Froot Loops, Melting Sneakers, and Never Enough Sleep
What I learned from Boy Scout camping about living life together
Camping was a major part of my childhood. I am convinced it is one reason that I chose Army ROTC over the Navy ROTC program I had started, despite the downgrade in uniforms. I wanted to be in the woods, close to the ground, map and compass in hand - not adrift at sea, stuck in a metal machine, surrounded by pipes and engines. Even under orders, I wanted my direction to feel free and unconstrained, determined by my own two feet.
The first camp out I remember was when I was a Webelo at some sort of Jamboree at Fort Frederick, Maryland, with multitudes of Boy Scout troops lined up in a field, tent to tent. I remember some sort of wagon racing competition in which we had to construct our own Prairie Schooner and race it down a hill with at least one Scout onboard. We built the wagon quickly enough, lashing together pieces of lumber, and got a good start pushing it down the hill. But halfway down, while at maximum speed, all four wheels came off, rudely tossing out our passenger, his head spinning. Mark, the guy pushing in back, did a full on face plant, his legs going vertical straight up in the air. Later that weekend, my friends and I literally captured Fort Frederick itself, closing the huge wooden gates and locking them shut. We stood on the stone parapets in our triumph, taunting the Troops in the field below. Then someone pointed out that we had brought no food with us. It was a brief siege.
From there out, I went on dozens of camping trips, plus two weeks of Scout Camp at Lake Goshen each summer. Each trip was unique and had its own stories but they all shared some things in common. Each patrol was responsible for planning and cooking their own meals. We’d collect cash at the Scout meeting Wednesday night, about $10 a head, and then go to Safeway on Friday after school. Pancakes, eggs and hotdogs were the usual fare. But without any parents along, our real shopping objectives were the food pyramid staples of any good camp out - Poptarts, Brach’s creme filled Royales and Kellogg’s mini-boxes of cereal, not the boring kind like Special-K or Corn Flakes, but the real stuff like Froot Loops and Sugar Corn Pops. Even better was the fact that these mini boxes doubled as bowls if you cut the perforated lines just right, always careful not to pierce the interior foil packaging lest the milk spill out onto your sleeping bag. Because, of course, we ate these culinary essentials only late at night in our tent, hoping our flashlight batteries didn’t wear out as we swapped ghost stories. This is camping.
Getting a good tent was critical. We were thrilled when our Troop’s Army surplus canvas relics were replaced with light, nylon space-age wonders, complete with poles that snapped into place with a flick of the wrist. Of course, nothing much helped if you pitched your tent on rocky ground or on a slope if it decided to rain. We didn't always get a full night’s sleep - but that was part of the adventure and the truth is we did not want to. Why else would we bring those little handheld electronic Mattel games with the endlessly annoying beeps? And why else, when we got bored with those, would we then go conduct raids on other tents? Sleep was not the point.
Scout camp outs are social events and it’s important to share them together. This one kid did not understand that and brought his own tent just for him. His dad came along but spent the night nearby in his pimped up van, as if the 70s was still a thing. In the middle of the night, six of us got up and literally moved this poor kid's tent - with him still inside - down a hill to where another Troop was camping. He was outnumbered so did the only thing he reasonably could. He came to our tent and walked around it in silent vigil the rest of the night, not saying a word, just walking. We slept through it, but in the morning there was a beaten path in a circle around our tent, worn down perfectly as if it had been there for centuries. His father was not happy, and so he and the two other adults called me before them to give an account as the ranking Scout present. I don’t remember everything that was said but I do remember the word, “pneumonia,” being thrown around rather loosely.
It's best when you share your tent with others. We learned that lesson the hard way one particularly cold weekend. When some of the Scouts dropped out beforehand, we were excited that we would have extra room, so that instead of crowding four Scouts into a single tent, we'd only have two per tent - room to stretch out, enjoy ourselves. We pitched our two tents end to end, a virtual mansion for the four of us. We woke up shivering in the middle of night, no feeling in our toes. We abandoned one of the tents and all crammed into the other, rolling over each other, but delightfully less frozen. We got up around four to light a fire and cook some eggs, but they were frozen solid. Desperate, I stuck my feet close to the fire to warm them up. They were so numb that I did not notice that my sneakers were melting until one of my friends wrinkled his nose at the burning rubber and pointed out the smoke rising from my soles.
I could go on and on, literally for days, about other camping trip memories. Most involve fire as you would imagine. I could tell you about the time we flung flaming marshmallows at one another, thankfully none of them hitting where it would count. Or the time a young Scout decided to find out what would happen if he heated up a can of beans without poking a hole in the can. I kid you not, when we heard the bang, we turned to see a mushroom cloud of ash rise up over the pines. We ran to his site, only to find him squatting by the fire, stunned, fanning plate still in hand with little black dots of baked beans spattered across his face. The things we survived.
There were other dangers besides fire. There was the time we cut down a tree with Evan still up in the branches. I was laughing so hard that I forgot to get out of the way and it hit me in the shoulder. Or the time that we hiked onto a private farm when a tall man on a dirt bike appeared abruptly on the horizon and began to chase us down. We scattered like humans in a Planet of the Apes movie, going to ground in a clump of bushes, pressing our faces into the mud while he prowled around us, throttling his engine loudly every time we thought it safe enough to make a break for it.
Somehow, we survived all of these adventures. We would return on Sunday afternoons, exhausted, filthy and happy. I would get into the bath for hours, sometimes going to bed at 5pm and not getting up until the next morning for school, none of my homework done. That pattern continued later in college when Army ROTC would hold Field Training Exercises on the weekend, not to mention Ranger Club on Thursday nights. These exercises provide even more stories, also largely involving fire and not enough sleep. But somehow, I survived all of those as well, getting back to my dorm room to collapse for approximately twenty-four hours. Once, still in full Battle Dress and face camo, I walked past some basketball players who had just won a game and were in a good mood. One of them, impossibly tall, laughed as I walked by and said, "are we at war?"
No, we were not at war. Not yet. But a few years later, when we did go to war, that provided even more adventures, once again involving fire and not enough sleep. Never enough sleep. Too much fire. But, like all those camping trips, somehow, I made it through. When I got home from the war, exhausted, I collapsed then too, with lots of work still undone. But this time, I was not alone. I came home to my bride. I am still home. We are still home, together.
Life, like camp outs, is best done together. It’s a cold, hard world, and it’s no good to spread out from those who love you just because you can. Sometimes our own feet don’t know best. Life is best when crammed into one place, rolling over one another. Eating junk food, telling stories, and keeping one another warm.
That campfire thaw gives new meaning to the expression "burning rubber" while the great baked-beans explosion takes me back to my grandparents' house, where I read in rapt attention the tale of the Great Molasses Flood in Boston in 1919. I'd pick up their old issue of Progressive Farmer every time we arrived and then I'd wallow in that molasses massacre. And then we'd go out and build a fort of pine branches on the Back 40 (more like a Back 10), waving at Jack the Mule as we ran and hearing my grandmother shout, "Watch out for snakes, boys!" — and inevitably we'd run into and around a copperhead, cottonmouth or king snake along the pine-needle-laden paths. Once, our beagle George sniffed a serpent too closely and wound up with a jowl the size of a small grapefruit. A trip to Dr. Garrett's vet clinic and he survived to chase another day: snakes, nutria, rabbits, possums and the like.