Why do I carry a Hiking Stick?
By Riley Rackliffe
Greetings, there are very many of you. Having lived in the Widtsoe building these last several years I am surprised. I never would have guessed there were this many lab rats on the ninth floor.
I have very little time and ten thousand stories to tell. I’ll talk quickly to make sure we cover them all.
Years ago as a scout I helped lead around 60 scouts out into a distant part of camp for a wilderness survival overnighter. As a staff member I was one of many who was responsible for making sure all the boys survived the night and found their way home. After roving the camp and giving tips on the construction of a good emergency shelter I realized that I needed a place to sleep myself. I found an empty niche, okay I partitioned an existing niche, in the middle of the Hooverville rapidly taking shape around me. Using a tarp and a few logs I constructed a very simple shelter. As I search among the thousands of lodgepole pine logs lying about the area I discovered one that felt different than the others. It fit my hand in just the right way.
The next day I returned to camp behind 60 dirty, sleep deprived scouts carting my stick. I spent the day carving off the branches and smoothing it out, particularly cutting the top to a good height and rounding it off. I used my hiking stick religiously over the last couple weeks of the camping season. The longer I walked about with it the more uses I found for it. It was a useful place to sleep in the morning at early staff meetings. I could use it to knock items like pinecones down from hard to reach places. It was also remarkably effective at getting scoutmasters to remember which of the uniformed overgrown boy scouts was the nature director.
I took that stick with me to my freshman year of college where its skill set expanded to teaching Elder’s quorum lessons on the appropriate distance to keep a girl during our pre-mission years. On a dark and stormy night it even acquired the name Aaron as I sat huddle against the rain in the tunnel outside this building and carved both the name and my finger into the wood.
For two years it guarded my past in a dusty storage room while I learned the difference between nineteen and twenty one. Once we were reunited we hiked many a trail and summited many a peak together. Aaron always took longer steps than I and was much better at the slippery mud slopes of Squaw Peak in April. Gradually he took over more and more of the hiking part which allowed me to spend more time looking about me at the landscape. I got better and better at moving quickly over boulders, much to the abandonment of my fellow researchers in the mountains last year. I was able to keep my eyes peeled to the changing plant species as we climbed or the shape of the mountains as we walked around them.
Unfortunately Aaron has a fear of flying (plus the security guards always misjudge him) so I had to leave him when I went on study abroad in Israel. Luckily he appointed a temporary hiking stick in the form of a rod of mustard tree which I located on Mount Moriah one day. That stick carried me around the holy land, extending my stride and my stamina. It was with me on the mount Tabor and mount Nebo. It looked out the window at Mount Hermon and we both decided to save that one for another day. Something about hiking sticks seems to understand mountains. That stick developed even more uses as it rescued balls from gutters for young Israeli children or herded sheep or served as a makeshift tripod for indoor picture taking. Across all the holy land it was only turned away from one church, the birthplace of John the Baptist.
That stick, like Aaron, had a fear of flying so it opted to avoid Israeli security and stay in Israel. It’s still there, hiding somewhere in the Jerusalem center waiting for someone else to need something to lean on. Aaron was overjoyed for my return. We began a two year regime of travel that would make any hiking stick envious. We climbed almost every mountain in sight of this building (please don’t look south of here). We continued to show boy scouts around the wilderness and branched out to showing college students the wonders of the Wasatch that overshadow our studies here. Aaron got particularly good at hiking in the snow. He learned that if he reached up at just the right spot on the trail he could knock the snow from the tree onto the people following behind him. It worked especially well on girls.
In spite of his mischievous side Aaron is remarkably well respected by the people that meet him. Most mistake him for more of a Moses figure. In one case his presence was reassuring to a tribe of Indians (of the subcontinent persuasion) who had gotten lost in the dark on the trail to Delicate Arch in southern Utah. Surely a stick as noble as that would have no trouble finding a way down the mountain.
Aaron also knows how to come through in a crunch. On one trip it rained for three days. With a full backpack and miles of high mountain travel my knees gave out before Aaron did. He was instrumental in my return to Provo. Aaron has also been used as a limbo stick, a fire poker, a wizard’s staff, a tide pool stabilizer, a star gazer, a wetland scientist, a dissection scalpel, a plant identifier, a coat hanger, a hat stand, a yoke for carrying luggage, a makeshift rifle, a trumpet, a pencil, a measuring stick and countless other odd jobs.
He receives some strange looks sometimes. People wonder why a young, apparently healthy young man would need a walking stick. A crutch they sometimes call it, necessary because of the weakness of the user.
I have to confess that a walking stick and a crutch have a great deal in common. They both allow the user to accomplish tasks and endure longer than they would able to on their own.
We have graduated from a university that forced us to live honorably during our time here. They gave us old fashioned commandments to live and made us promise to stay clean shaven and stop visiting girls after midnight. We had to take hours and hours of religion classes, I took more religion classes than I did Spanish classes and I have a minor in Spanish. We are going out into a world that will laugh at the honesty and integrity we have been trained in here. It is possible that they will tell us that silly things like commitment to family or devotion to deity restrict us in how far we can progress. And it is completely possible that your son’s baseball game will keep you from getting a promotion someday. But we don’t climb mountains to make money (unless you do research in the alpine zone). The day may come that the world will look at the virtues they have tried so hard to teach us here and call us weak for using them as a crutch for our weak and feeble spirits. I hope you will realize when that day comes that your spirit is valuable enough that any help it can get; be it a crutch, a hiking stick, or faith in a living God; that can give you a little extra help is worth it. Never berate someone for trying to do the right thing.
I hope I will run into you out there on the trail someday. I hope I will still have my hiking stick by my side so we can both remember how great we can become when we have a little faith to lift us up.
Thank you
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