A Duncan musician has been awarded ‘Stick of the Year’ by an online group of stick aficionados after stumbling upon what he describes as his ‘ancient energy sword’.
There’s no simpler thing in nature than a stick, and depending on your imagination, it could be anything.
From practical to fantastical, a stick found on the forest floor can be anything from a crutch to a cutlass. In fact, there’s an Instagram account devoted to celebrating the stick and it’s also where a Duncan man has found fame.
Marcus Barrick won’t say where exactly he came across the stick, but it was in a river bed somewhere in the Cowichan Valley.
“I like to scramble through rivers and rocks. It was kind of low water season so I just found that stick perched up on a rock,” Barrick told CHEK News while at a retreat in India.
The stick, dubbed an ‘ancient energy sword’ by Barrick, bears resemblance to a sword you might find in a fantasy film.
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Barrick who has his ‘ancient energy sword’ mounted the wall of his Duncan home, says he learned about an Instagram account called @officialstickreviews where people post photos and videos of cool sticks they’ve found.
For the first time in the page’s history, the most popular sticks were pitted against one another in a bracket to determine the world’s greatest stick. As a result, Barrick’s stick made the finals, and on Tuesday the winner was announced by singer-songwriter Noah Kahan.
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“Congratulations. You earned this. Your stick is fantastic,” said Kahan in the official winner post.
Barrick, a musician and author, remained low-key about his triumph. “I just hope the attention can go toward our forests, especially here in B.C.,” he says.
The City of Duncan recently lost the title of ‘World’s Biggest Hockey Stick’ when the famed Expo ’86 stick and puck was removed from the façade of the Cowichan Community Centre. Now they’ve got the world’s best stick, courtesy of Barrick.
As for what to do with it, “I kind of want to keep it,” says Barrick.
Trust a stick lover to be good with an axe, Barrick is the guitarist and vocalist for Domesticated Minds, described as ‘Dark Ambient Technical Death Metal’.
And while the stick could make a guitar neck or perhaps fetch a fortune, Barrick isn’t interested in selling. “I’m not interested in the monetary aspect of it.”
