Camping

I learned camping in Scouts. I learned even though I was the fat kid, I could still enjoy the outdoors. Even hiking. Even winter camping.

I re-learned camping when my wife and I had kids and we decided having kids wasn't going to alter what we did for fun. I learned even little kids like to wander around in the outdoors, watch fires, throw rocks, listen to the coyotes howl and the owls hoot.

My kids learned camping thanks to family camping, but also to eight years (and counting) spending the summer at scout camp as my wife worked there. They learned camping can help them learn, and can help them become teachers.

I re-learned camping again when I was called as scoutmaster. I learned scouts like watching scoutmasters go swimming, hike, throw rocks, build fires, take the polar bear challenge, get scratched up and dirty, just like them.

I'm going to re-learn camping yet again as I take on the role of scoutmaster a second time. This time with a troop of girls who want to learn the same stuff they've seen their brothers learning for years.

I can't wait to learn it all over again.

Girls in the Boy Scouts? I'm All for It.

I know I will hear lots of arguments against the Boy Scouts of America’s Oct. 11 decision allowing girls to join Cub Scouting and, eventually, earn the Eagle Scout award via traditional Scouting organizations beginning in 2019.

I’m going to offer one argument in favor of the decision: My daughter.

This past summer, she worked as a counselor-in-training at Treasure Mountain Scout Camp, part of the Idaho Falls, Idaho-based Grand Teton Council. She worked alongside her older brother, who worked as a counselor in the commissary, and their mother, commissary director. There too was our youngest son, a CIT in all but name. Where was I? I was at home, working full-time and volunteering as Scoutmaster for our chartered organization.

We’re a Scouting family. So it’s families like us the BSA talks about when they say things like this:

“This decision is true to the BSA’s mission and core values outlined in the Scout Oath and Law. The values of Scouting – trustworthy, loyal, helpful, kind, brave and reverent, for example – are important for both young men and women,” said Michael Surbaugh, the BSA’s Chief Scout Executive. “We believe it is critical to evolve how our programs meet the needs of families interested in positive and lifelong experiences for their children. We strive to bring what our organization does best – developing character and leadership for young people – to as many families and youth as possible as we help shape the next generation of leaders.”

We’re not alone in this.

I can think of at least two other families served by our chartered org that are also “Scouting families,” where everyone is involved in one way or the other – even the girls.

I’ve seen girls at pack meetings participating in games and activities with gusto, right alongside their brothers.

And I’ve seen their disappointment when the time for awards comes around, and only the boys get them.

I was thrilled when our daughter went to Cedar Badge – along with two good girlfriends – and then joined an all-female Venturing crew. I’ve seen – from Cub Scouts through Boy Scouts to things like summer camp and Wood Badge and Cedar Badge the great advantages families can garner when everyone who wants to is participating, and being recognized.

Our kids participate in many such activities. Two are dancers. All three are musicians. But it’s in Scouting where we get to see them function together, as a team (and I should say that’s at Scout camp). I love what I see.

And none of what I see detracts from the core of the Boy Scouts of America. Not even the “Boy” part.

Boys and girls get to work together, whether it’s building a fire or hiking to a mountain lake. They learn to respect each others’ differences, each others’ talents. And they all have to cook and wash the dishes.

Robert Baden-Powell saw the impact Scouting could have on girls, and founded the Girl Guides in 1910. Yes, it was and is a separate organization – expected in society at the time. But Baden-Powell worked hard to advise both Scouting and Girl Guiding organizations until he retired in 1937. He saw the importance and value of offering such a program to girls.

This is all the BSA is doing – mirroring an impactful program the Baden-Powell would not find alien even in his own time.

Girl Scouts – Unhinged

Look at what the BSA is focusing on: Family.

Take my family, for example.

I’m a Scoutmaster, and have been for coming up on four years. Our oldest son is an Eagle Scout. Our youngest son is a Life Scout, with only an Eagle project in his way to that ultimate reward, and is also a member of the Order of the Arrow.

My wife both works for and volunteers for the local council. She gets paid as the council food coordinator, guiding the council through food- and nutrition-related aspects of feeding Scouts at the council’s three Scout camps. She also gets paid working as a commissary director at Treasure Mountain Scout Camp for eight weeks in the summer, a role she’s had at two camps for the past six years.

We also have a daughter. Thanks to Venture Scouting, which has allowed girls 14 years and older to join for a very long time, she’s involved in Scouting as well. She’s worked as a Scout camp counselor and has been to Cedar Badge. Twice.

Clearly, we’re a Scouting family.

But our daughter’s missed some of the adventure. She went to many a Cub Scout meeting with my wife when she was a pack leader and then the den chief, but couldn’t earn any of the rewards. She saw her oldest brother earn the Eagle rank and participated in many an activity – including his Eagle project – but couldn’t earn the rank herself.

This is the target audience the BSA is looking at first and foremost: Girls who are members of Scouting families and could participate fully in Scouting if the organization allowed it.

As a Scoutmaster, I’ve participated in a few online surveys regarding the BSA’s potential inclusion of girls. What the Girl Scouts is calling “secretive” to me appears merely to be consulting with existing Scouters to get their feel for whether and where girls might fit in the program. In other words, they’re researching. They’ve asked questions along these lines:

1.      Would you support the formation of girls-only troops for girls between the ages of 12-14? (Fourteen, remember, is the age limit already wet where girls can already join Venture Scouting, in either co-ed or girls-only crews.)

2.      Should girls be allowed to earn the Eagle Scout award?

I don’t see anything sinister in these questions. It clearly makes a lot of sense for the BSA to ask current Scouters how they feel about including girls, and how they should be included, before any decisions are made.

The BSA Issues an Apologih-gee.

So here’s the thing:

The Boy Scouts of America *shouldn’t* have to apologize for the speech President Donald Trump offered at the National Scout Jamboree Monday.

But, I suppose as President Trump himself likely won’t apologize for the speech which brought politics to the BSA in a venue where politics should not have come, *somebody* had to apologize.

“These character-building experiences have not diminished in recent days at the jamboree,” writes Michael Surbaugh, national chief scout executive in the apology. “Scouts have continued to trade patches, climb rock walls, and share stories about the day’s adventures. But for our Scouting family at home not able to see these real moments of Scouting, we know the past few days have been overshadowed by the remarks offered by the President of the United States.”

For my part as Scoutmaster, while I’ve encouraged my Scouts to talk about service and civic engagement, particularly when we’re working on the Citizenship merit badges, I’ve always tried to steer the discussion clear of partisan politics. Such talk does little to enlighten and serves mainly as a soapbox where one side simply shouts down the other. 

We place emphasis on the maxim that we can disagree without being disagreeable.

Unless, of course, you’re Popeye. When you reach that point, well, you reach that point.

Plew Trail

Update: I'm grading papers furiously. Very impressed by what I've read so far. But I also wanted to record a few thoughts from this week's scout camp adventure. And to share them with you.

In the shower, that’s the best time of day at scout camp. The warm water rushes out of the shower head and with the soap floods away the dust from the trails and the sweat from the sun. The wet cedar boards of the shower floor, cupped just enough to capture a bit of water, allow tired feet to soak up relief, and your feet are so tired and dirty you don’t mind that the cedar is tinged green with a little bit of algae.

But this shower is bittersweet.

Clean, yes, but not for long. Tonight we hike the Plew Trail.

More dust. Lots of dust. Island Park Scout Camp is in a volcanic caldera, so the soil beneath the firs and wildflowers and quaken aspens is loose. And the scouts never pick up their feet. In fact, on the way through camp to the Plew Trail head, they scuff their feet in the dust, kicking up clouds of it.

And I’m breathing that. It’s getting on the Class A uniform I reluctantly put on after that glorious shower. You always wear Class As on the Plew Trail. Because of that Scout Law, the part about being reverent. Being dressed in that stiff shirt with the neckerchief and the patches and the long pants, that promotes reverence. Or so you tell your ragged Scouts, tired from three days at camp, when they don’t want to put on their Class As.

But they do. Because you have yours on. Even though you don’t want to.

Island Park Scout Camp is all about the mountain men. Teton Pete is our mascot. We’re on Pete the Ninth. I’m old enough to remember Pete the First, Dwaine Loertscher, my sixth-grade teacher. Tall and fat and jowly, but always at the front of the line on a hike and he could fire that massive muzzle-loader, nearly as tall as he is, without flinching.

They don’t sing his ballad any more at camp. But I can’t help but to sing it in my head as we march past campsites to the head of the trail:

Oh do you remember my friend Teton Pete

Who crossed the wide prairie his fortune to seek

He came to Wyoming and then Idaho

Saying "Here I have found it, no further I'll go!"

Singing om pa pa om pa pa om to de aa!

One evening quite early when Pete stopped to eat

He threw in his line to Fire Hole Creek

When he got a nibble and pulled it out

It was cooked to perfection a big rainbow trout.

Singing om pa pa om pa pa om to de aa!

When Pete bedded down in his Island Park camp

He yelled "You get up you lazy old scamp!"

While Pete lay a-sleep'in his yell travelled on

Bounced off the Tetons and woke him at dawn.

Singing om pa pa om pa pa om to de aa!

And so on – to the tune of “Sweet Betsy from Pike.”

That’s the kind of thing you learn as an adult. When you’re a scout, you just learn the funny song.

We see Dakota – our assistant commissioner – on the trail ahead. The Plew Trail is starting, and we’ve already walked a mile to the starting point.

Dakota reminds us that many of the campsites at Island Park are named for mountain men who worked and lived in the Island Park area. He also explains the meaning of the word “plew.”

“When mountain men came to their rendezvous, they traded their furs for things they needed to survive the winter: Flour and shot, black powder and blankets. But they kept their best fur – their plew –for last, or when they were desperate for an item and the trader who had it wouldn’t budge on the price,” Dakota said.

Plew is an English mangling of the French “de plus,” or “extra.” The French pronounced it plew. That’s what you learn as an adult. When you’re a scout, you just know you’re going on a hike of some length where you’re going to stop on occasion to listen to a member of the camp staff read a letter from Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouting.

So we march. We march past flowers of lavender and yellow and white and Indian paintbrushes of startling, vivid red. That’s what you know as an adult, but as a Scout you just know it’s difficult to do this hike in silence, as Dakota said it should happen.

There are occasional whispers, immediately shushed, and not even by leaders, but by the scouts themselves.

At the second stop, I noticed one of my Scouts hopping from one foot to another, as if he were footsore. He was panting a bit – our leader was setting a cracking pace. And he was sucking lustily on the tube to his Camelbak. He looked uncomfortable. As I looked at him I flashed back to that wonderful shower, and how happy I felt, and how tired I felt now.

So as we left, I patted him on the shoulder and whispered “You doing okay, bud?”

He flashed an enormous smile, hopping lightly on his feet and whispered back, “you bet!” And shot up the trail, leaving his tired Scoutmaster to follow at a trot.

As I walked, it was if a window opened.

A window opened from heaven and a father I once knew and would know again leaned out, patted my shoulder, and whispered, “You doing okay, bud?”

I stomped my left foot hard, as if to keep myself anchored to the ground because I felt like a balloon filling, filling, filling and rising above the canopy of Douglas fir and quaken aspen. I felt as if I were back in that shower, with that cleansing water washing the dirt and sweat and weariness away.

“Give them your plew,” the voice whispered.

I could not react like an adult.

I, too, flashed an enormous smile, hopped lightly on my feet and whispered back, “you bet!”

And shot up the trail, no longer feeling tired, and sang along in my head:

Once you have stayed in Pete's camp for a week

Where ever you go or whatever you seek

You'll always remember and be extra proud

Of Island Park camp and Pete's happy crowd.

Singing om pa pa om pa pa om to de aa!

"Why'd You Leave the Trail?"

I’d never hiked Big Elk Creek before, but despite the weight on my back and the mud on parts of the trail, I was enjoying myself.

I’m not in the best of shape, but I’m willing. I take up the rear, making sure any Scouts we’re hiking with don’t get left behind. Ahead of me is Sam, a Scout who’d never backpacked before in his life. He had a good pack, but the hike was long, mostly uphill, and he was getting a little tired. In front of him is Paul, my assistant Scoutmaster. He’s hiked this trail before. We’re in good hands.

To the left is the creek, bubbling over the rocks and through the tiny meadows at the bottom of the valley. To the right, mountains, some covered thickly with pine and aspen, others with tumbles of rock. There are mountains beyond the creek too, and as we hike the mountains get steeper, taller, and closer together. And we have a well-worn trail to follow. And Paul is leading us. No worries.

We cross yet another rock fall, stumbling here and there over a shifting slab. We walk across more rocks. And even more rocks. But we’re talking one to the other, marveling at the scenery.

That’s funny. The creek is smaller. And a bit further to the left than before. And – wait a minute – we’re climbing the side of the mountain, now scrambling over the rocks, and the creek is retreating further to our left.

“I think we lost the trail,” Paul says as we three sit on convenient boulders. “We shouldn’t be this high. We should be right next to the creek. But that’s okay. We’ll just work our way down.”

Just work our way down.

Over more rocks, now here and there punctuated with fallen trees, stripped of their needles but their bare branches still poking up like fence posts. We have to go through them, lest we turn around and lose distance, further falling behind our companions who stayed on the trail and are further ahead of us now. We wrestle our shoulders through the trees and over the branches, our backpacks get caught. We’re thirsty. Sam is out of water, so I share a bit of mine. And no matter how far we walk, we can’t seem to get down the mountain. We can still see the creek – we can even see the trail, brown amidst the meadow grasses, near the stream’s banks. But fight as we might, we can’t lose much of the altitude we’ve gained.

Gradually, inch by inch, log by log, rock by rock, we fight our way down to the trail. Our feet finally plod in the brown dust where we see our companions’ footprints. We walk through a glad,e take a turn and we see them, tents set up, a fire going. A few of them are climbing rocks. Others are splashing in the creek.

“What took you so long?” Benson, a scout, asks.

“We got a little lost,” I said.

“There’s only one trail,” he said. “How’d you get lost?”

“We kinda found a new trail,” Paul said.

“You should have stuck with the real trail,” he said.

Yes, we should have. But we were so distracted by the scenery and our conversation, we didn’t notice we’d left the trail until the landscape became a lot more difficult to traverse.

On the way home, we followed the trail. Paul, Sam and I stuck together again. This time we didn’t stray. “How’d we miss this?” Paul asked. Because it was clear our wanderings up the rock fall and the mountainside added at least an hour to our journey, as the hike from our campsite to the big rock fall where we recognized we’d lost the trail wasn’t all that long.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“We weren’t paying attention, that’s clear,” Paul added, laughing. “Or at least I wasn’t. And you two just followed me.”

Ah, the lesson.

You knew there’d be a lesson.

God and life present us with two great influences: Our companions, and our free agency. Used well, whether in tandem or opposition, those two great influences will determine how difficult our journey through life will be.

Paul is a good companion. Experienced with the backcountry, with first aid, even with backcountry rescue. But I let my trust in him override my agency. Because, when we started climbing the rocks, I saw to my left, just lower down the slope, where the trail again emerged from the rocks. I could have used my agency to call out, “Paul, the trail’s down here!” and though he was further ahead, he would have descended, got back on the trail, and we would have joined our companions for a leisurely evening. Instead, I ignored my own senses and followed that companion up the difficult path, taking the trusting but hapless Sam with me.

Had I listened to myself, had I believed what I saw with my own eyes, a simple correction would have had us back on course. But I waited until that course correction was much more difficult and time consuming.

I surrendered my agency and three of us paid the price.

Were there times, I wonder, when one of the sons of Mosiah saw the correct path, but instead of calling to his companions to set them on the right way just went along with his friends, up that difficult road that led to an angel descending from heaven and sending Alma the Younger into a stupor in which he was wracked with torment. “Nevertheless, after wading through much tribulation” he says in Mosiah Chapter 27, verse 28, “repenting high unto death, the Lord in mercy hath seen fit to snatch me out of an everlasting burning, and I am born of God.”

“My soul hath been redeemed from the gall of bitterness and bonds of iniquity,” he continues in verse 29. “I was in the darkest abyss; but now I behold the marvelous light of God. My soul was racked with eternal torment; but I am snatched, and my soul is pained no more.”

What pain Mosiah’s sons and Alma the Younger – sons of the king, son of the prophet – could have avoided had one of them, somewhere early in their journey, noticed they were off the path if even only a little bit, and said, “Gentlemen, the path we want is over there.”

A quick correction based on what I could see with my own eyes would have prevented a lot of weariness as we backpacked Big Elk Creek. I chose, however, to surrender my agency – and three of us suffered the consequences. May we all choose our companions wisely, and love them enough to offer correction, is my prayer, in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

Nothing But Scum

Some negative-vibe merchant tried to use my credit card to buy $277 worth of stuff from a home decoration store in Canada over the weekend.

Fortunately, our bank recognized the fraud immediately – not sure if it was because of the location or because it was my card being used in a folderol store – called us, and got the charge reversed and card cancelled.

I certainly hope they catch this two-bit, booger-baggin’ buttaramus and don’t leave HomeSense holding the bill. Yeah, maybe they are a big corporation and can “afford” it. But you know what, it’s the TB4 who deserves to pay the bill (and be prosecuted for using someone else’s card).

I sincerely hope HomeSense finds this individual and nails their smelly hide to the wall.

I also hope to find out what they bought, so I can figure out why they thought stealing someone’s credit card was worth a $277 shopping spree at a home décor store. (I suppose it could be a purchase at any of HomeSense’s sister companies as well, ranging from TJ Maxx to Marshalls to I don’t know what else. Doesn’t matter.)

So far, it appears only one credit card of ours was compromised – a check of our credit reports isn’t as of yet showing any other suspicious signs.

Also this week: A different TB4 cut the padlocks on the two Scout trailers parked at the church. By sheer dumb luck we’d parked our trailer snug against a light pole, so they couldn’t get the door open to get inside, but it sounds like they did some rather extensive burgling of the neighboring trailer. Probably the same dorks who slashed the trailers’ tires last year. Again, I’d like to find those responsible, and maybe pound a little sense into them. They also probably think this is a “victimless” crime, since they’re stiggin it to “the church,” which surely can afford it. No, boys (and I’m sure it’s boys; I hesitate to call them men), you aren’t doing that. You’re hurting a bunch of Scouts who have no money to replace what you’ve stolen.

I have higher confidence that the person who stole my credit card number will be caught rather than the trailer burglars. Thought my confidence isn’t all that high to begin with in either case.

I begin to hate people. That’s not good.