The Stick | Teen Ink

The Stick

April 5, 2010
By arborwriter BRONZE, Marathon, Wisconsin
arborwriter BRONZE, Marathon, Wisconsin
1 article 0 photos 0 comments

Favorite Quote:
"There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace."
— Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac)


From a bur oak acorn that’s hidden below the soil there sprouts the bur oak tree. Up and up it grows competing with the flora and even with the fauna located within the same proximity as the tree itself.


For a tree like this; or any other perennial woody plant for that matter, to sprout is difficult. The acorn must first fall far enough from the parent tree to succeed the correct amount of comfort. To continue in its path to adulthood the juvenile arbor will need to gain the correct amount of nutrients while at the same time remaining away from predators. It will also need to gain enough sunlight, while still remaining shaded from the sun and the wind.



Too much or too little of anything in the wild is the difference between life and death.


As the tree has reached maturity it will now begin to create it’s own fruit; that being the acorn, in order for its lineage to live on. Continuing the cycle of the trees.


The low lying braches of the tree will begin to be jostled and strewn about the forest floor. Now the tree has finished its self-indulgent phase of its adolescence and contributes back to the forest and its inhabitants.


This stick being dead should have little or no consequence to the roamers of the forest. But the opposite is true, it has everything to do with the beginning and the end of an animals life.


The stick now acts as an apparatus, an escape mechanism of sorts. The predator tracking his prey silently will be met with difficulty when setting off something as simple but so effective as this.


The author's comments:
I was inspired to write this piece when i was walking through the woods one morning. I was constantly scaring away ducks, and i was getting so mad. I then came to the realization that trees are the protectors of the woods.

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