Pants, Stick, Dog

1) Pants—A good pair of pants is the armor that protects you from the dangers of our world, that protects your most vulnerable places, your most valuable assets: your ankles and Achilles tendons (the greatest of the Greek warriors, Achilles, was killed when an arrow pierced his Achilles tendon), your knees and femoral arteries, your quads and hamstrings, your hip carriage and genitals. A good pair of pants shields these vital parts of your body from what might do them harm, and gives you the mobility you need to express your strength and speed, to move about in the world so that you may do your work and meet your life's mission. Your pants are elemental to the way you love and protect your partner and your people, your children, if you have them. Wearing a good pair of pants, you are dangerous and deadly and able to protect the perimeter of your property and homeland. Your pants give you the freedom to do for yourself what governments and corporations seek to do for you by taking from you your vitality and your will to do it. Your pants are also your calling card in the world, a signature by which you may be recognized, a statement of your beliefs and convictions and desires. Your pants are functional first, and fashionable after. Your pants are classically and timelessly fashionable for their function; form follows function. The best pants may be worn from morning until night, meeting every demand in your day, and they may be worn from your coming of age until death, meeting every demand across the years of your life. There is nothing better than a good pair of pants. To be without a good pair of pants is like being without a dog. First you choose a good pair of pants, and then you do everything else. In the sixth century, Greek geographers recorded that Central and Eastern Asian, as well as Persian, horsemen wore pants instead of robes. It's likely that Persian and Asian horsemen had been wearing pants for centuries before that, as the oldest known pair of pants, found in a cemetery in Xinjiang, China, was made between 1300 and 900 BCE. Horses were first domesticated in central Asia between 3500 and 3000 BCE, and pants were an adaptation to a life on horseback. Pants are superior to robes, especially when riding a horse, and especially when riding a horse into battle—they are warmer, and allow more mobility and protection. In fact, armies that wore pants far outperformed armies that wore robes. For a time, the Ancient Greeks and early Romans rejected pants. With modernization and the expansion of the Roman Empire across the known world, the practicality and superiority of pants brought them into common use in the West. Pant styles changed over the centuries, and sometime after 1800, those changes stabilized to become the kind of pants you wear today. When I get up in the morning and put on my pants, I want those pants to be worthy of my death. I am not being dramatic when I ask: Would I die in these pants? If the answer is “no,” then these pants are not worthy of wearing, nor even worthy of keeping. Pants unworthy of my death are also unworthy of my life. I cast them off, as I do other burdens like guilt and self-consciousness and shame. What makes a good pair of pants? I wear pants that are form-fitting, but loose enough in the crotch and thighs to sit and kneel, and move and walk for long hours. I wear pants that are breathable and suitable for both cold and hot weather, and can be worn for a week before washing. I wear pants that are tough, double-fronted, and resistant to spills and rough use. I wear pants that are neutral in color: black, blue, brown. I wear pants with good pockets to carry my tools: my keys, cellphone, wallet, a knife.2) Stick—A good stick is a tool for making your way in the world. As a tool for walking, use your stick to probe unsettled ground before stepping onto it, and to help stabilize your footing when crossing a stream or a field of snow or broken rock. When coming down or along a steep slope, place the bottom of your stick on the uphill side and lean into it for stability. Walking a narrow trail, use your stick to push aside overgrown brush, the low-hanging branches of trees, spiderwebs spun across the trail in the night, with apologies. Use the bottom end of your stick to sweep away stones troubling your path, branches come down on the wind, a snake curled in a sunspot, with apologies. Set the stick into the ground to stand upright and so hang your jacket on it, or stretch it across the gap between two trees to hang your pack or to dry your clothes in the wind. Walk with your stick out in the woodlands and deserts and mountains, and walk with your stick down the lane or along the sidewalk in a busy city. If you are self-conscious, walk with a cane so as not to attract too much attention. A good stick is your greatest security, a deterrent just at the sight of it, like a dog. It says: Approach only if you are my friend. You can learn to fight with a stick or a cane, to open a space between you and a threat, to jab and smack and block and smash, if you have to. A good stick will protect you from aggressive animals, from solicitors, hooligans and zombies, from your weakened confidence and swelling fear. A good stick feels good in the hands, something to hang onto, something to love. It is an extension of your hands and your body, and with use and practice, it becomes an extension of your thoughts and your desire and will. It doesn't matter if you are old or young, carry your stick wherever you go. The stick (along with the rock) may be the oldest human tool and the oldest human weapon. It is primal, perhaps primordial. We have been making and using wooden sticks for walking and as spears and bludgeons for at least 500,000 years, probably longer. It was the stick that killed the woolly mammoth, and it is the stick that helps the aged and injured to walk. We evolved with sticks in our hands. After about 1600, a walking stick or cane was part of the gentleman's wardrobe. A stick might be fashioned to match a suit, and sometimes a snuffbox, a pipe, or a dagger. Some walking sticks or canes conceal daggers. Others conceal flasks in the top for carrying a measure of your drink of choice, just for you or to share with friends, even to share with your enemy. A stick can be magic, as in a wand or wizard's staff, or part of a religious ceremony or religious pilgrimage. A stick can be used as a symbol of purpose and power, such as a king's mace, which is a bludgeon, highly ornate, extremely expensive. Universities keep ceremonial maces. If your child or your dog is bored and so unruly, give them a stick. If you collect walking sticks, you are a rabologist.Under various rulers in Edo period Japan, the great age of the Samurai, it was unlawful for a common farmer to carry a sword, so he carried a stick. A farmer's stick might have once been the handle of a farming tool—a rake or hoe or shovel—a straightened and carved length of red or white oak, or bamboo. A straight stick of about six feet in length and one inch in diameter is called a bo, and a straight stick of about four feet in length and one inch in diameter is called a jo. The bo and jo are integral to a number of martial arts, or are themselves martial arts. The bo has greater reach, but the jo is faster and easier to wield, and it relies on techniques associated with the katana, or Japanese long sword. Either is exceptional as a walking stick. Whenever and wherever possible, I carry a stick for walking and for self defense. When I am not carrying a stick, I think about the stick I might carry. I have constructed my own sticks of varying lengths, mostly from hardwood blanks (oak is more common, hickory is better) measuring one inch or one and one-sixteenth inches in diameter, which I cut to the length of my liking, then sand and finish with linseed oil. I have one stick that measures seventy-two inches in length, several at sixty inches, a couple at fifty-six inches, one at thirty-nine inches (like a cane), and several at eighteen inches, short sticks to carry concealed in a backpack or in the door pocket in my truck. The stick I favor is sixty inches long, hickory, with a copper cap fitted on one end. I use it for walking, and it is a weapon too. Sometimes (but not often) I fix a rope lanyard to my stick to help keep it in my hand. Wearing a good pair of pants, I practice with my stick daily, moving through the few katas I know.3) Dog—A good dog is an extension of your hand, like a stick. A good dog will test the perimeter and patrol the boundary of home and property, routinely and without tiring. A good dog is a sentinel, a scout, an alarm, a friend. A dog can bring the sheep together, find the lost lambs, and protect them from predators: bears, wolves, lions. A dog will hunt, and it will bring back what you have hunted and killed. A dog makes you stronger and more courageous than you are, and will lead you to where you would not go alone, even into the darkness. A dog's courage is unmatched, led by its astonishing sense of smell, and its curiosity and drive to satisfy the scent that draws it, and to please you who love it. Dogs remind you that you are an animal, and so you long for the companionship of the animal dog. Your animal nature is a portal to your animal soul, so the dog dismembers your ego and brings you back to the body and its senses and its sensuality. Your dog understands you, your feelings and gestures, even your language, just as you understand your dog's. You and your dog listen to each other and understand what is needed and what must be done. You are your dog's singular purpose, so your dog will die for you, if you ask, just as you might die for your dog. Losing a dog is a grief nearly inconsolable. Your dog is gone and not gone; she will return now in your dreams. The dog evolved from the wolf some 15,000 years ago, possibly even as long as 30,000 years ago, in what are today China and Israel's Upper Jordan River Valley. From the German shepherd to the Pekingese, the dog is a domesticated wolf, the wolf made compatible with humans. The root of that word, “domesticated,” means “belonging to the house.” So during that time long ago, the wolf came into the house to live with humans. In fact, dogs don't do well without humans, and in turn, humans don't do well without dogs. While domestication is a human enterprise, something humans do to make use of animals, it is also fair to say that domestication is something wolves did to themselves. In that long-ago past, wolves found shelter, and scrap meat and bones in and around human camps, and humans tolerated and then found use for friendly wolves. In time, these wolves became dogs. Work in exchange for food has always been the foundation of the relationship between humans and dogs. Dogs have served as draft animals to pull small carts and travois, for guarding property and goat and sheep herds, for herding goats and sheep and cows, for service in police operations and war, for hunting, search and rescue, therapy, and in service to people with disabilities. And perhaps chiefly, dogs are our companions, our friends, members of our families. Domestication has been a successful survival strategy, as dogs now live and flourish in every climate and on every continent, while wolf populations are declining worldwide.In many cultures, it is thought that the dog is a medium and a guide for journeying between the natural and the spirit worlds, between what is human and what is animal. In ancient Egypt, the dog-headed god Anubis attends to the dead by overseeing mummification, and determining who is worthy of entering the land of the dead. Anubis is the protector of graves. Dogs guard the gates of hell: the Greek god Cerberus, the Norse god Garm, the hellhounds and hounds of hell. The dog helps prepare the dead by eating the flesh and chewing the bones, and it will dig to bury or to exhume. The dog is a wanderer and a healer, too. For this reason, the wandering Norse god, Odin, travels with wolves, and the Roman war god Mars is accompanied by dogs in war. Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were raised by wolves, and North American indigenous cultures admire the wolf for its courage, endurance, cooperation, and its fierce protection of its young. Fenrir, the death wolf of Nordic myth, destroys the world at Ragnarok, but only to make room for what is coming, for what is new. I have shared my life with three dogs: Kuma, a Queensland heeler from New Mexico, who howled when I played Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, roamed with coyotes across those deserts of prickly pear and pinyon pine, and was so devoid of manners, I was forced to find him a home on a ninety-one-square-mile ranch in Arizona, where he worked cows to the end of his days. Osa, a Queensland/McNab cross who died young. She ran class III whitewater with me while sitting in the bow of my canoe, easily covered twenty miles on a ten-mile hike, and her face ballooned hideously when stung by bees. And Kona, the German shepherd, so astonishingly beautiful that people pulled up in their cars to say so. She lived half of her life traveling with me in my truck, slept on her back with her legs splayed, was always kind and gentle with people, was sometimes foul and aggressive with other dogs. When age came upon her and she could no longer get up, I put on a good pair of pants, and with my stick in the truck where she lay, I held her as she made her passage out of this world.