By Arielle Greenberg
Photographed by Chris Battaglia
From our October 2022 issue
For nearly 40 years, 72-year-old Stephen Miller’s career has brought him close to the trees. Since cofounding the nonprofit Islesboro Islands Trust in 1985, he’s been the org’s executive director, helping protect some 1,000 acres of mostly wooded land and 15 miles of shoreline and create more than 13 miles of trails. More recently, when he’s not protecting Islesboro’s trees, he has taken to carving their limbs, turning them into elegant walking sticks he sells through his side business, Greyfeather Woodcraft.
Growing up, Miller was intrigued by his grandmother’s “Shillelagh stick,” a walking stick she brought to America when she immigrated from Ireland. He learned woodworking as a kid in his grandfather’s basement, but it wasn’t until three years ago that he started making walking sticks. That was the same year his oldest son passed away, and he found solace in the labor, just as he had with woodworking and land-trust work when he lost his wife, Elaine, to cancer some two decades before. It was a book by a pair of Welsh craftsmen that reignited his childhood fascination, a guide to the techniques and processes of making walking sticks by hand. “I was reminded of the lyrics in a Joni Mitchell song: oh Carey, get out your cane, I’ll put on my finest silver,” he says. “Walking sticks can be celebratory.”
Miller’s sticks begin as limbs he prunes or scavenges from hardwood trees. Then, he runs a power rasp over irregularities, sands them, and finishes them with oil (Odie’s Oil is his favorite). Each stick is one of a kind: he might add a leather lanyard to one or a metal handle to another or carve a knob at the top to look like a bird’s head. On each piece, he burns an ancient Celtic symbol representing an ash tree. This summer, he launched a website for Greyfeather Woodcraft — named for the gray feathers he often finds on Coombs Cove Beach, one of his favorite spots on the island. “These sticks are little pieces of Islesboro,” he says. He also sells benches made from island cedar, the same kind he’s been making since 1998 to set out along the land trust’s trails.
Of course, Miller’s sticks are more than just art objects — he mentions hikers who take them on trail and a friend with mobility issues who uses one as an aid. Someday, he says, he’ll retire from the land trust, and it’s comforting to think that, through Greyfeather, he’ll still be helping people access nature. “Having a stick,” he says, “is a major motivator in getting people to enjoy the outdoors.”
