Gorock Stick

Yesterday, as I was hiking up a muddy creek in the Wilkie Unit of the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge, I found that I needed to use a “Gorock Stick” to improve my safety. For those of you who may not know what a Gorock Stick is, it was named after a man whom I first wrote about sometime ago, who lived around 5000BC.

Mr. Gorock may not have invented the concept of using a stick to poke unstable ground in order to find safe passage, but he did in fact, perfect the art form. In a time when it was important to have the basic skills of hunting, using weapons and poking a stick in the ground to find safe passage, Mr. Gorock was the undisputed expert in the use of what would later be referred to, as the “Gorock Stick.”

Some of you may have seen the movie “Nanook of the North,” in which the lead character, Nanook, used his spear to find safe passage across dangerous ice flows. It is likely that Gorock’s stick too, may have doubled as a weapon such as a spear.

The stick that I used was a simple branch that I broke off to the correct length. I was able to use it to help support my weight as I traversed a slippery ledge. I also used it in the traditional way –of poking the mud to see if I could walk across it, or if I would be sucked down into the muddy depths to my death. Thus you can see the importance of knowing your way around a Gorock Stick.

Mr. Gorock’s great skill with the stick made him both the envy of the other men, and quite popular with the ladies. This would sometimes cause friction between him and Mrs. Gorock. No doubt, at that point in history, his skill was akin to that of a fighter pilot in our modern society.

Modern humans have less need of such skills as the use of a Gorock Stick, just as Mr. Gorock would have had little use for a laptop computer. While I could never reach the proficiency level of Mr. Gorock, I am proud that I know how to use a Gorock Stick. Such things tend to make history come alive don’t you think?