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Ten days in the timeless realm of Scout camp
By E. THOMAS McCLANAHANThe Kansas City Star
“I require human flesh every 12 hours,” he said in a matter-of-fact way.
“Big deal,” said the boy to his right. “I’m the lost prophet.”
One of them saw a sign advertising a product with pumpernickel bread.
“Why do they call it ‘pumpernickel’?” the boy asked. “They don’t, like, pump nickels into it.”
“They do too,” came the smart-alecky response.
“Oh, come on.”
“Betcha five bucks.”
With the miles sliding by and nothing to do on the road to Scout camp, the boys sometimes forgot I was there. But not completely.
After an exquisitely detailed discussion of certain matters related to bathroom practices, one politely asked, “Mr. McClanahan, don’t you find our conversations interesting?”
That would be one word for it, yes. But the main charm of the camp experience is how little things have changed at the H. Roe Bartle Scout Reservation.
The first meal of each 10-day session is tacos.
Every year, the boys yell themselves hoarse in the dining hall. They sing about the ship Titanic, and the cat that always comes back, and the Penguin Song is always a big hit, and in between merit badge classes they collect bugs or draw on each other’s faces when they’re supposed to be sleeping, although there was a lot less of that this year.
On the morning of the last day, you usually find underwear on the flag pole, camp boxes swaying from ropes in the trees and small puffs of shaving cream on the ground around the tents.
They clumped around on stilts or carved neckerchief slides from pieces of wood, as untold thousands of scouts have done before them.
And they scrambled after toads and collected turtles.
The boys’ plan for the turtles was to draw numbers on their shells and have races, but the turtles escaped.
I wondered how they will remember all this.
The memory of a child is an iffy thing. I’ve asked my son, Michael, now 19, about certain events that are vivid to me and I’m often surprised that he’s completely forgotten, or experienced something utterly different. Maybe some memories only come later.
Our troop was quartered at the same camp site it occupied nine years earlier. On the first morning, we hiked off to breakfast on a path canopied by trees, and as the path dipped toward a low gully I suddenly saw my son and his friends, boys then in their first year of Scouting, marching along the same path in their tan shirts and blue neckerchiefs.
One carried a box of Froot Loops under his arm.
I walked over to where another troop was camped at another site our troop had once occupied. There I had showed the boys the larval galleries carved out of 2-by-4 rafters by the relentless carpenter bee, and I was stung by a yellow jacket while showing the boys how to remove same from net without getting stung. Oops. It all came back to me, but I doubt any of the boys would remember.
I ran into one of them last year. He had grown into a tall young man, and worked as a waiter at an upscale Plaza-area restaurant. A few months ago, he enlisted in the Army.
Not everything has stayed the same at camp.
Some of the boys say “tight” instead of “cool.” Despite the lack of electricity, the third-year boys found a way to watch a movie: They used a battery-powered device with a tiny screen, wired to a powder-blue teddy bear equipped with a speaker.
If that sounds quirky, consider the remark blurted out on the day the boys dressed for lunch in Hawaiian shirts, and were scrambling after the troop’s stash of leis, grass skirts and similar items: “Tommy, don’t take that, the coconut bra is mine!”
Yet another entry for the “Things you don’t expect to hear at Scout camp” file.