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Harvesting the Staff |
From left to right: full sized oak kung fu staff from Wing Lam Kung Fu; Shaolin style short staff from ash handle manufactured by Turney Wood Products, Harrison, Arkansas; juniper sapwood walking stick I harvested myself. |
Any hardwood that will make a good bow (as in archery) will make a good bo (as in kung fu). Not just any wood will do. You need wood that is strong, that will bend without breaking and then regain its shape. You ideally want a staff that is just heavy enough to be effective, without being a burden on the trail. Osage Orange, hickory, ash, oak and juniper all make good staves but it isn't as simple as just going out in the woods and cutting down a sapling or a branch. My small staff is juniper (Eastern red cedar). Usually that type of wood is pretty weak--full of knots as well. This staff came from a straight grained section of cedar log about two feet in diameter, from a thick section of flawless sapwood. The familiar scented red heartwood |
the right one is like a rite of passage. You look in the worst places, thickets and brambles and deep woods where the dark things hide. Something magical would have to guide you, to find a really good one. Currently the only natural American canes being marketed in this style are of sassafras, a wood that's good enough for a walking stick but not strong enough or heavy enough for defense. From the British Isles, Blackthorn shillelaghs are still available, and serviceable imitations in durable plastic are produced by Cold Steel. Good shillelagh trees won't jump out at you. What you need to watch for are thickets of spreading saplings, like sassafras. You might find something really good in one. Osage orange is a better bet, a good bow wood that often does grow in thickets, with many of the qualities of blackthorn (especially the stickery parts--digging in an Osage orange thicket won't be fun). Even some fruit woods could work--old apple trees often put up healthy sucker shoots from large old roots. The number of people who want to spend this much time and effort looking for a good stick is pretty limited. If you take the other route, shopping for something that's ready to use, you can find all sorts of things incorporated in staff designs -- like spears, survival kits and even blowguns. |
Decorative Native American spears -- photo by Xandert |
Wushu kung fu staff -- Wikipedia Commons |
of this tree is weak; the straight grained sapwood is very light and resilient but also very hard to find. Very few cedars have much sapwood of that quality. My Shaolin short staff was easier to acquire, but only because there was an old time hardware store in the town where I lived. Miller's Hardware kept a wide assortment of tool handles, including a stout ash version a little over five feet long that fit some tool I don't even own. A little work with a rasp to even out the flared top end, and I had a good staff. Maybe a little heavy for hiking, but no worries about it ever breaking. The most sensible way to get a high quality staff is through a martial arts supplier like Wing Lam Kung Fu. You'll have to pay a bit, but you get top quality--no flaws, and sometimes the dragon carving is free. In full sized staffs you get a choice of white waxwood or red oak. Oak is a material I grew up with, so I went with that. There is a way to harvest a staff yourself, but it may take a year or two. First you have to find the right tree, and you'll be getting into a lot of work. This will be a heavy staff, too, the kind of thing people might have carried as personal weapons, not the lighter version we'd choose as trail tools today. Two American woods serve beautifully for this, and often grow tall and straight in the understory of mature woodlands. Either persimmon or dogwood saplings with a base diameter of 2 inches or a little more, if nice and straight, will make beautiful functional staves. |
If you want a peeled staff (no bark) you should cut the sapling in the Spring when the sap is running. The bark slips right off with a little bit of chipping and prying. The advantage is that bugs that might get an easy grip on the bark and eat holes in your hiking stick won't have anything but slick wood to bite. Chances are really good that as the staff dries you'll get quite a bit of cracking--not the sort that weakens the staff, but it doesn't look great. Keeping the bark on limits the cracking. Spring just isn't the time to cut one, if you want a better quality staff. In late summer, when things are hot and dry, is a good time to cut. There won't be so much sap in the wood in drought season. You could wait until the leaves fall and the sap is down and that's even better, but there's an old woodsman's trick you can use in late summer only. Above the top end of what will eventually be your staff, carefully girdle the tree, removing the bark down to the sapwood. If there are small branches below the ring you've cut (taking off a half inch of bark will |
do) cut them off at the base. Come back in a few weeks when the top of the tree is dead and cut your staff down. The leaves will have pulled more of the moisture out of the sapling. Even if the tree was ramrod straight, this staff will probably have a few slight curves when it's dry. Wood grain isn't uniform, thicker on one side than the other, so it will always dry with a little bend. You can ease some of that later on, by shaving away excess wood. Before you get around to any shaping, tie a loop around one end and hang it someplace cool and dry, like the corner of a garage, for a few months. Then you can start shaping it, taking off bark and smoothing out the curves, looking for the uniform shape you'll never find. The base will always be the heavy end, so don't worry about that; don't carve too deep into the wood or you'll find flaws, because as trees grow branches die and the stubs heal over. Some martial staff traditions were based on balanced poles like my kung fu staff. A natural staff is much different in action, more like the weighted clubs that Native Americans favored. In a few jungled areas of Asia, martial traditions survive that were based on exactly this type of staff; the shepherd's crook or the shillelagh are European examples of very effective unbalanced designs. Obviously, building your own isn't quite so simple or quite so cheap, if you want something good. You'll spend money on tools and time looking for the right sapling. Finishing the staff involves shaving it down |
Flowering Dogwood often grows tall and straight as an understory tree in forest clearings; photo by taelisin |
Look for persimmon saplings in abandoned fields or overgrown fencerows; photo by mrmac04 |
until it's symmetrical and smooth enough to slide easily in the hands. A few patches of smoothed bark don't matter. For fast action, you'll have to take the diameter down to no more than two inches. If you've cut a sapling that's three inches in diameter, that becomes a lot of work. The most efficient hand tools for this work are the drawknife and shaving horse, which used to be common on farmsteads in days when people often made their own tools. Today it's much easier to buy a long hoe handle and shave the end down, or go shopping for a martial staff turned from quality lumber. Long weapons are for open country. If you're a monk walking along established trails in bandit country, a long staff makes sense because you'll have room to use it. If you're going off the beaten path, spending lots of your time in places where if you swing a six foot pole you smack into three or four trees, you need something short and effective. In this country the answer was usually the tomahawk, a small ax with a rather long handle; in other places, the weighted club was more popular. Shillelaghs are natural versions, most of them in the British Isles being harvested from blackthorn, a tree that grows in thick hedges of upright trunks springing up from vast root systems. The base of a small sapling is often connected to a large root, sometimes horizontal or even swollen and gnarled. It takes some digging to free up that part, but the result is a knob of sworled dense wood at the end of a light but strong walking stick. The knobby end serves either as a handle or a basher of heads, which is why it was both popular in the rougher days of Britain's past, and why it has periodically been outlawed. On this side of the Atlantic, many Indian nations favored weapons created in the same way, harvested from unusual growths and polished into deadly sidearms. Finding the right one is like a rite of passage. You look in the worst places, thickets and brambles and deep woods where the dark things hide. Something magical would have to guide you, to find a really good one. Currently the only things being marketed in this style are of sassafras, a wood that's good enough for a walking stick but not strong enough or heavy enough for defense--and either blackthorn, which is being overharvested now, or plastic simulations of blackthorn. On this side of the Atlantic, many Indian nations favored weapons created in the same way, harvested from unusual growths and polished into deadly sidearms. Finding |
Although a straight section long enough for a staff is rare, Osage Orange is a common hedgerow tree and a good source of shillelagh quality stock. Photo from Wikipedia Commons |
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