Boy Scouts

Way back in the early 1960s I was a Boy Scout for two or three years. Our troop was sponsored, as most troops were, and for all I know still are, by a church, in our case a conservative Christian church that would today be called fundamentalist. I learned all the basic tenants of scouting — “Be prepared,” “Do a good turn daily,” “On my honor I will do my duty to God and my country and obey the Scout Law . . . ,” “A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind . . . ”— and learned to tie knots and learned to build a campfire and learned to administer basic first aid (including snake bites), and by the end of my tenure had accumulated enough merit badges to reach the penultimate rank of Life, stopping short of Eagle only because most of my friends in the troop were a year older than I was and had quit and because it was too much work.

But most of my memories of scouting are of delinquency, especially while out camping. There was the relatively mild “snipe hunts” (first year as a duped bagger, the next year as one doing the duping), sanctioned by our leaders. And one day when some of us snuck off to skinny dip in a stream, only to emerge with leeches clinging to our bodies. And one middle of the night, after curfew, when another few of us took several flares from the truck, walked a couple of miles down the road, stuck the flares in the ground and lit them, and then after walking about half a mile back toward camp, looked around and realized we’d set the grass by the road on fire, raced back and stomped it out. (Red Howell, our scout leader, was waiting for us when we returned and said, “Don’t tell anybody anything about this.”)

But the highlight of my scouting days was a week-long national Jamboree in Colorado. One afternoon we (no leaders present) organized nude races down a hillside meadow, the theory being that our nudity would cut wind resistance. (That I would much later learn of the closeted gays in our troop didn’t really cause me concern.) And then there was the afternoon when we were on an overnight camping trip with mules carrying most of our gear, and Basil (forget his last name) decided it would be fun to jack off one of the mules. And he did.

As I said, this was a Christian scout troop.