone to Christmas trees, purveyors of cancer to residents of NW North Carolina. It's ok. They pay a lot of taxes, the county budget couldn't make it without them. I was thinking today while whittling on Judy's walking stick of all the farms that were on this mountain, big farms that raised food for work horses and milk cows, chickens, family to live on through the course of a year. This is where making liquor came in. Liquor making was the only way a farmer had to make some money. It worked pretty well until it worked too well and the liquor-making corporations lobbied laws to prohibit a man from making liquor on his own land. A really good movie was made about that time not far from here around Stuart, Virginia, across the state line from Mt Airy, NC. It starred Val Kilmer and a lot of local people from the area. In scenes where a lot of men came together to stand up against the G-man, I saw local faces galore. I felt at home among them. It was especially refreshing to see mountain people portrayed accurately by way of film, even sympathetically as something besides toothless. Lawless is its title. The story was written by the son of the man the story follows, the film made from his book. The history of these hills is in Judy's walking stick that grew out of the ground of its own accord within ten feet of the house. I've put one coat of tung oil on it with bare hands. The stick soaked the oil up immediately. I'll put another coat on it later, and one a day for several days until I feel like it has done what I want it to do, preserve it as a walking stick and bring out its inner beauty, the beauty of its unique self.  

 

stick from the ground up

 

 

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REDIRECTING MY INNER GPS

tj worthington

 

The last couple days it has been in the front of my mind, a question posed to me by my friend Lee, who was wondering if the wave of high tech phones, twitter, etc, is behind the faster pace of our way of life now. My first inclination is to see these tech items an expression of the quickening pace in the economy, the world of work. The introduction of the computer increased the pace in the business world, which everybody is subject to by having jobs and debts that are a part of the economic pace. I can see these tech hi-speed items as side-effects, symptoms. Big business I suspect is the lead. I'm recalling that in a herd of cattle there is one cow all the others will follow and no other cow. This cow is used to lead the herd from one pasture to another. I feel like business (busy-ness) is the lead cow, the lead we follow. I recall in January of 07 all news sources told every day for two weeks that the cd was over, downloads are it from here on. I had a small business at the time selling cds of regional music. After two weeks of announcements on the news the cd was over, it was over. Those two weeks were the end of my business. I know the news now is the corporate news, what "they" want us to believe. The news, like everything on television and radio, is about money. Television advertising is so expensive only big corporations have a budget big enough to include it. It obviously works or they wouldn't be investing so much in advertising. It's because advertising works that I stay away from the television. The pace in tv programs and advertising is directly influential in the pace of the viewer. It tells the viewer over and over that money is the only. It's an American state of mind from a long time before television, in partnership with the adoration of ignorance, reinforcing what we already believe in our tradition. We already believe it, so we follow.

 

tj worthington

 

The benefit I see from television is it taking us into such a fake world that we become fake. It seems like there comes a time in living a fake life that the fake doesn't work anymore. I'm wondering if this is part of what we're going through in a collective transition from unconsciousness into at least some degree of consciousness. In my own life, late twenties to early thirties, I had been seeing myself too much in relation to the world around me. I saw that everything around me was fake, especially people being fake, pretending to be what they're not. I fell for it. If I want to get along in this world I have to adopt my own fake self. The fake self I took to myself was pathetic. To be acceptable. There came a time I saw I was not being successful and never would be successful. So I get a middle class job and position as reward for taking on a fake life and making it work for me. The time came I realized I had taken the fake path and didn't even do it right. For reasons I can't comprehend, a large number of people are able to live a fake life if it means more money. I could not give myself to a lifetime of keeping my soul in my back pocket like the way tv golfers wear a glove in the back pocket with the fingers hanging down outside the pocket for show. I was attempting to write poetry at the time, but going at it for the wrong reasons, knew it, but denial took care of that problem easily. After I came to the mountains intent on writing here, I became acquainted with a young American poet (YAP) of about my level. I was glad to meet another yap. He was so obnoxious, so fake, so full of shit his bucket overflowed, arrogant, regarded self the apex of existence. I saw myself in a mirror every time I saw him. This was what I was aiming for. This was my goal for myself. I saw myself so clearly it became like they say people on lsd see in a mirror.

 

tj worthington

 

I had fallen in with Meher Baba just a year before and my thinking was shifting away from the fake in myself. I came to the mountains to shed my fake self like a snake skin and start fresh. Second winter I became acquainted with this guy who was like a hologram of my own fake self. I made a resolution to myself that I would not attempt to write again until whatever it might be wrote itself. I shut off writing poetry because I saw I was not true. I was doing it for a certain kind of attention. Denial took care of seeing it in myself until I saw this hologram of self and freaked out. The mirror seen without denial. We don't deny as readily for others as for ourselves. I cut two paragraphs out of a National Geographic article, page randomly picked. I cut out each word from the paragraphs and put the words in two separate saucers, picked up words licking the tip of my finger, touching the pile and a word stuck. I put the word on a piece of paper making a poem-shaped string of words randomly picked up. Did it twice, made two poems. I typed them onto paper, put them in the yap's mail slot at work with a note saying, "These are my new poems, I wanted you to see them." Had a woman friend in California who was a poet. We wrote back and forth regularly for years. I wrote her about what I'd done and my decision. She wouldn't have any more to do with me. It made her mad. I thought, there wasn't much there if it was that easy to break. It's like after leaving a church when the people don't speak to you anymore. She was part of my fake life too. Not that she was fake, but my attraction to her was fake. I can't articulate it, because I can't put a finger on it, perhaps something like her role was enabling the fake me. That's awfully simplistic, but as close as I can get without resorting to the psychiatric couch. Nonetheless, I had committed with such resolve there was no turning around.

 

tj worthington

 

I've never regretted shifting direction. It was not the poetry I was abandoning, but my own fake self the poetry was attached to. Worked on the farm for seven years, liking manual labor work for the meditation in it. I believed the farm work would work off my anger, thinking it had to do with physical assertion. All the time I worked, my mind seethed with anger and I was at a loss for what was up. The physical exertion didn't make me less angry, it made me more angry. When I left the farm and took up house painting, the anger fell away from me, again, like a snake skin. It was gone. Evidently the labor put my anger up front and center to deal with it. Seven years I dealt with it, then poof, it was gone, not even gradually, but a snap of the fingers, now. Overnight. Woke up one day and the anger was gone. My own mental health was more important to me than being a yap. I'd made the turn, like shooting an arrow straight up. It goes as far as the momentum of its push, slows to a stop, turns and returns to the source, faster and faster. The move to the mountains was the turning point. I wanted to find my true self, needing distance from influences of habit in the city, playing the role. Wanted no social roles to play. I read Thoreau's Walden soon after arrival during the first winter. I romanticized it in the beginning that much. I felt like my real purpose in the mountains, my reason for needing the mountains was to develop my own inner resources. I was so tired of living among signs, noisy cars, ugly low-bid buildings everywhere, too many people too close together, too many styles and trends, too much that was devoid of value. Required to be superficial, I could not see living the rest of my life wearing a mask or maybe have hundreds of them like Dolly Parton has wigs. I fell in with the mountain people like jumping into a heated swimming pool. Trust and respect are important in the mountains and mountain people have learned city people can't be trusted, as a rule, and don't know anything about respect. I love being in a place where you're not trusted until somebody knows you thirty years. I'm comfortable with that.  

 

 

tj worthington hiself

photo by cheyanne

 

 

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