A Week in Boy Scout Hell

Recently I was helping my wife do the laundry.  By “help,” I mean I was trying to stay out of her way and not look stupid. I was doing a fair job of the first and pretty much blowing the second when she addressed me in a voice that would make a Drill Instructor cringe–”You DO know how to fold towels, don’t you?”  As I stammered out a lame defensive reply, my mind was catapulted back through some 40 or more years, back to the week I spent in hell at Camp Hidden Valley.  Back when I was a member of the Stag Patrol, Troop Eight, Boy Scouts of America. 

Being a Scout was kind of a big deal to me at the time, being in the same troop as some of the rich kids who lived way up on the hill in Dauphin.  It was even a bigger deal to my Mom–she had a portrait taken of me in my Scout uniform giving the Boy Scout salute, had it hand-tinted and everything.  For all I know, it may well still be one of her proudest possessions.  Anyway, some charity or other (probably the Lions Club, we got Christmas baskets and stuff from them–now that I think of it, the local Lions paid for the bifocals that my wife Kathy and I are wearing right now–God bless the Lions–but I digress) picked up the tab for my week of scout camp.  It was supposed to help my socialization or something.  At any rate, my humiliation started before I even got on the bus.

All two dozen or so of us were in a ragged formation.  I had my meager gear stowed in a ratty canvas knapsack, and had improvised a tumpline out of a length of clothes line and two feet of yellow sateen ribbon left over from Christmas or Easter or something. (A tumpline, by the way, is a pack strap which goes from the shoulder/back load to around the chest or forehead.  Both the concept and the word come from the Algonquian, and the word entered the English language around 1796.)  So there I stood, in my shabby clothes and thick-lensed  glasses with a bright yellow ribbon around my forehead.

Now yellow was a particularly unfortunate choice of color.  Although the scouts were not so overtly homophobic back then as now, yellow WAS associated with being gay.  Every Thursday back then was known as  ”Queer Day” at school–if you forgot and wore a yellow article of clothing, cries of “Hey queer!” would follow you all day.  My mother did not know this, of course, and once picked out for me an Easter outfit consisting of yellow blazer (with plastic buttons), mustard-yellow vest, and light yellow chinos.  All the kids called it my “Thursday suit.”

Anyway, when the assistant soutmaster got to me, he stopped dead, and stared at my yellow ribbon. “What the hell is that supposed to be?” he demanded.

I could barely speak.  “Tumpline,” I managed to get out.

“And what the hell is a tumpline?”  Before I could explain, he ordered me to take it off because I looked like a girl.  My fellow scouts were vastly amused.  I wanted to die.

I didn’t, and a few hours later, we were at camp, being assigned bunks and unpacking our gear.  There was some free time left before dinner and some of the fellows were getting up a game of touch football. I was not then, nor have I ever been, athletic.  This was a source of continual disappointment to my father, who proudly displayed his framed Charles Atlas certificate and had yellowed snapshots of himself flexing in a park following his wildly successful completion of the Charles Atlas body-bulding course. I was the skinny bookish kid who usually got picked next to last, along with the fat kid.  The effeminate kid, the one who “ran like a girl” always got picked last.

Anyway, one of them yelled “Hey, can you play football?”  I was puzzled.  Did he mean, did I have parental permission–the stout lads did not distinguish between “can” and “may.”  Did he mean, was I familiar with the rules, as in, “Yeah, I can play chess.”  Did he mean, was I proficient, as in “Boy, he can really play football”?  I ran through all these options and more in a few seconds, and gave what I thought would be  safe reply–”Well, that’s a matter of opinion.”  He frowned and turned his back on me.  The rest of the week, no one asked me to join in their games, and few spoke to me at all.

I was not completely solitary.  There was another skinny bookish kid who was even more of a pariah than I was, having had the bad taste to be Jewish. I had brought along with me my copy of “The Book of Forbidden Knowldge,” which I had gotten mail-order from the Johnson Smith Company for a quarter or so.  The “forbidden knowledge” included how to hypnotize someone.  So I was alone in the barracks with my Jewish friend trying to hypnotize him, when the scout master caught us.  He was outraged, and ordered me to put the book away for the rest of the week.

Later I was playing chess with another outcaste, a short fat kid a year or so younger than I was.  I was a good player–my father taught me how to play when I was five and quit playing with me when I became good enough to beat him consistently–but I was sloppy and overconfident, and managed to lose my queen.  This was unacceptable to me, so when he left the room to take a leak, I put the queen back on the board.  A few moves later, he noticed.  “Hey,” he said indignantly, “I took that off.”

“That’s right, “I replied. “And I put it back on.”

“But you can’t do that,” he said.

“Well, I did it, didn’t I?”

He agreed to call the game a draw, and thus I followed one of the most widely-observed Boy Scout traditions–bully anyone smaller, weaker, or stupider than you are.

The climax of the week was an overnight camping trip–pitch tents in the snow, cook over an open fire, the whole nine yards.  One of the purposes of the week was to advance in rank.  A new scout was a Tenderfoot, and advanced to Second Class, than First Class by displaying various  skills–fire-building, first aid, knot-tying, cooking, that sort of thing.  After First Class, one advanced to Life, Heart, and finally Eagle Scout by amassing Merit Badges in things like Morse Code, building a crystal radio and such.  Today I guess they get badges in things like Computer Science and Political Correctness, I don’t know.

I started the week as a Tenderfoot. Doing a meal meant getting lot of points–fire-building, improvising utensils (one guy made a sort of frying pan out of a forked stick and some aluminum foil), and cooking.  My contribution was gathering the firewood.  When I learned I would get full credit, as if I had done  the whole meal myself, I was troubled–it seemed like cheating.  So I packed up my stuff and headed back to the barracks myself, without telling anyone I was leaving.

A leader caught up with me and asked what was going on.  I tearfully explained that it seemed like cheating, and I didn’t want any part of it.  He told me that we all deserved credit for teamwork, that we earned the credit as a unit.  It sounded like BS to me, but I kept quiet and went along with it.  I advanced from Tenderfoot to First Class  that week, and I was sort of proud of the accomplishment.  I had never heard of anyone ever doing that.  Thing is, I had already fulfilled most of the requirements for Second Class already, but still I did advance two ranks in one week.

Later that month, they held an awards ceremony.  One of the awards was for the most advancement, and I was sure I would win it.  After all, I HAD advanced from Tenderfoot through Second Class to First Class in a single week.  The award was given to a popular boy who had advanced from Second Class to First Class.  I learned a great lesson then–merit means nothing, popularity means everything.

I dropped out of the scouts soon afterwards without telling anyone why.  Before now, I never told anyone but Kathy.

From their literature: “A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.” 

Right.

What a bunch of fucking morons!

The above should have been the headline of the news story that inspired this.  The real header was “Liberated minks run amok in exurbs.”  It seems that this bunch of,well, fucking morons, for want of a more precise term,  calling themselves the Animal Liberation Front  broke into a mink farm in Sultan, Washington, a small town not far from Seattle. 

These pea-brained posturing pricks released 10,000 ranch-bred minks into the wild, an act which these nimrods have called “a beautiful act of compassion.”  Compassion, my Aunt Fanny. Never mind that it was a crime, pure and simple-minded–vandalism and burglary and probably a few other felonies which could be tacked onto an indictment. Never mind that it caused significant economic hardship for a bunch of perfectly decent people and brought chaos to an entire town. That they will ever be busted is doubtful–the FBI says these clowns have been running loose for at least seven years and have committed some 600 like offenses.  But was it good for the minks?

Well for openers, it probably wasn’t very good for the hundreds or thousands of “liberated” minks that got squashed by cars shortly after the crime.  It seems that ranch minks, when released into the wild, tend to run in front of cars–they are fed from motorized carts,and are conditioned to associate the sound of a motor running with food.  Obviously, the ALF didn’t think of this; or if they did, didn’t care.  When a fanatic’s mind is made up, who wants to be confused with facts?

And another fact is that minks are nasty.  They caw like large crows, and they stink to high heaven.  They have needle-sharp teeth, and the ones who are still at large in Seattle have slaughtered ducks and chickens and fingerling salmon.  The damned things are vermin who happen to grow really nice fur.  But back to the story.

All but a thousand or so of the suviving fugitives were rounded up and re-caged, which brought out another charming feature of minks–they are cannibals.  Yep.  Farmed minks are reasonably sociable, but only if they have been brought up in the same cage.  If they were reared in different cages, they see each other as enemies (much like domesticated primates, I might add) and wll try to kill and eat each other on sight.  The ones who have been rounded up and re-caged have been doing so with a will.

The ones who remain in the wild seem to be adapting–at the expense of local ducks, chickens, salmon, mice and nesting birds.  They have the ability, said state biologist Ruth Milner, of “wiping them out.”

(Ranter’s note:  The observant reader  may wonder hy I refrained from referring to the self-righteous, epic-scaled narcissistic personality disorder cases of the ALF as assholes.  The fact is, to call THEM assholes is to defame REAL assholes.  Real assholes serve a useful purpose, and bring laughter, pleasure and relief to millions.  That is lots more than you can say for the metaphorical assholes of the ALF and others of their shrill and mean-spirited ilk, such as PETA.)

Now and Zen

I have been interested in religion for as long as I can remember.  Since “as long as I can rmember” is, say, 20 minutes anymore, perhaps I should clarify that statement.

In junior high school English, we were given an assignment to write a speech and give it in front of the class.  The subject: our religious beliefs.  I daresay that such a task would draw howls of protest, not to say lawsuits, from some litiguous latrine-lawyer parents today, but in that older and more innocent day,no one protested.

It was the honors class, so the speeches mostly ran to Episcopal and Presbyterian and Jewish, all bland white-bread stuff, even the from the Jewish kids.  Then I got up and announced that I was an atheist.  That got their attention…

I don’t recall exactly what I said–it was some 40 years ago, and I refuse to confabulate.  But I remember vividly part of the following Q&A session.

Alayne Livingston, a gorgeous leggy blonde cheerleader/Student Councl member, asked “But what happens to you after you die?”

I looked her straight in the eye.

“You ROT,” I replied.

That was around the time, within a year os so, of the time I was sent to church camp.  Camp Michaux.  Intersting place. It had been a POW camp during the Big One.  Artwork by German prisoners adorned the walls of the common room, which would probably fetch big bucks on e-bay today.  I was the kid who wore a fedora, by the way. But I digress.

The counselors ernestly tried to pound religion–the relatively inoffensive Prsbyterian kind–into our pointy little heads. One poor schmuck, in what he probably thought was an inspired bit of theological reaosning, argued as follows:

“Jesus said he was the son of God, right?  That means one of two things–either he was really the son of God, or he was insane.  And since we all know that he could not have been insane, he MUST really be the son of God.”

Some of the kids actually bought that shit.  But what really sunk it for me was communion the next day.  The cup came around, I noticed all the greasy lip marks aound the rim, and passed.  “Yuck,” I thought then.

So I thought then, and so I say now.  Yuck to greasy lip marks, Yuck to organized religion in general and Christianity in particular, Yuck to all priests–not just the pedophiles–and Yuck to any and all limiting beliefs.

Which brings me to Buddhism.  Sure, I know that superstitious morons are not all Christians and Muslims and Jews–there are some Buddhists who believe that, when he was born, Buddha took seven steps and spoke seven words.  Farted seven times, for all I know. And take Nisherun Shoshu Buddhism–please.  I did that, never made the little altar, but chanted my ass off, mostly to get into the pants of a woman some ten years my senior who drove a really neat car.  And who was, in retrospect, seriously disturbed. 

 But in general, Buddhism seems to me to be one of the more highly evolved religions, especially the Zen branch.  I read  a lot about it, beat my brains out over koans, laughed at the antics of these cranky old Zen masters who whapped novices over the head.  Pretty much all I really got was “The only Zen you find at the top of a mountain is the Zen you bring along with you.”  I have no idea who said that, but it sounds really cool.  You know, more enlightened than thou and all that.

And that brings me to what inspired this little blog in the first place, an article in the paper yesterday about the American poet Jane Hirshfield.  She is kind of a Zen maven, having spent three years in a monestary practicing the religion full-time.  Presumably, she got good enough that she doesn’t have to practice any more.

Anyway, a friend of hers moaned that he had gotten a commission to write a book on the subject, but had to keep it to 40,000 words.

She replied that you only need seven–”Everything changes.  Everything is connected.  Pay attention.”

Cars I have Known and Loved

As I approach my dotage, I find myself in a state of anecdotage-more and more, stories and tales from my youth come to mind.  Maybe this just means that the memory-enhancing drugs that I take (when I can remember to take the damn thngs) are startng to work.  At any rate, here are a few stories from yore–in this case, yore being the 60s and 70s–, all auto-related.  I hope you, gentle reader, enjoy reading them as much as I enjoy writing them.

“My first car”–there’s an evocative term.  I suspect there is hardly a male alive in this culture who does not remember his first car.  More vividly, perhaps, than his first love.  Mine was a 1955 Mercury, black two-door hard top.  The front end was mostly chromed bumper and grill, the sound system was an AM radio with a range of maybe twently miles under good conditions, and the thing looked bullet-proof.  Under the hood was a 312 cubic-inch V-8 with dual Weber carbs. Gas mileage sucked, but who cared?  The stuff was like 25 cents a gallon.  And  it ran.  Boy, did it run.  I once had it up to 110, which scared the bejeesus out of my passengers.

I got it in the first place for the most practical of reasons.  I had an after-school job too far away to walk, and hitch-hiking was out of the question.  So one evening–why this happened at night, I have no idea–we went to a used-car dealership.  The first car that caught my eye was a 1959 Lincoln about the size of Maryland.  The six-way power seats fascinated me.  But it was way impractical, as well as being way out of our price range.

The Mercury was ours for $200.  I remember Dad making some quibble or other about the car,and the sales guy said defensively, “Hey, this isn’t a thousand-dollar car.”  At the time, a “thousand-dollar car” was a used car that was almost as good as new.  I do recall he had reservations about the automatic transmission–a bias which I share to this day–and the salesman assured him that it had been recently overhauled.  He may have been telling the truth–I never had any problems with it.

The big Merc served me faithfully and well until that day in a shopping center parking lot, when we were t-boned by a 1958 Chevy.  I thought it was the other driver’s fault–I had been driving within the lines, she had cut across unoccupied parking spaces–but the insurance guy said it was on private property and hence was mutual negligence.  I got it fixed as cheaply as possible, and the  once-black car ended up with a pale green fender and aqua door, not the most pleasing combination of colors.  And you had to kick the fender, hard, at just the right place before you could get the door open.

Not much later, I traded up to a 1961 Olds F-85, a metallic brown compact four-door sedan.  It was sort of a vanilla car–no mystique at all, but it ran and looked decent and the headlights worked.  That was all that was important to me then.  Come to think of it, that is all that is important to me now with my current vehicle, a 1988 Dodge Vista wagon.