Boy Scouts

Perhaps because I was so often missing in action as a child, my parents signed me up for every activity they could think of. I played Little League -- the uniforms were kind of cool but I got bored. Football -- same. Judo -- I didn’t get past white belt. Boy Scouts...

Boy Scouts wasn’t actually bad. Our troop met at the local Mormon church in Bolder and since we lived at the edge of the Rocky Mountains, we were more outdoorsy than we were interested in merit badges. We went to a Boy Scout Summer Camp that turned out to be a disaster when either a virus or food poisoning decimated the campers including me. It’s the sickest I’ve ever been. I woke up puking in my sleeping bag. But here’s the greatest thing; this camp was the only place I’ve ever encountered two-hole latrines. On the face of it a two-hole latrine is a stupid idea since who wants company while they’re taking a dump. But when you are so sick you are running at both ends, a two-hole latrine is perfect. I was puking into one hole while having diarrhea into the other. The only time I’ve ever needed a two-hole latrine and there it was. After a day or so they shut down the entire camp and sent everyone home. Now I think about it, it was probably Norovirus.

When my family left Colorado for Southern California my troop was planning a canoe trip on the North Platte river. They were even building the canoes. I missed the trip but did hear that someone got appendicitis and had to be evacuated which, again, now I think about it, was kind of a theme of our scout troop.

Snowed In

For me, the last (and my favorite) scout trip was one we took into a hiking area during the spring of 1964. The “adult” leader at that point was a mechanic by trade so, of course, his vehicles were a mess. We finally got one old rattletrap car running and hooked up a trailer with all our gear to the back. At one point, while driving around a town way up in the mountains (Central City?), we realized we were driving the wrong way down a one-way street and started counting how many laws we were breaking at the same time. Besides driving the wrong way, we had too many people in the car plus some more riding in the trailer which was also a violation.

We set up our tents in this camping area, it was just us, and then took a long but not unreasonable hike. One scout was not having a good time. His feet got wet, he started crying, we started giving him shit. The usual. After dinner, our “adult” leader drove off to town to drink. This made even me a little nervous so after we went to bed I kept peeking out the side of the tent to where his car should be parked. After a couple peeks I noticed it was snowing. After a couple more peeks the snow was piled up so high I couldn’t see anything. By morning we were good and snowed in -- our leader did make it back but his car had disappeared under feet of fresh snow.

Being good scouts, we had wood prepared for the morning so my pal and I got a fire going and started making breakfast as the others started rising. He-of-the-wet-feet had another meltdown. We were so excited to be snowed in. I think we were already calculating how many days we would wait before cannibalizing the crybaby. 

To our disgusted surprise, our parents had also noticed the snow storm. My dad and another of the fathers had been dispatched by our mothers as a rescue team. They had followed snow plows and arrived just as we were eating breakfast. It was so unfair. We had to hike out to the road with what we could carry. So again a troop event ended with an evacuation.