Whittling Sticks

I remember my first pocket knife.

It was an old Barlow hand-me-down. I have no idea where it came from or how my dad came to be in possession of it. He wasn’t much on carrying knives of any kind. I never saw him whittling anything other than sharpening a toothpick and he usually did that with whatever kitchen knife was handiest.

I was seven or eight when the old hand-me-down two blade was given to me to tote around in my pocket. It was about as dull as a butter knife. I’m not sure if it was dull to begin with or if my dad dulled it on purpose before he gave it to me. Knowing my dad he probably applied a brick to the edges before he put it in my hand.

One thing for sure … I was plenty proud of that old folding tool.

Wasn’t long before I found the whetstone … the one in the kitchen drawer that kept the kitchen knives sharp … and worked a bit of an edge on the blades of the old Barlow. It wasn’t as good a sharpening job as I do now but it was enough of an edge that I drew my own blood a few times. 

That’s part of the learning curve with knives. Both the sharpening and the cutting yourself.  It’s one of those paying your dues things.

Once you slice yourself  … feel the sting, see the red flowing, and have to deal with sore fingers a few times  … you learn to be careful.

That was a good long time ago.

That was back when a lot of kids carried their pocket knives everywhere they went. Even to school. Imagine. Kids sitting in the shade during recess peeling sticks and whittling with their pocket knives. No one got alarmed. No one raised a fuss about it. The police weren’t called. Kid’s weren’t expelled or carted off to the juvenile detention center for bringing a weapon to school. Parents weren’t labelled as negligent or derelict because their child brought a pocket knife to school.

It was normal back then for boys to carry pocket knives. At least around here.

And here is the kicker.

I do not recall a single knife fight at any point in my progress through the public school system. Not even during that tumultuous period known as De-Segregation. A few good fist fights. Very few of them racially motivated. Most of the fist fights had to do with hormonal bravado. Guys fighting over girls. But not a single knife fight.

Cutting tools are extremely important items in the world of woodcraft. Their edges provide us with some needed advantages when it comes to crafting other items that are necessary for self-reliance. Their edges give us an edge. Possessing appropriate cutting tools, caring for our cutting tool possessions to insure their efficiency and longevity, and knowing how to effectively and safely use cutting tools for their intended purposes are necessarily integral elements of our woodcraft school program.

In the forward to his book … The Book of Camping and Woodcraft … Horace Kephart wrote that “Real woodcraft consists in knowing how to get along without the appliances of civilization rather than adapting them to wildwood life.  ..… Woodcraft may be defined as the art of getting along well in the wilderness by utilizing nature’s storehouse.”

Whittling sticks to turn them into something other than sticks is at the very heart of woodcraft … the ability to manipulate a few simple hand tools and utilize available natural resources to secure our well-being in a self-reliant manner … whether it’s building a shelter that will protect against the wiles of winter, handles for tools, furnishings for home and camp, or improvising devises that assist in procuring meat to sustain physical life … and do it all in an efficient manner that limits the possibility of embedding an axe in our shin or laying ourselves open with our own knife.

Times were, and those times were not so long ago in the big scheme of time, that these (and quite a few other skills) were common skills developed at a young age and practiced throughout life.  Unless you were a city person accustomed to city ways.

It may raise some hackles to say it but it is something that needs to be said.

Accept it or not. Like it or not.

But the truth of the matter is that, with few rare exceptions, we have all, in varying degrees, become city people. Some lesser so than others. Some more so than others. Some are simply outright city people whether they live in the city or out on the farm. The progress of life in these modern times is the culprit that has thrown a harness on us and made us city people … made us all even more dependent upon the outfitter and the mercantile.

City people … dependent upon our appliances and conveniences … regardless of whether we are urban, suburban, or rural … is what we will remain without personal concerted efforts to reclaim, relearn, and put into practice the craft that the old timers called woodcraft.

I’m passionate about this … about woodcraft and self-reliant living … about practicing what I know … about continuing to learn new things in the school of the woods where there is no graduation day …  about achieving greater degrees of self-reliance through knowledge, skills, and resources … about teaching woodcraft skills and hopefully seeing others transition from hobby woodcrafters to woodcraftsmen as a lifestyle.

Ma Nature and all that she is, when that transition is made, begins to take on a lot of significance that is otherwise missed by city people and by woodcraft hobbyists. Somewhere in making that transition we begin to see ourselves as one small part of nature dependent up it as the greater part. We begin to see nature as an ally to be cared for and safeguarded. Our lives, and the way we go about life, go through a serious adjustment.

People are getting into the craft for a number of reasons. One of the reasons definitely has to do with the survival aspect. There is not a thing wrong with that aspect. I admit that it is one of my reasons.

But there is a something else. There is a lot more to it. At least for me.

That something else for me is that a time came in my consciousness where I realized that the process of citification had overtaken me. Me? One that grew up in the woods and fields? One that hunted cottonmouth moccasins in these swamps and bottoms as a summer sport when I was in grade school? One that knew more about life in the woods and fields before I was 12 than the majority of 50 year old men in today’s society?

I fell victim to citification.

It’s hard to imagine it looking at me today but there was a long length of time … back there a ways … when my normal daily attire was suit, tie, and wing tips. Those years of citification robbed me and instilled a lot of fear in me. Back when I first started reclaiming myself I had become, despite my formative years in the woods and fields, afraid to venture off the beaten path. Dirt roads and out of the way places no longer called to me. The woods had become a foreign stranger to me.

I simply had to return to myself and get back what I had lost.

Now?

I’ve crossed a line in my own mind and heart. A line that I cannot cross back over. A line that I will not cross back over no matter the pressures brought to bear against me to return to the city ways that holds modern society captive in its strangling grasp.

So we whittled some sticks Saturday morning and turned them into Figure 4 snare triggers … 3 sticks … 4 notches as the contact points … 3 pointed ends … touchy things that appear to the novice as complicated contraptions but are really simple devices that do an effective job where a baited snare-set is concerned.

The finished products were a little rough for first attempts. I took time with each one to do a little touching up on the notches and points, explaining the necessity to make clean joints that will hold when pressure is applied to the trigger stick part of the sensitive device, then field tested the finished products with each student. 5 out of 6, after a little tuning, performed effectively.

Whittling, like all the other skills in woodcraft, is something that takes practice.

No skill is developed without practice. The more we practice the more efficient we become. I think whittling is a terribly underrated and neglected skill. There is a lot more to blade proficiency than carving feather sticks, billeting kindling, and cutting lengths of cordage.

Whittling involves developing dexterity. It involves developing muscles in our hands and fingers. It involves eye-hand coordination. It involves learning to manipulate and control a sharp blade without slicing a finger open and bleeding all over our work. It involves imagination and creativity. It involves being able to visualize and see a finished product in some sticks and bring the finished product to life. Whittling doles out patience and perseverance in small doses.

And another thing.

Whittling introduces us to and helps us understand the different qualities and characteristics of different woods … from the soft woods to the hard woods … something that can assist us in a big way when we are harvesting sticks to be used for varying woodcraft purposes.

We have a lot more whittling to do.

Little sticks. Larger sticks. Logs.

With tools appropriate for the jobs at hand.