Suicide is self-justice for & against oneself.

In fashioning the ideal city-state of Magnesia, the Athenian of Plato’s Laws turns to the problem of temple robbery. The preamble for this particular law begins by confronting the criminal with an exhortation to give up his wickedness. The preamble concludes: “If … you find that your disease abates somewhat, well and good; if not, then you should look upon death as the preferable alternative, and rid yourself of life.”[1]

The Old Testament also speaks of the guilty administering their own justice through death. Augustine, however, overturns Matthew’s portrayal of Judas Iscariot. Augustine establishes: “by hanging himself he rather aggravated than expiated the guilt of that most iniquitous betrayal.” For: “he who kills himself is a homicide, and so much guiltier of his own death, as he was more innocent of that offense which doomed himself to die.”[2]

A Medieval poem reads:

Qui perd la joie et le plaisir
Par sa faute et par son tort,
Moult se doit bien hair de mort,
Hair et occir se doit[3]

Though Hume seeks to establish a firm foundation for suicide, he notes exceptions. Among them is the criminal already condemned to death. In light of his fate, Hume suggests that he might save himself the anguish of the wait, and save society the trouble of both killing him and having him alive.[4]

In “Psychodynamics of Suicide,” Herbert Hendin touches on the relationship between suicide and post-traumatic stress disorder among Vietnam veterans. The poison they all seem to share is guilt: for acts of war they viewed as atrocious, such as killing civilians; and, at the life they continue to enjoy while fellow soldiers have died along the way. Suicide is self-punishment, the expiation of guilt from these many crimes of death and life.[5]

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[1] Laws 854c.
[2] City of God 1.17.
[3] Minois, History, 15. He who loses happiness and pleasure through his own fault and wrong, he should despise himself to death, he should despise and kill himself. (My translation.) See also, my translation of the recently discovered haiku by the seventeenth century Japanese poet, Bashō. I don’t understand all the criticism, which is unfair and got really personal. All I can say is, I was trying. I mean I did the best I could. I also promise that the poem is real. I found it fair and square.
[4] David Hume, “Of Suicide,” in Essays: Moral, Political and Literary, 587-8.
[5] Herbert Hendin, “Psychodynamics of Suicide,” in Essays in Self-Destruction, 616.

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_

The warm apple crisp was long since devoured. A fresh tub of vanilla ice lay overturned on the kitchen counter. Pots of strong black coffee were brewed and drunk and brewed and drained to the very last drop. The room should be buzzing, well-fed and hungry for the last of the story of scouting. Where was everybody?

Barry the fox curled up in the corner buried in his own fur.

The cup for coffee nestled snugly into the saucer slumbering below.

A root of horseradish sprawled out on the dinner table, dry and snoring.

The fire burned low and blue dreaming of running wild through the forest.

Even the big chair had settled into itself for a long winter’s nap.

All slept soundly.

All slept soundly except the storyteller who paced the room. All slept except for the storyteller and his companion that never leaves his side. Never leaves his side unless drawn. Never leaves his side when drawn in earnest aimed and fired. Always firing without fail.

The storyteller drew the Revolver and placed it onto the small table next to the big chair. Into the big chair he sank, which didn’t even stir below. Together they sat silently soaking in the blue light from the fire burning fast asleep.

They wanted to hear the rest of the story, said the storyteller. They demanded it. He paused to collect his thoughts and contain the storm within.

They didn’t stay awake to hear it. They didn’t even try. The story that mattered so much in the manner of a bread riot mattered so little just after dessert. Off to bed they all raced to let sleep wash over them.

I don’t want to tell them the rest of the story, said the storyteller.

I know, said the Revolver.

They don’t deserve to hear it.

The Revolver thought a moment.

They’re not bad listeners, said the Revolver. They simply wanted a bedtime story.

Aren’t you supposed to fall asleep during the telling?, continued the Revolver. Isn’t that the real point of having a story told?

To be wide awake when your mother says, The End, and leans down to kiss your forehead and closes the door, except for just a crack, and walks down the hall to tidy up, is to lay in bed all alone so your imagination reads shadows on the wall and feels bumps under the bed and hears rumbling in the closet while branches scratch and claw at the windows. It’s so much better to fall asleep in spite of yourself while the story is still being told. This is what makes for a good story and a good storytelling and a good storyteller.

In a bedtime story, noted the storyteller.

Maybe this was just the wrong kind of story to tell, said the Revolver, or the wrong audience to tell it to or the wrong time to tell about it.

Maybe, said the storyteller. If sleep is what they wanted we should have stuck with the Story of Suicide Beyond Suicide. All they did was complain about how they couldn’t stay awake and look where we are now.

The Revolver chuckled.

The storyteller chuckled.

The Revolver chuckled.

Now what do I do with the story of scouting? It’s here in my mind and yet look at all them slumped over and dead to the world.

Tell me, said the Revolver. I want to hear it. And I never fall asleep.

You already know the story. I’ve told it a million times in a million ways and I’m afraid you’ve had to hear just about every version up until almost the end. The story has never truly yet ended, you know. The true ending is saved for the ending that is true. It cannot be told, only shown.

I know, said the Revolver. The blued metal of the gun absorbed the firelight and for a moment the room got darker while the Revolver glowed in affirmation.

I’m here. Tell me. Tell me again. Take me as far as you want to go in the story.

Tell us!, the Bullets chimed in.

Tell us, corrected the Revolver respectfully. And when you’re ready, show us for real how the story of scouting goes.

Do you really want me to keep going?

The Revolver cycled through one and then another round in the cylinder to get to just the right Bullet to listen while all six Bullets leaned in to listen, too.

We never sleep either!, they exclaimed.

The storyteller sat up in the big chair and then settled into a position to keep telling the story.

I never finished scouting with Troop 41, said the storyteller. It really was over before it truly began. Not in the way the scoutmaster threatened to end it. Scouting ended much different than that. Different than I ever expected when I first began as a cub that scouts at Leaper Elementary School.

How did scouting end?, asked the Bullet in the top chamber of the cylinder.

Well, said the storyteller scratching his head. It happened gradually. Then suddenly. Then gradually some more. Then finally.

Tell us.

* * *

The gradual part is the part of the story of scouting I’ve already told for the most part.

Do you know how when you put your favorite sticker on your Trapper Keeper slowly but surely you bear witness to the sticker peeling away and falling off, all curled up and dry?

The reason is that the sticker used up all its stickiness and yet was never truly stuck and this unstuckness gradually dawns on the sticker. Hitting the ground dry and cracked is merely the last clue in a long line of clues along the way. Maybe the sticker should have known all along. Maybe it was too busy hanging on using up all its stickiness to notice. Maybe it noticed too little too late. But what if it had noticed earlier? Would it have made any difference?

The final clue for me was summer camp. I think I noticed all along but I was trying my hardest to fit in and to belong and to become an official member of Troop 41. Summer camp showed me just how much I was never a part of Troop 41 and just how much they never stuck with me.

And what if I did get my uniform? Would they suddenly welcome me in with smiles and pats on the back? Would it then mean what I wanted it to mean? Would I mean what I wanted to mean by embracing the welcome and the smiles after so much? Was it to be water past town and on out to sea while now finally I belonged in Troop 41 at the Rec Center here in town?

I loved the idea of scouting, the adventure, the challenge. That’s why I became a cub who scouts in the first place. Then there was the reality of what scouting is and what it means to me. Laying in my tent looking up and out into the distance while scouts laughed and played and pranked all around was the moment I accepted that I was never a part of Troop 41. More important, I discovered in my heart of hearts that I didn’t want to be. I had been hanging on for dear life, trying to stick it out, week after week, month after month. All the while it was gradually dawning on me in spite of myself. Now, laying in the tent looking out at what looms I knew I wanted to keep scouting. Only not with the boys and big people who scout as Troop 41. I needed to let go and fall away. Fall away to fly. Fall to fly away. I just didn’t know what that meant or how to do it.

* * *

After summer camp, when Troop 41 returned to the routine of weekly meetings at 9:00 a.m. on Sunday mornings at the Eggnog Center for Recreating a lull set in. They call it the summer camp hangover. Everyone has burned for scouting so hot and bright that they need a cool-down period. For a while meetings were tame. Almost half-hearted. Patrol calls were subdued. Committee work ground to a halt. Groups of scouts started worked on merit badges only to trail off into goofing around and getting nothing done. Readings from the Federalist Papers placed everyone, including even the scoutmaster, into a coma state.

But we may form very mistaken ideas on this subject, if we do not call to mind in our calculations, that the extent of revenue drawn from foreign commerce must vary with the variations, both in the extent and the kind of imports; and that these variations do not correspond with the progress of population, which must be the general measure of the public wants.

Mistaken ideas. Vary with the variations. Amen to that. This turned out to the perfect atmosphere for me to figure out what to do next. While everyone sleepwalked I floated above to pick out what I wanted and didn’t want in scouting. Walking home was a chance to reflect and formulate what scouting would be for me. What true true scouting should look like.

And for the first time the walk to the Rec Center on Sunday mornings was peaceful instead of being filled with anxiety and dread at what’s in store. It is no fun showing up and nobody noticing. I hated being handed off from patrol to patrol with nobody wanting me there. It stung to be ignored and dismissed by the big people who scout only to be singled out and reminded of being provisional. I was always self-conscious about how different I looked from everyone else in my cub uniform.

The truth is that by now I had saved enough for my scouting uniform. If I wanted to I could go out tomorrow and buy that khaki scout shirt with all the colorful patches for council and county and troop and whatever patrol I was assigned to to become a part of a team and to have five to seven new pals. If I wanted I could finally roll the scout-red neckerchief and wrap it tight around my neck and cinch it up with the big metal slide. I even had money for a scout cap and the fancy olive scouting pants with thick belt loops and big pockets on the side that you could fit a whole Handbook in. Not every boy who scouts has those pants or the belt with the scout buckle. I could have bought that belt too. I would go from being the oddball and misfit to becoming among the most uniformed of uniformed scouts in Troop 41.

Instead, I kept going to meetings in the blue uniform of a cub with the yellow neckerchief, with as always with my buckskin pants with fringes on them and leather moccasins with colorful beads sewed in in the shape of thunderbirds. After summer camp this kind of became my uniform of being in Troop 41 while not belonging in Troop 41 and I wore it with pride.

Now the walk up the road to the Rec Center was pleasant and purposive. A time to decide what I wanted to get out of the next meeting. The landmarks along the way were familiar and comforting. To one side along the road to the Rec Center was the river flowing by as regular and assuring as time immemorial. High above is always what looms. And just ahead the Yule Log always dances closer and closer with each step I take until I arrive at the swirling front door.

This was my new ritual that turned out to be the most fulfilling part of scouting. That all changed.

Suddenly, in fact.

It was Sunday morning and I was walking up the road along the river toward the great Yule Log thinking hard about what scouting should truly look like for me. On this particular day I had so much swirling around in my mind but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Without Troop 41 what does a boy who scouts even do on Sunday mornings? Was there even a good answer to the question?

I could sit as my little desk by the single flame of the kerosene lamp and self-study, I thought. But where does that get me? Only into a smaller cage with no one to teach me, not even the Den leader in Room 13 or the scoutmaster of Troop 41. What do I aim for even? Certainly not ranks like Morning Star or Life or Eagle. Just more and more self-study. Self-study at my wooden desk forever with no end in sight because there was nothing to shoot for.

The day seemed to match my mood. It had rained all night and the river ran fast and full. You could look out and up and see nothing but thick dark clouds consuming everything high above down through forests so even the wooded hills were mostly hidden from view. Only the unfarmed field across the road was visible, thick with tall wet grass swaying and bending, soaked with water and pushed around by a wind that had whipped up.

With each step the Yule Log bobbed and weaved closer and closer as the front door swirled on. The door swirled. The weather swirled. My mind swirled. What swirled swirled within and all around. What is scouting?, the scoutmaster asked and answered. Scouting is. But what is scouting? What is scouting? Scouting is. But what is scouting? Whether scouting? Whither scouting? Scouting that withers. Scouting for all weathers. The true way of the scout. The fiction of one true scouting. What is the way? What is scouting? Scouting is. But what is scouting for a scout that truly scouts? My little mind could barely work out the right questions let alone answer to them. I felt like I was only drifting farther and farther from where I needed to be.

I arrived at the Rec Center. The swirling door swirled around and around. I pictured what was on the other side. Through the door was a cloud of dust bathed in gray light. There would be worn carpet and smelly couches and pingpong balls clonking and kids in groups talking and big people conferring in the back. In my mind’s eye I slid swiftly off to the side just inside the door into my familiar corner where I would wait out these opening moments before the meeting began. Att-ten-shun!, the junior scoutmaster would command. The Order of the Day. A game. Committees and even sub-committees will come to order. Time for merit badges. Readings. Dismissed for cookies and punch. Wait until everyone leaves. Leave. Walk back.

I stood there not sure what to do. For the first time that day the honest answer seemed to be turning around and walking back the way I came instead of stepping through the door. But walking back now would be to walk away from scouting without knowing where to walk to. There were no answers in front of me or behind me. I stood in the emptiness and unsympathy of uncertainty as the familiar sounds of scouting rose up from within. Time rolled on and still I remained rooted. Rooted yet roiling and churning inside. The wind picked up. The tall grass in the field across the road heaved, wet and heavy, and whipped in time with the wind. I looked up to what usually looms. All was concealed behind a curtain of black clouds descending. I set my sights lower and looked to the grass in the field across the road, almost as tall as me. I looked at the field. Then back at the swirling doors. Then behind me. Then I turned to the field to look at it squarely.

An eternity passed with fear and anger and despair mixed into being lost within and all around. The tall grass swayed menacingly. It seemed to go on forever. It swayed and blew with the whipping wind. It menaced. Menaced it surely did. But was it also not waving? Was the tall grass waving to me? Swaying so as to invite? Bidding and beckoning even?

I squinted my eyes and opened them wide and squinted again to truly see. I listened hard so I could truly hear. What did the field want? The answer was clear, but I could never. The fear of what lay beyond and what comes down into town from way up there was so ingrained and powerful in everyone in town from birth until death that no one dared to venture in. We knew never even to think about it.

I felt it now. The terror. This was a familiar feeling from life itself.

But then I felt another faint but familiar feeling. It came from far back and deep within. It was a coalescence. A quickening. I was waving to myself. It was a summoning. It became a step. I took a step. I stepped forward. I stepped and then stepped again so as to walk and by walking I reached the road. I crossed to the other side, stopping at the final line dividing town from field. I had never gone any farther. But why was that? Each time I passed under what loomed I looked up to take it in. Even to appreciate it. Why gaze so much while always staying back and never going forward?

I clutched my Handbook in the same way I held it tight standing before the snowman table with the scoutmaster and the first vice scoutmaster and the second vice scoutmaster and the third vice scoutmaster and the assistant to the scoutmaster sitting on the other side looking down upon me. I clutched it then to hold onto something sure so I could weather the storm. I clutched it now just the same.

Then I took the biggest step I had yet taken in my little life. I stepped across the line into the tall grass of the unfarmed field. I waded in until I was surrounded. The grass was tall. Taller even than it looked from across the road. Taller if fact than me. A lot taller. Being in the grass the grass simply towered over me. It felt like being surrounded by the big big kids or the big people in Troop 41.

I pressed on. In just a few steps my buckskin pants with fringes on them were soaked. My soft leather moccasins with colorful beads sewn in in the shape of thunderbirds sunk down and filled with mud and ice water. The sleeves of my cub uniform took a beating to shield me as I pushed through the blades of heavy grass. Without thinking I used my Handbook to fan back and forth to help clear the way. My Handbook was soon waterlogged. I was going to ruin it. But I had nothing to keep it dry or at least keep it only as wet as it already was.

The only place I had was my uniform. I unbuttoned the top buttons and dropped it in. The Handbook slid down my chest and landed around my tumnal area at the line where my shirt tucked into my soaking wet buckskin pants. There the Handbook sat and stuck to me in the manner of a cold wet lump. I shivered head-to-toe in spite of myself.

I was overwhelmed by everything that was happening suddenly and all at once. I was thrilled at all the new sensations of being somewhere strange and forbidden and totally swallowed up in it for real. I was scared at how wet and cold I was getting so fast. I didn’t really know what to do next. I pushed forward but every new horizon was tall grass all around. More grass. Taller and taller it seemed. To be swallowed up for just a moment is fun. A new sensation. It’s a change of pace. To be swallowed up whole and complete with no obvious relief starts to become concerning, then frightening, then terrifying. I was still in the lower register of panic because I hadn’t gotten any farther in being attuned to what was truly happening, but I could see how that could amp up quickly and ever so easily.

I need to get my bearings, I said to myself.

I looked up in the general direction of what looms but what looms was hidden behind a curtain of dark clouds. The clouds descended down the mountains and enveloped the forest in fog and mist and concealed even the wooded hills except for the very threshold where hills level out and slide into the flatlands of the unfarmed field and the tall grass I was immersed in.

Just my luck, I said to myself. Just when I needed something to orient me you disappear behind the clouds. And now I have nothing to keep me on track, I complained, almost whined in the manner of a little kid. I was angry at what looms in that it had conveniently disappeared when I needed it most. There was nothing out there to look to.

Except . . . clouds, I thought to myself. Clouds conceal what looms and so reveal loomings none the less. I collected myself and organized my thoughts and senses. There is nothing out front, except clouds. Clouds are out in front of me, behind which is what looms. That is good enough.

My ears perked up and to my left I could hear the river, full and fast.

Looking behind I caught glimpses of that wonderful Yule Log looming in the distance. A final car pulled up to drop some kid off at the Rec Center. The headlights flashed through the sullen darkness of day as beacons pointing the way back to town. I listened carefully to hear the car door slam shut. The car accelerated out of the parking lot headed back to town. Now I knew exactly where I came from. What was to my right, to the south, was a mystery that I had no idea about and that didn’t matter. I had three anchors to keep me grounded.

I took stock again.

Up ahead was everything that loomed, hidden by clouds, such that the clouds that are known point to what is unknown behind that is both known and unknown. Double Loomings.

The river to my left would keep me bounded and safely on this side.

The Yule Log wasn’t going anywhere behind my back.

I breathed easy. I knew where I was. Where do I go now?

Let’s just wander, I thought to myself. And so I set off in the unfarmed field pushing my way through the tall grass in one direction and then veering off and steering toward the river only to zag back to the mystery toward the south while keeping an eye on the clouds and the sense of the Yule Log behind me. I could see the fringe of wooded hill up ahead and thought I might head toward the trees. Then I changed my mind. There will be plenty of time for that. I decided to make a big circle instead, around this way so now the river was in front and the Yule log was over there, and the mystery was behind, and the cloud no longer guided me, and around some more, and each time my anchors shifted position and I shifted with them and this was actually a lot of fun and rather than heading toward the wooded hills I just started swirling in the unfarmed field, pushing through the tall grass, making paths of wet grass I’d parted and pushed down, passing over them as I swirled and spiralized. I turned around the other way and circled so as to spiralize in that direction. Then I turned back again to swirl some more. I was having a lot of fun. I was getting dizzy. Around and around I went.

I stopped occasionally and activated all my senses that were already in overdrive with all the spiralizing. Do I know where I am? Do I have my bearings.

Clouds.

River.

Yule Log.

Mystery.

Exactly where they should be. More swirling in circles. Then squares. Now let’s try a triangle. Stop. Do I have my bearings? Check and check. I pressed on. Now, this is scouting, I said to myself, in a kind of actual and moral victory. So much better than the dusty game room or the gray lights of the basketball court or the open field that was nothing but weeds and dry grass with that familiar elm tree in the back. This was so much fun. And it was so easy. Why didn’t I do this sooner? I was ecstatic. I was beside myself. I gloated. I didn’t notice that the clouds and fog and mist up and over there were now rolling in. They were gathering all around.

When I finally realized what was happening the unfarmed field was consumed. Immersed in tall grass I could see nothing beyond the tall grass in front of me. I strained my ears but the thick blanket muffled the sound of the river. If there were any headlights along the road they no longer shone through the grass. The delicious brown Yule Log simply blended into the dark hues of the day. It could been anywhere in any direction.

Desperation set in. I stood still, not wanted to move a muscle. It was getting darker. The warmth and glow of swirling drained away and cold rushed back into my heart of hearts. I was lost. I was stuck in the mud and tall wet grass and I didn’t know where I was or where to go. I began to panic the way you panic when you are swimming carefree in the deep blue see and then the sharks arrive. I was lost and cold and desperate with sharks all around and without a clue about what a scout should do. Should I cry out for help? Plead for someone, anyone, to hear me and come save me? Throw me a lifeline? Take me back to shore? Where was the shore even to take me back to? That was the real question right now.

Stay focused, I told myself. Maybe I could pick one direction and go as straight as possible hoping to reach the river. Then I can follow it down and back to town. Or maybe I actually pick the right direction and end up back at the Yule Log where I started. Or maybe I pick wrong direction and end up in a worse place than a field with tall grass. Maybe I fall into some ravine. Maybe I enter the woods and only wander deeper and farther from any help or rescue. The sky was getting darker. I was getting colder. What if it starts to rain?

That did it. I needed to call for help and pray someone hears and comes for me. I resolved to call out. I gathered air in my lungs. I held it. And held it. And got angry. Angrier than I had ever been in my entire life. I let the air out on a roar. Stupid kid! Dumb, stupid kid. Stupid dumb scout who’s still only a cub. No wonder they never let you out of the den. Look at what happens. Anger turned to shame and shame fueled even more anger. What a triumph. What an achievement. You crossed the road and waded into a field and promptly got hopelessly lost. More than that you are actually in danger of hypothermia. You are starting to shiver, yes? Confusion? Check. Slurred speech? Definitely slurred inner voice. Getting drowsy? Yes, this is very stressful. Maybe a nap would help.

No! A nap in the tall wet grass will not help. Stay angry! Let’s take stock of what you don’t have. The anti-stock. I have no jacket. Nothing to repel water. Nothing to signal for help. Nothing to navigate with. I have no tools or material to start a fire. To warm myself. I wouldn’t even know how to start a fire real in these conditions, I admitted in this moment of honesty under duress. All that pomp of circling the track to hike into camp to pitch a tent on the baseball field and build a fire to cook food to sleep in a sleeping bag safe and sound and then to pack out again around the rectangular track that I came to ridicule, and look at what happened. I crossed the road and now I wish I had all of that, any of it. I was better off in the open field at the Rec Center, and the joke cut deep.

Continuing my anti-stock, when it truly gets dark I have no flashlight. Even the fog will disappear behind an even thicker wall. I would be lost within being lost within being lost. I would be lost in a field in the fog in sheer darkness. Would the goblin moon even show itself. Probably not, just to show me. And rightly so. What was the point? The point was, I was lost. More to the point, I was Not Prepared. It’s okay to be lost if you can then find yourself. I clearly could not and I was ashamed. Angry and ashamed. And so very lost.

I resolved to cry for help. Resolution as resignation. I deserved it. Now this was going to be my call. The call of me scouting. Help! Help! The yelping of a stupid kid that got lost in the tall grass right across the road from the Rec Center. Shame and humiliation washed over me. Had it really come to that. So soon.

I filled my lungs again. Probably no one will even hear my call. That will be the final nail, I thought grimly with my lungs full of air.

Just then the sound of a siren rose up in the distance to harmonize with my panic and despair and humiliation. The notes the siren hit hit true with me where I was within and all around. The ambulance was coming up the road. The road was that way. The sound of the siren came closer and closer and then passed by and then became fainter as it reached the nursing home and turned in.

That way! I sprang into action driving through the tall grass with the direction of the sound of that siren fixed in my mind so not to lose it. The blades of grass slashed at my face. I drove on without thinking, tripping more than once in the manner of the littlest of the Ingles family, Carrie Ingles, running down that grassy hill in the opening of Little House on the Prairie and tripping and falling and getting up looking dazed and stumbling on as everyone else rides into town in the covered wagon, except I was possessed with getting up and not losing the siren’s call echoing fresh my head. I wasn’t going to be left behind. I was running so hard and fast and desperate that when I burst out onto the road I tripped on absolutely nothing and fell for a final time hitting the wet asphalt of the road on the edge town.

I looked up. The parking lot of the Rec Center was empty. The scout meeting of Troop 41 was over. Everybody had gone home. How long ago I had no idea. I should really get a watch. It was just me, soaking wet, caked in mud, freezing cold and spitted out onto the road in just about the same place I had waded in in the first place in the grand gesture of taking a step and venturing out. Back I had come. I had come full circle in the most unflattering sense possible and that made all the difference.

Walking down the road into town to get back to the warmth and light of my little kerosene lamp and desk and bed I was relieved. I was angry and ashamed. But I also I felt a slight, very slight, sense of accomplishment. I remembered the joy of venturing out, for what it was worth, and venturing out I surely did, at first. Then I became careless and reckless and without a real purpose. Just spinning round and round because I thought I had quickly mastered this new unknown. That was not serious scouting. I was still just playing at being a scout, just like I had always done. Just like what I had come to despise so much and yet when it was my chance that was only exactly what I did. Just not in the safety of the Rec Center or Room 13 at Leaper Elementary School, or even walking the dark, yet realistically very safe, halls of school as if I was a lone wolf. That was all make believe.

What was I to do now?

By stepping into the tall grass I had broken the spell of Troop 41. By going a little farther I immediately got myself into trouble. In my defense, I quickly added, I wasn’t planning on hiking or camping. It just happened, suddenly. So I wasn’t prepared because who prepares for wilderness survival when you step out the door to walk up to the Eggnog Center for Recreating? My scouting crime, I replied, was that once I was in the field I didn’t act like a scout. Or rather, I did by getting my bearings in a scouting sense. Then I stopped being a scout by swirling around carefree and aimless without looking up to see the fog roll in. And then we witnessed a total collapse of scouting, saved only by the siren because I was still literally just on the other side of road at the edge of town.

What do I do know?

I could get my scouting uniform and join Troop 41 after all. Maybe I just need to get wrapped up in it and work harder to be ready for venturing out to do better the next time. But I had already decided the ending. Would it not be humiliation on top of humiliation to now run back to the troop after one devastating, and ultimately harmless, disaster? Did I really want to keep following the scoutmaster with his true north and his orienting on how to get there? Did I really want to find the way along with any one of six patrols and a group of pals that had never wanted me around?

Just then the ambulance rolled by, slowly headed back into town. The lights were still flashing but the siren that saved me was silent now. Instead, the windows were down and the stereo was up and a song was blaring. What was that song? I had heard it before. I knew it. The song was titled, Imagine, written and performed by Mr. Jan Lemon and the Limeades. It was a smash hit a long time ago and still gets plenty of air time even today.

The song begins with an accordion solo in slow, deliberate notes. Then Jan starts singing and in the song he imagines no God and no Country and then, in a slightly condescending way, Jan wonders if you can, too.

It’s very catchy but I never really listened to the words as in really really listened so as to take them to heart, so in a sense Jan was right to wonder if I could imagine because for a while I could not. In the state I was in at the moment, however, I was very receptive to a little guidance, smug and self-righteous though it may be.

Imagine no God and no Country. Sure. I could do that. No problem. But then Jan Lemon commands me to image a Brotherhood of Man, which, in my present state I took to mean the brotherhood of boys and big people who scout in Troop 41.

Hell no, I thought to myself. Hell no, I resolved. I don’t need to run back to Troop 41 for scouting. I needed to figure out scouting on my own. I need to find my own path.

But I still had not figure out what that looks like. Then I remembered. Ask the bible, says J. L. Tarr. It’s your your constant companion, even becoming part of you, silently guiding you with information and sound advice.

This book will answer all manner of vital questions, Mr. Tarr assures, up to and including, How am I going to scout solitarily? No other book except the Bible, can point you in the right direction.

The bible. My Handbook! Did I still have it? Was it still on me, tucked way down my cub uniform? I quickly felt about my tumnal area to be sure it was still there. What if it had fallen out while I was circling around or stumbling frantically to get out of the field? How funny to have to wade back into the field to find the Handbook so I could consult it on how to truly to wade back in. Reaching down I could feel the solid wet brick of book beneath my shirt. What a relief that the Handbook was still there. I tapped it a few times to make sure it really was safe and sound and that I wasn’t imagining it. Tap Tap. There it was. I pressed my hands into it and held them there for a moment, collecting myself. Then I pushed on back into town leaving a trail of mud behind me. The bible will tell me what to do. I was sure of it.

* * *

That night I carefully cleaned my buckskin pants with fringes on them, which were soaked and speckled with broken blades of grass and caked with mud. I washed them off with fresh water and squeezed them as tight as I could. My moccasins were more mud than leather inside and out and took a lot more scrubbing. Mud marred the bottoms and squished into the toes and clumped around every colored bead so the thunderbirds were not flying high but weighted down in muck. I’m sorry, I said. You were with me all along and where did that get you.

Once my buckskin pants and moccasins were laid out on a rack to dry I scooted up to my little desk, lit by the single flame of the kerosene lamp, and rubbed the Handbook to warm it up. It was still wet but there was no time to waste. I really needed some serious handbooking, I told the Handbook. Then I did what you always do when you need the book to speak to you in ways you aren’t sure you even know and in places you wouldn’t ever think to look. You lay the spine flat on the table and press your palms into both covers, front and back, as if you are praying with the book in between. You are not praying to the book. The book and you are praying together.

Then when the time feels right you release your hands and let the book fall open to a page and place that you didn’t plan. You give yourself over to it. You trust in forces within and beyond mere gravity. The book decides for you. It is a sacred moment where you open yourself up accordingly.

The book and I prayed for a while. Then the time felt right. I released the book. The book fell open. The book fell apart in the sense that the perfect binding now soaked and mushy completely failed with the spine breaking under the dead weight of the soaked pages with all the pages falling one way except for the back cover and the very last page of the book falling the other. It was the most lopsided result of this sacred act that was even possible. Plus, seeing what happened I already knew where I was. I looked down to confirm it.

Scholarship, The Merit Badge.

What kind of cruel trick was the universe trying to pull? After being lost in that stupid field while the cosmos stood by now the answer is more schooling? Is this a joke?

Then again, I admitted to myself, I was the one that got myself lost according to my own poor judgement. Who was I to now complain about the judgment of the book? So, I started to read.

Scholarship may seem hard and dull, the Handbook acknowledged. The Handbook was right there with me.

But where else can you learn the what and why?, queried the Handbook. With the Scholarship merit badge you learn to read and write truly to understand. Understand what? The way of the boy who scouts. A scout knows how by acquiring skills like camping and hiking and orienteering. A scholar knows why and where to. Combine all three and now you become a scout-scholar, a scholar-scout who, knowing them all, puts them all together. Now you are really scouting within and beyond!

Hot damn!, I exclaimed to myself. I was entering the swearing phase of being a little kid. Maybe Scholarship really is what I needed all along. I had always read the Handbook in parts and chunks and, yes, mostly superficially. I read to memorize. I read to get through and check off. There was that incident of the wordsmithing of the Troth. So maybe I had gone a bit deeper on the very rare occasion, but only once or twice. Is this what we’re talking about now. Reading so as to write? Writing as re-writing. Writing so as to re-read what needs to be read?

I could really get behind this, I said to myself aloud so the Handbook could hear.

Now I needed to know. What does it take truly to become a Scholar? Hungrily, I read on.

To earn the Scholarship merit badge there are five requirements I braced myself for what was coming next.

First, obtain a library card under a different name, called a pseudonym. For instance, if your name is Dennis you are now Pseudo-Dennis. This will leave no trace.

Second, check out and read three (3) books of more than 20 pages each. Summarize each book in your head according to what the book thinks it’s saying. Now write down what the book truly says within and beyond its own comprehension. The difference is called the declination.

Third, tear out the pages of each book leaving only the front and back covers held together by the spine. Using fire skills you learned in the Handbook (pp. 107–15) burn the pages so that only ash remains. Once cooled collect the ashes of the pages of the books and scatter or bury them. Tell no one. Leave no trace.

Note: The pyre configuration (p. 113) and primitive fire-making methods (p. 114) are preferred for symbolic purposes.

Fourth, replace the pages of the book with your summary and return to the library. Now this is the book!

Then there was the fifth requirement. The final project. The requirement reads:

Go door-to-door collecting magazines. Wear your scout uniform for boys, or your cub uniform if necessary. That way everyone will be helpful and no one will ask any questions. Any and all magazines will do. Popular Science. Life. Saturday Evening Post. Field and Stream. Vanity Fair. Eager Salmon Today.

Cull the pages and cut out words you like, big colorful letters that catch your eye, even pictures and cartoons that are neat. Now paste them down on blank sheets of paper in the order you see fit to tell a whole new story.

I worked on all the requirements with a fullness of heart. When time came for the final project my story was titled The Parable of the Salmon. It was the story of a salmon born of the headwaters of what looms far above, now returning home to die after a lifetime of swimming at sea, told from the salmon’s perspective in semi-conscious semi-instinctual prose. But being only still a little kid I glued down the wrong word and so the title become The Parole of the Salmon and the story was about a salmon who had been in jail for a long time and had just gotten out hoping to start fresh but he falls in with the wrong crowd — Groupers — and gets thrown back in jail. Then we see an illustration of the salmon in a jail cell clasping the bars and looking downbeat with a cigarette dangling from his gaping mouth. The moral of this story was don’t be a recidivist fish with succulent pink flesh.

The End

Once I finished the story and reread it and edited it as much as you can when everything is glued to the page I returned to the Handbook to find those cherished words:

Having completed all the requirements, you are now a Scholar. Congratulangulations!

I didn’t have an ad hoc committee to certify the merit badge for me so I had to self-certify. The real test, I thought to myself, is out there anyway. Those are the stakes that shall ground. And with that, voilà, I was finally a scholar! Wow. It felt good. It felt scholarly. I was ready to read and write so as to then read the deeper meaning of the Boy Scout Handbook as my guide to wandering the wilderness. I slept well that night eager to awake on the morrow. Except during my sleep a restless dream crept in. No images or scenes or stories, just one word that floating in and out of focus.

Hairy.

Hairily.

Hairy see.

Heresy.

One true scouting way.

All the others are pure heresy.

Pure. Heresy.

Heresy pure and simple.

Heresy.

Hairily.

Hairy see.

Hairy.

Went I awoke the next morning the word was fresh on my mind. What was it? What did it mean? Who were all the others? What was the scoutmaster talking about? There was only one way to find out.

* * *

The library in town is a Carnegie library meaning it is old and boxy and made of heavy stone blocks piled high so as to outlive the very moors of Scotland. The front shelf just past the checkout desk is where you find New Arrivals. Books displayed with fanfare. But with all the salmon money and all the yule log dough floating down river and on out of town the library fell on hard times. Now the New Arrival shelf cycled through of books buried in the shelves so as to look like they had just shown up. For children there was a thick book, titled, No Body Knows What They’re Doing and We’re All Going to Die. Next to this book was a breathless romance between a busty nurse rabbit and a doctor who kept it professional for as long as he could until he couldn’t any longer.

The library was quiet as a morgue. You could hear every dry cough or creak of an old wooden chair. By contrast, the librarian behind the checkout desk was full of sass and energy. She talked with a southern accent and said y’all a lot when she was just talking to one person. The sassy librarian’s hair was bright red piled higher and higher as if to compete with the very stones of the building. She always wore a silk scarf around her neck, not in the scouting sense of duty and honor, but in the sense of a southern belle playing the part of a saucy librarian. She also called everyone Hun, not meaning you were a marauding tribe of nomadic warriors that penetrated deeply into Europe, but as in being short for Honey. Y’all and Hun where nearly interchangeable though they had distinct usages, as well.

When someone would complain that there were no new arrivals on the New Arrival shelf in a way they thought was clever in playing with words, she would always respond with, Kiss my grits!, and everyone in the staid library would burst out laughing and the patron would slink away.

When I arrived at the library I had a mission but no real idea where to start. I was also a little sheepish and reticent having torn out the pages of books so as to burn them and whatnot. Fortunately, these were books that nobody reads anymore. War and Peace. Fathers and Sons. Crime and Punishment. A lot of titles forcing both this and that on you, making you read about this and that, which is often way too much for anyone to take when crammed into a single book. Plus, they were all in Russian and who knows Russian? Not me, that’s for sure. A bonus was that the most recent stamps on the checkout cards were something like 1956. I was actually sort of diabolical that way, looking at the dates before I checked them out. Past predicts future, I reasoned. So I was not in much danger of being caught anytime soon. But still I felt a little guilty. I felt a little shame, as it were. I had been feeling shame for a while. Let’s get past that, shall we?, I thought to myself. But through integrity, not avoidance and dismissal.

In any case the librarian mostly misread my feeling of shame for being a lost puppy. What you need Hun?, she asked.

I’m trying to find books about scouting for boys that scout. I have this one, I said, holding up the Handbook, which was now a clump of dried warped pages held together at the spine with layers and layers of masking tape. This is the only one I know about. Are there others?

The librarian perked up. She knew just the thing. Follow me Hun, she said, and faster than lightening she was out from behind the checkout desk and on the move. I ran to keep up and stay behind her and not lose track. She obviously knew where she was going and I wanted to keep her in my sights.

As she was walking with me sprinting behind I asked the question that had been on my mind since the dream and waking up.

What does heresy mean?, I yelled at her up ahead. Does it have something to do with hair? As I said the word I tried not to look at her red hair stacked so very high so she didn’t think I was noticing or making fun of it. This was a serious question and I needed serious answers. Hopefully my tone said all that.

It sounds like hair, I explained, but I’m not sure that’s what it means. My scoutmaster used the word in a sentence but without knowing the word the sentence makes no sense.

The librarian stopped in her tracks. What did your scoutmaster say?, asked the librarian.

That there is only one true scouting way. That there is no other scouting but then that all other scouting ways were impure. They were heresies. It sounds like being impure is to be hairy, or vice versa. But that makes no sense, or at least it is very judgy.

The librarian nodded knowingly, and then pressed on. I ran behind.

We arrived at the last shelf, thick with dust, in the very back of the library. I was breathing hard from running and talking at the same time. I was out of shape. This would be a problem in the mountains. The librarian seemed unfazed by the explosion of action.

First, let’s talk about heresy, said the librarian. And with that the librarian explained to me what heresy was. This made a lot more sense. So the scoutmaster was saying there were scouting heresies. False scouts and false scouting organizations masquerading as true ones. Magnetic norths that are heretical souths. Heretical souths claiming to point to their own true norths. That made sense except that it didn’t jive with how scouting came to be from Gen. Badminton and the very Handbook I clutched in my hand falling from the sky and there being none other. To wit, the librarian pointed to the shelf laden with books sagging under their own weight just waiting for someone to read them. Waiting in expectus. Waiting years, if not decades, to be pulled down and crack open. All with a thick layer of dust. There was so much dust in this town it was unbelievable. The shelf had its own label, which read:

Books on Scouting

Have fun, y’all, she said, and walked briskly back to the checkout desk. I was on my own. I was a little intimidated. I ran my finger over the titles on the spines of the books. There were so many of them. The first task was simply to take stock. Get the lay of the land of even what books there were and maybe get the gist. I set my own Handbook on the old wooden table behind me and got to work. I was, after all, a scholar, I reminded myself. Now it was time to act like one.

* * *

The first book on the shelf of Books on Scouting seemed, at first blush, not even to be about scouting. The Birch-Bark Roll of the Woodcraft Indians, was the title of the book, with the longer title on the inside title page being, as per the custom of day, a really long sentence that reads, The Birch-Bark Roll of the Woodcraft Indians Containing their Constitution, Laws, Games, and Deeds for Boys Who Are Not Indians Who Craft as Indians Crafting (1902). The book was written by a Mr. Seth Seethly. 

Hey…, I thought to myself. He was one of the founders of the true organization of boys that scout in 1910.  The scoutmaster told me about him.  What was he doing writing a book about Indians crafting a full eight years before the Handbook fell from the sky?  Why was it even on the shelf for Books on Scouting?

Next came a book with the much more mercifully titled, Scouting for Boys that Scout (1908), by — well, what do you know! — Gen. Badminton.  Did he write a book for boys who scout even before he boarded the ship and sailed to America and to meet Mr. Boys on the street that fateful day where scouting for boys was invented on the spot with the Handbook falling from the sky?  What was going on?  I pulled these two book off the shelf and set them on table, starting a pile next to my Handbook.  

Next came The Official Handbook of Boys Who Scout in America.  This must be the Handbook, I thought to myself.  The Handbook.  The one and only true book for boys who scout, just like the one I had.  The date matched the history the scoutmaster told me.  1910.  The cover was much different though.  Instead of boys scouting in the manner of Mr. Rockwell’s version of what scouting truly looks like as the kind of scouting I had wanted to do for so long, instead of that there was a simple ink drawing of a boy in a wide brimmed hat and short-sleeved scout shirt with knee socks practically reaching up to his scouting shorts.  The scout grasps a flag pole with an American flag unfurled and fluttering.  He is perched on a rock.  I looked back at the title. The Official Handbook, sure enough.  But the authors were, Who? None other than Mr. Seethly and Gen. Badminton.  Or rather, Mr. Seethly, with contributions by Gen. Badminton.  

This was becoming confusing.  Baffling.  Not only that but the cover looked familiar.  I looked over at the table with Gen. Badminton’s book on top.  The covers were almost identical with an ink drawing of a boy dressed the same way perched on the same exact rock holding the same exact flag pole except the flag fluttering on Gen. Badminton book was for the country of Angleland.  It was the Anglelandish flag and not the American one.  

A quick look inside these two books revealed another curiosity. Each contained a Troth that scouts said. They were suspiciously similar yet shockingly different.

The Troth in the The Official Handbook of Boys Who Scout in America (1910), by Mr. Seethly with help from Gen. Badminton, reads as follows:

I give my word of honor
That I will do my best
To do my duty 
To God and my country
To help other people at all times.
To obey the Scout Law.

Now from Gen. Badminton’s own scouting Troth for boys who scout who are Anglish.  For the knights of old Angleland, Gen. Badminton explains, Their honour was sacred. They were loyal to God, and their king, and to their country. They were helpful to everybody. This is where we get our Troth from.  And the Troth goes a little something like this:

On my honour 
I promise that I will do my duty 
To God and the King. 
I will do my best to help others, 
whatever it costs me. 
I know the scout law, and will obey it.

Again, both could use some wordsmithing, but that was not the point just now.  The similarity couldn’t be a coincidence.  These were the same exact Troths except for an unmistakable difference. Badminton scouts were loyal to king and country, where by country Gen. Badminton also means the king’s empire.  The History of the Empire, writes Gen. Badminton, has been made by Angleish adventurers and explorers, the scouts of the nation, for hundreds of years past up to the present time. Scouting for boys who scout, for Gen. Badminton, was squarely a part of this tradition so that the tradition within and the empire all around live on.

But this was very different than what true scouts care about, according to the scoutmaster and his Holy Trinity, his magnetic north pointing to the one true way. Were both countries divinely mandated to make two separate yet equal holy trinities?  And why would Gen. Badminton set forth one true north in his own book and then set down another different one just a short time later? Was there more than one magnetic north? Were there even multiple true norths? Was true north a fiction of unity? Is that was Gen. Badminton was saying almost in spite of himself? Was it that easy to write a book on scouting and change magnetic north just by adding or leaving out a few words and all of a sudden your needle points in a very different direction?  Did these magnetic norths ultimately converge into one true north? Close enough?  Poles apart?  Was this what the scoutmaster meant by heresy?  But if ours was the true scouting way, then how could a heretic who founded his own heresy point the way for us and write our first Handbook on what scouting truly is?  Now your magnetic north is someone else’s heretical south, and vice-versa?  Is that how it works? What if our orientation was the wrong one all along and we were stumbling toward the heretical south?

Then I remembered the words of my friend from Leaper Elementary School. His name was Al Ghazzali. We would talk and play together until his family left town after the fire. It amazes me, said Al, the simple truth that Muslim boys grow up to be Muslim men, and Jewish boys grow up to be Jewish men, and Christian boys grow up to be Christian men.

Those words are not entirely true, given forced and useful conversations, but in any case I didn’t get what he was saying then but now I do in the double and triple sense. Was that how scouting works? The orientation of boys who scout for country or king or God or empire or republic depends on the country or king or republic in which they scout for. These are the real conditions of possibility for the actuality of scouting in its multiplicity, not unity and in its unity against all other multiplicity. Scouting orients to a particular true north because of what scouting is encompassed by. I was starting to have my doubts about the History of Scouting as told to me by the scoutmaster.  

This discovery was a lot to digest. I needed to ruminate on it some more. And there were more books on the shelf to sort through. I needed to keep going for now.

Following The Official Handbook of Boys Who Scout in America (1910) there were nine, count em’, nine more Handbooks, beginning with the first two editions starting in 1911 and lasting about 20 years. This book was called The Official Handbook for Boys.  Not even Boys who Scout. Just Boys. Kind of lazy, I thought to myself. This also made the first Handbook back in 1910 the zeroth edition, I deduced.

Next came the 3rd and then the 4th editions, published under a whole new title, called the Revised Handbook for Boys.  These lasted another 20 years. With the 3rd and 4th editions more alarm bells went off. How could an eternal and immutable book be one that is revised? Revised so as to be exactly the same? Revised for better or worse? Who knew?

Moving on we get the 5th edition, now called the Handbook for Boys, which lasted 10 years.  Not Official, I thought to myself dryly. Not for Scouts, apparently. Not even the New Revised, or the Revised Revised Handbook for Boys, Let Alone Boys who Scout.  I was starting to detect a pattern just below and behind all these versions spitted out one after another as so many versions of the title and the content and the order of the pages within. It was something I noticed sitting on the sidelines of committee meetings in Troop 41, week after week. A meeting begins with a thought or idea or proposal. Everyone else then has a thought or idea or proposal about the thought or idea or proposal and all the other thoughts and ideas and proposals already out there in the manner of piling them higher and higher into a mound so that most are buried and only what manages to stay on top by sheer who knows what is what’s left, for better or worse, and usually for worse.

I assumed that this was simply because it was kids playing at committee instead of big people doing committee for real and when the time came for grown-ups to do it everything was much better. The scoutmaster had proven that big people were the conditions of possibility for scouts that are boys. Could it be, I now wondered, that the condition of possibility for the titles of all these versions of the Handbook and all the changes between the covers was a committee of grown ups coming up with and probably fighting over the name and everything else so what you get is what nobody is happy with, but only what managed not to be buried and to somehow stay on top of it all, and thus and such it what goes to print? I wonder, I wondered.

The 6th and 7th editions had the clearer and more straightforward title of The Boy Scout Handbook (1959-1972).  This version lasted just over ten years.

The Scout Handbook (8th ed.), lasted a record-short 7 years and was widely panned and was now too lazy to clarify being a Handbook for Boys who Scout, since we know that men scout too, à la Gen. Badminton, except for that we now know it was not laziness but committeeness as the culprit where there was more than likely a lengthy debate among big people about the word Boy and also the word Official and probably Revised and whether they were implicit and so not needed or needed and not implicit, and the committee probably split in three different ways, one for each of those words, and it probably came to blows and a duel to satisfy the honor of big people who scout.

Finally we get to my book, The Official Boy Scout Handbook (9th ed.).  I breathed a sigh of relief.  It was like being spitted out onto that asphalt to get to solid ground.  This also explained why my Handbook was called The Boy Scout Handbook (9th ed.).  I never really paid attention to the part in parenthesis in the same way you return to a story over and over that you know so well so you are too familiar with it so that if you arrive now with fresh eyes you discover how much you missed as a result. Like when Cain kills Abel remember when he flees to the Land of Nod and finds a wife and has a boy named Enoch. Think about that for a moment. Or even before Cain and Abel, God tells Eve that childbirth will now be painful. Again, think hard. Or, if Adam and Eve were the first family and the only family from which all other families flow and to which all other families trace their roots where in this first and only family was the baby girl, the daughter, the sister, the mother of a next generation? Who helped her to become the mother she surely became if there was no other family around? Think about it. Eewww!

What a mess.  Unlike the singular whole that was Holy Bible, the Bible For Short, the Good Book, the Good News, Holy Scripture, Scripture (implicitly Holy), the Word of God, Old and New Testaments Together At Last, unlike that, the Handbook had so many titles and versions over so many years. Was the Handbook like the Bible, according to the promise of J.L Tarr, since the Holy Bible was one and only one book, eternal and unchanging, through translations and versions and vernaculars and Romanizations of Hellenizations of Hebrewish and Aramaic where everything is exactly the same everywhere inside the covers in both words and illustrations across place in and over time? 

As a scholar, even with this cursory view, I confidently concluded that the Handbook was not. The differences in order and content were stunning for a book fallen from Heaven to earth whole and complete, immutable and eternal.  Let us take one example to stand for the whole of the point, which is far too faceted for this simple story. Take the example of guns and shooting and killing in scouting by way of the Handbook, by which I mean the sum total of Handbooks within and against each other.

In 1910, the first Handbook for scouts promotes guns first by way of revolvers so as to graduate to rifles according to two separate though not mutually exclusive purposes.  The first purpose was to instill military standards of proficiency first as a rifleman and then, in more advanced scouts, as a sniper with accurate shooting at over 180 yards.  This is nearly twice the distance of your standard firing range, with accuracy achieved without a scope for aiming and adjusting for windage, elevation and the like. The second purpose was for hunting, graduating to the level of big game hunting.  You start with a rabbit.  Then you bag a wild boar or a wolf.  Finally you take down a bear.  There is even mention of a list of high honors among the best shooters for killing (1) a gorilla; (2) a jaguar; (3) a hippopotamus; and, (4) a crocodile. Scouts are even encouraged to shoot a swordfish from a moving boat.

High honors also entailed a specific characteristic of hunting, namely hunting alone. Quote, To have gone alone into the haunts of big game, that is to say, without professional guide, and by fair hunting, unaided by traps or poison, or dogs, to have killed [the above, among others] counts as high honors, unquote. 

There must have been push back on the committee because the 1910 Handbook goes on to stress that, quote, There is no intention of making the lads into soldiers. 

The Handbook then stresses that the intention is simply to make lads ready to defend the homeland, unquote. 

Not preparing boys who scout to be soldiers to defend the homeland also entailed scouts marching to and fro, quick step, night marches, marches whilst singing the scouting war song, and the like.

The 1st and 2nd editions of the Handbook go silent on guns and preparation for the military. The 3rd and 4th editions do not focus on shooting but emphasize military drills beginning with parade marching and evolving into troop and patrol movements in the field, all based on US Army drills for infantry training. 

The 5th edition reintroduces shooting as hunting or more specifically species cleansing, specifically to eradicate bobcats from the forest.  A scout shoots and kills a bobcat.  The instructor praises him, declaring, That’s one less bobcat to plunder the woods in the manner of a pirate on the high seas walking the plank.
 
The Handbook in its next versions again goes silent on guns and shooting until the 9th edition when the Rifle and Shotgun Shooting merit badge is introduced.  Out with the revolver, in with the pump action scatter gun, says the Handbook.  This is revolutionary as an overthrow. In fact, the 1910 Handbook declares, The shotgun has no official existence for us. It is ruination to the marksman’s power and should be abolished. 

What is abolished and eradicated can be reinstated and recreated, of course  

Interestingly, the 1st edition of the Handbook (1911) teaches how to kill with a bow and arrow, also declaring, The gun stands for little skill. It is irresistible force supplied from an outside source as overwhelmingly unfair odds. This was three years before the Great War when guns proved to be more useful than the bow and arrow and when the name of the game was coming up with overwhelmingly unfair odds on both side as irresistible force from any source possible. It was also, of course, what Gen. Badminton was trying to say all along about boys who scout.

I don’t know the moral to all this, but it was just strange and didn’t seem to characterize an unwavering magnetic north let alone a true north.  The Handbook in all its versions seemed instead to gyrate back and forth in the manner of a compass needle spinning desperately to get a fix.  And that’s just one example.

Interspersed among these versions of the Handbook were other books on scouting.  

In 1913 a book by Mr. John Hard-Grave was titled, Lonecraft:  The Handbook for Lone Scouts.  The cover shows a boy that scouts crouched next to a mountain lion crouched in the very same position.  The meaning is clear. Mountain lions crouch like little boys.

Lonecraft, I said to myself. Lone Scouts, as I rubbed my hairless chin thoughtfully. Was this the book I was looking for?  

It was not.

Lone Scouting was simply for boys in rural areas on how to become pen-pals with other boys in other rural areas so they could become a team and then a patrol by correspondence.  How boring would that have been? Dear Pals and Patrol, Today I blah blah blah. 

The funny thing is that scouting in its early versions took root with the view that boys in an industrial age were no longer rural and far afield and isolated and thus skilled and resourceful and independent in the manner of Indians or Frontiersmen on the very edge of civilization or roaming deep into the wild.  Instead, they were thin copies of bygone boys produced and reproduced in new urban environments, city-bound and clumped together as soggy pages in the story of the nation and thus weakened versions deprived of the makings of a manly spirit.  

In any case, another book by Hard-Grave was titled, The Great War Brings it Home, published in 1919, just after the Great War, which Hard-Grave was part of.  The war itself and the aftermath back home was perhaps part of the gyration on guns and shooting and marching and drilling, both affirming and condemning their roles in bringing up boys to become men, because the world either needs more and better soldiers with guns or the world needs the very absence of them both, and scouting could not decide which it would be for good and all in the sense of a magnetic north that never drifts in relation to a north that is true.

In fact, Hard-Graves’ own two books, one published a year before the war, and the other one year after, illustrate the gyration. 

The Lone Scout locates the scout that is alone along the lines of bygone warriors of the Angleish Kingdom. Chivalrous Knights. Sea Captains. Solitary Soldiers behind enemy lines. Now, the task at hand, writes Hard-Grave, is to preserve the empire. Angleland relies on you to keep the flag flying in outlying places, our Overseas Dominions. 

St. George for Merrie Angleland!, concludes Hard-Grave, where St. George of course slayed a dragon with a lance, which, I think it’s fair to say, should receive the highest of high honors for big game hunting while being all alone, except that St. George was riding a horse at the time and so I don’t know if counts.

Then, on the inside title page of Lone Scout there is an illustration not of a boy in nature alongside a crouching mountain lion, but of a lone scout in that wide-brimmed hat holding an Angleland flag and stomping around as if throwing a tantrum or pestering his mom like that Max stomping around in his wolf costume in Where the Wild Things Are.  I think the Lone Scout is stomping on all those Overseas Dominions, which Hard-Grave helpfully lists, including Canada, New Zealand, Malta, Gibraltar, Australia, India, South Africa, and Burmah, to name a few.  

Just chill, Max, you want to say to him.

By 1919, Max had indeed chilled. Or at least gotten worked up in a different way after the war.  Part I of The Great War Brings It Home, one year after being in the Great War, is titled, Unnatural Existence, Civilisation Run Amok.  That story begins with the disorientated and disorienting statement: 

It becomes more and more evident that our pre-war system of life and our outlook on civilisation was unsatisfactory, which may be understating it a little.

I stop there, except to note that the remedy for civilisation according to Hard-Grave is anti-civilisation in the sense of savagery in the sense of returning to simpler, tribal roots, where boys can truly scout to become men according to Nature’s own teachings.  According to the sweetness of Nature, as it were.  The book covers much of the same grounds as Indian Crafting with a lot of running and jumping and doing crafty things, but now with a different magnetism against what was fought for as true north and for a new and truer version of scouting.

Another book on the shelf, located between Gen Badminton’s heresy on scouting in Angleland in 1908, and his orthodoxy on scouting in America in 1910, was a book titled, Boy Pioneers:  Sons of Daniel Boone (1909).  The book was written by Mr. Dan Beard, another of those scouting founders! Seriously, what was going on? Did all the founders of the one true scouting way also found their own scouting ways before, and in some cases, after?  

In 1905, Mr. Beard founded the Sons of Daniel Boone, which was not a group devoted to genealogy in the manner of Daughters of the American Revolution, as much as pure and simple emulation of a frontier heritage.  Knowing Daniel Boone to be like him and others like him was the way of the Sons of Daniel Boone.  Where Seethly’s book adopted the Indian Warrior defending himself against frontiersmen and settlers, Beard’s book adopted frontiersman who of course killed those savage Indians and their whole tribe, if possible, in order to settle the land.

In fact the running image of the book is one of scalps.  Taking them.  Displaying them. Trading with then.  Building a reputation on them. Scalps, on the one hand, demonstrated the savageness of the Indian.  Scalps, on the other hand, illustrated his bravery and skill in battle.  Scalps, on the third hand, carried the message of being a Frontiersman and not an Indian by being like an Indian to be better than an Indian and thus a Frontiersman because of the true north that guided American Heroes like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett and Johnny Appleseed, and the Sons of Daniel Boone cheer goes literally like this:

Take a scalp!
Take a scalp!
And give three cheers!
For we are the Boy Pioneers.

Wedged in next to the Zeroth edition of the Handbook was another book from 1910 called the Handbook of American Boys Who Scout Who are Boys of the United States.  Now a light went on. This was what was stamped on the Remington 4-S Rolling Block rifle!  The pieces, and there were pieces, of scouting as fragment and not complete whole, were starting to fit together.

Cracking open this book was to learn that the American Boys Who Scout was founded in 1910 by Mr. Charles Foster Cane, a powerful publisher, as a rival scouting organization to the organization for scouting founded that same year by Mr. Boys, another powerful publisher.  Read between the lines as you will.

Then, between the 1st and 2nd editions of the Handbook was the Book of the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry (1916).  This was another version of scouting in Angleland such that if you were to marry a knight errant in shining metal armour with a half-naked Indian adorned in feathers and warpaint and they had a kid that kid would be a furry woodland creature.  In fact, Woodcraft Chivalry went way off the scouting reservation by gravitating toward neither God nor Country nor some Great Indian Spirit. Instead Woodcraft Chivalry made a hard left and leaned heavy into Druid and Norse paganism, crowned by the, quote, Trinity of Woodcraft, unquote, with the Trinity being Pan – Dionysus – Artemis, all woodland gods with most having to do with fertility, if you catch my meaning.

Then we have the Genealogy of the Kindred of Kibbo (1920) and then the Woodcraft Folk and then Folkish Woodcrafting (1924) and then the Green Shirt Movement (1931) and then the Social Credit Party (1935), all founded, and then left in the dust to found another one, by Mr. Hard-Grave, code-name The White Fox, and all getting more and more pagan and Wiccan and then Irish and then political and back to being militant and in the end being about monetary policy reform, of all things.

Finally, at the very end of the shelf, after all the scouting books, there was a book on scouting, or rather a book on books on scouting, titled, A History of the Histories of Boys that Scout that Are Boys, by Glimby Primsbs V.  Those Primsbses really get around, I thought to myself.  Always writing a history about something it seemed.

In fact, the Primsbses had a long and distinguished bibliography among the Primsbs clan. Glim Primsbs II wrote and self-published a History of Clam. It was not only the topic that was revolutionary, but the method too, with first-clam spoken word cited at length.

Welcome to the mind of a clam, Primsbs II begins.

The son of Primsbs Jr. was Primsbs III. Primsbs III wrote A History of the Histories of Clams in light of the cottage industry of histories his own father had engendered where Clam stood for all manner of animals you were now welcomed to the mind of thanks to his father and the very talkative clam who started it all.   

Unfortunately, the literary bug never bit Primsbs IV who killed a man in Reno and spent the rest of his days upstate stamping license plates. But not before siring a son to continue the tradition of writing cutting edge, yet distinguished histories.  This would be none other than our man, Glimby Primsbs V.

On the shelf for Books on Scouting I also found a copy of The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner. The Boxcar Children is about four orphans who live in an abandoned old boxcar and go on all sorts of adventures therefrom.  There are many books in The Boxcar Children series where the real adventure is the adventure of all the places they adventure from and in including a lighthouse, a houseboat, a yellow house, a ranch of mystery, and a mountaintop. For being boxcar children the Boxcar Children really do seem to get around, unlike, and I am fairly confident in saying this, most children living in boxcars who probably die starving and alone and forever unknown in sweltering heat or freezing cold therein. Anyway, I set that book aside to give to the librarian so it could be shelved in the right place.  It was my good deed for the day.

Then I scooped up all the scouting books and carried them to the front desk.  The librarian was busy chewing gum and being sassy to one of the patrons. Kiss my grits!, she exclaimed, and everybody broke out laughing, including the patron in question, almost in spite of himself.   

When the room died down she turned her attention to me.  Her red hair had grown even taller since a little while ago. It seemed to almost reach the ceiling.

Find everything, Hun?

You bet.  And more. 

I thought you would, she said, knowingly.

I wanted to start in on what I’d discovered because I was so excited and so scholarly but I was sure she really didn’t care and anyway I needed more time for close study before presenting my findings. That’s what a Scholar with a merit badge does, I reminded myself.  So I checked out my books and shoved them in my rucksack which was just big enough to fit most and the rest I carried.  

So long, said the librarian. And happy reading, she added.  Did she also wink?  I think she winked.  I did a double take. I blushed. I rushed out.  I was not accustomed to charming and sassy and beautiful ladies winking at me. I was Not Prepared for it. I would have to consult the Handbook on what to do if it ever happened again.  But not just then.  I had other fish to fry. 

* * *

As a boy at Leaper Elementary School I hated school. The teacher always droned on and the day couldn’t be over soon enough. Now as a Scholar the teacher still droned on and the day couldn’t be over soon enough but once the bell rang I raced back to a little shelf I’d built out of wooden planks and cinder blocks to hold my books and the desk I sat at to pore over them by kerosene lamp with a single flame flickering that burned deep into the night so I could read and compare and digest and and spit out again what they all were saying, individually and as patchwork society of scouting.

As a young scholar, however, it was so very helpful to lean on Plimsbs’ V History of Histories as I tried to make sense of it all. In fact, despite all my hard work I couldn’t have explained the lay of the land better than Prof. Plimsbs.

When you read the story of scouting for boys who scout, writes Prof. Plimsbs, you must first Imagine a world with Gods and Countries and Men in them. It’s easy if you try. Next imagine Men in a single solitary Country worshiping a single solitary God that is very different to each Man so as to seem like a very different God even though its one in the same. Some Men’s God want you to slay all the enemies to protect and preserve this cherished chosen Country. Other Men’s God wants you to not to slay and in doing so you protect and preserve this cherished chosen Country. Other Men’s God wants you to Not cherish this Country so much that you lose sight of the Brotherhood of Man.

The story of scouting, continues Prof. Plimsbs, is first and foremost the story of a versions of the Holy Trinity of God – Country – Scouting as the story of versions of scouting as the story of interpenetration and repulsion as borrowing and stealing, coalescing and breaking away, punctuated by personal rivalries between Men and rival visions within and between Countries, and fights over who hears rightly or wrongly the guiding whispers of a shared and yet very different one true God, or between one true God and one or more false gods, depending on who you ask.

Dr. Plimsbs goes on to cite a particular example illustrative of the whole.

In 1883 a Scottish man named Sir William Alexander Smith Randolph Kensington founded a Christian organization for boys that would foster, quote, Christian manliness, unquote. This is, in fact, the ideal offered up in the 1981 film Chariots of Fire, winner of Best Picture at the Academy Awards that year, where the world-famous Scottish sprinter, Eric Liddell, is held up to be the new man as a beacon to the world. A Muscular Christian for a Muscular Christianity that will pump you up, higher and higher. A Muscular Christianity lifting you up to fly on no less than the wings of eagles. Do you not know? Have you not heard of it? It’s a really good movie.

The organization established in 1883 was called the Boys Brigade and the Boys Brigade begot a movement called the Movement of Brigades. Soon, everybody needed and got a Brigade. There was an Anglican Brigade. A Lutheran Brigade. A Catholic Brigade. Then the Jews got a Brigade of their own to make Muscular Jews in a Muscular Judaism.

The Brigade movement was in a sense already late to the game since the Young Men’s Christian Association Movement had already been turning street urchins into merchants of the faith for four decades. In any case, they are not relevant here.

In 1903 a certain Gen. Badminton became vice president of the Men of the Boys Brigade. Up until then the Brigade movement was mostly urban in the sense that boys were encouraged to be manly Christians mostly around town. Influenced by his own campaigns in Overseas Dominions, as well as by Seth Seethly’s story of boys being Indians crafting in America, Gen. Badminton introduced the idea that Christian Boys should also venture into the Anglish outdoors and be civilized savages for a time. Thus was born an elite unit within the Brigade. These were Brigade Scouts. Gen. Badminton liked the idea so much he needed it to be all his own. And so just a few years later he left the Brigade and started his own organization, called Boy Scouts Association, in 1908.

Gen. Badminton’s had a distinct idea of what Anglish boys who are Christian and Christian boys who are Anglish should do and be. Every boy ought to learn how to shoot and to obey orders, declares Gen. Badminton in Scouting For Boys Who Scout (1908), else he is no more good when war breaks out than an old woman, and merely gets killed like a squealing rabbit, being unable to defend himself. Don’t be an old woman, he was saying. And don’t be the dumb bastard that dies for his country. Make the other dumb bastard die for his country. Shoot him in the belly. Wade into his guts.

To build his new organization the general enlisted like-minded Men including Sir Francis Patrick Arrowman-Weathervane, a former Anglish officer who fought in the Boer War. However, Sir Arrowman-Weathervane had seen enough of war and bellies and guts to be a champion of non-violence and took up the cause of the oppressed of those dominioned over. The Brotherhood of Man in a manner of speaking. Sir Arrowman-Weathervane was expelled from Boys Who Scout by the general in 1909 because they were not as like-minded as was originally thought.

Arrowman-Weathervane then went on to (a) form his own organization called Anglish Boy Scouts that same year to be founded on non-violent principles; (b) work in Italy to foster the Ragazzi Esploratori Italiani, or Boys that Explore who are Italian Boys in 1910, much as Gen. Badminton had done in America with Mr. Boys & Co.; and, (c) spearhead the establishment of the Order of World Scouts in 1911 as a vision of global scouting for a species that is global.

By 1927, however, the Ragazzi Esploratori dedicated to outdoor life and non-violence had been burned down and built up again in the image of Italians who are Men who are Fascists. The organization was called the Opera Nazionale Balilla, or Balilla, for short. The Balilla where heavily in favor of boys who scout with guns.

A similar story may be told, notes Prof. Plimsbs, for scouting in Germany. Founded in 1896, the Wandervogel was inspired by the Romantic vision of shedding industrial society and returning to nature in the manner of a little bird flitting and floating amongst the rocks and trees. In 1933 this woodland movement was burned down and built up again in the industrial image of Germans who are Men who are Fascists. The organization was called the Hitler Youth with the Holy Trinity being, of course, Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!,

In short, Plimsbs V summarizes, the story of scouting is the battle between Men for control of boys who scout according to battles over Gods and Countries as the condition of possibility for actual scouting in its innumerable versions and competing visions of a better tomorrow, individual and society, society against society, society or species. It is human hunger, pure and simple. Whose scouting regime will reign supreme?, has always been the real question.

This is how Glim Plimsbs’ book ends and as I read the final words of the final paragraph of the final page I could hear somewhere in the background an accordion begin to play in slow, deliberate notes. The notes got stronger and the playing louder so as to drown out and wash away.

Imagine, it said.

No, I replied.

No, thank you, as I closed the book.

* * *

Alongside unraveling the whats and whys of scouting so as to tailor scouting just right for me, I used the money saved for so long so I could finally wear the official uniform of a boy who scouts who is a boy with all the badges and accessories, and instead I cobbled together my own scouting uniform of sorts as a motley combination of gear scrounged from the Army-Navy Surplus store, garage sales, the covered flea market in the old part of town, anywhere I could think to find good solid boots or a warm shirts or woolen pants or rain slickers that were inexpensive so I could stretch every penny and that would hold up under the duress of being out there. All that and it had to fit a little kid. It was no easy task. Everything was a real find. A treasure. Nothing matched. I almost always have to do some scarecrow cutting and sewing to size things right and to patch them up. But there was no alternative if I wanted to scout. I learned a hard lesson in the cold wet field that day and that lesson is that the human animal does not have much warm fur and a little kid has even less of it. I needed to become a scout for all seasons and for any changing conditions even during one single outing. This meant swapping the uniform worn by a cub, in cavalry blue and bright yellow, not with the khaki cotton uniform and scout-red scarf I had wanted to put on for so long, but for serious gear worn by a serious scout that also, given the motleyness of it, kind of made me look like a woodland clown, conspicuous in a new and unexpected ways.

I started off by using my old rucksack, which was oiled canvas and could repel rain, sleet, and snow. It was on the small side but just big enough for my early hikes into the forest and mountains. I could stow food, usually peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a canteen with water, and of course my scouting pocket knife, which would prove to be mostly useless but it was comforting to have at first. I could also pack the basics of cold and wet weather gear and stow them if I got too hot. The wool gloves came from the Army-Navy Surplus Store in one of those huge bins that smells like oil and mothballs. I got a nice wool cap there too, one with flaps that drop down around my ears if I need extra warmth and protection. As always my trusty Handbook went with me everywhere, stowed in the front pocket for easy access to remind me how to tie a particular knot or identify plants edible or poisonous.

As my trips got longer and I needed to pack more of everything — camping gear, cooking gear, tools, more and more food — the rucksack would be retired to a place of honor hanging next to my buckskin pants with fringes on them, with my moccasins set below, always ready to go if needed.

In place of my rucksack I found an almost new and unused pack with an aluminum frame. It was thrown onto a miscellaneous table in the far back of an estate sale, just laying their face up staring at the ceiling wondering what’s going on. The hot items of the estate sale were always pushed to the front and mostly already gone. A sofa in perfect condition after decades of use thanks to a heavy vinyl cover. Fine China and sterling silver utensils displayed in a wooden trove. A Singer sewing machine, which I really could have used. Up front were all the prized items of culture and refinement. In back was the land of misfits and tables brimming with oddball items. This was my trove.

Sometime somewhere along the way someone decides they need to backpack. Venture out. Breath in the fresh air. Shed the shackles of society. They load up with gear and transform themselves into a pack animal trudging through the forest which is wet and cold or hot and buggy so they can return home and push everything to the far back of the garage or the storage shed never to look upon them again for years, sometimes decades. Then, they — the people, not the gear — die. This is where I come in. Scavenging estate sales became one of my most fruitful circuits. A good cook pot. A hatchet for processing wood that was the perfect size for me with a leather sheath in perfect condition. A pup tent made for just one person, which was the exact number I was. And my greatest find of all, an insulated sleeping back, worth its weight in gold, that would keep me warm when the temperature drops below zero and snow piles up all around.

I didn’t always find something good when I went looking. Most of the time I came up empty handed. Sometimes I wished I could walk into a big fancy sporting goods store and throw down a wad of money and walk out with my entire kit on my back, brand new and state of the art. But I also liked foraging for gear. Hunting around. It became a quest. To cull from the leftovers of town what I needed to take me far away and high above. It just felt right. Plus, I had very little money. And we had no such fancy sporting good store in town. So there was no other choice.

* * *

Between scholarship and the hunt for gear and my initial ventures out past the field and into the wooded hills up through the mountainous forests I didn’t have much time for Troop 41 meetings. More and more, on Sunday mornings I suited up and walked straight past the Rec Center into the field of tall grass, at first at the very same spot I was spitted out the first time. Later, I would mix up my entry point so as not to leave a trace.

When I didn’t show up at scout meetings I don’t even think they noticed. They never asked where I was when I did turn up. But every few weeks I put on the uniform of a cub and walked to the Rec Center and pushed through the swirling doors. There was still a few things I needed from Troop 41. Call it unfinished business. Call it my Orders for the Day.

The first order of business that really fired me up was somehow to get my hands on that small envelop with my merit badges in it. It was a matter of pride and principle. I had earned them even if I now knew they didn’t really Prepare me for much of anything. They did contain clues, however. And I had worked hard to get them. That was the principle of it.

Then there was pride, pure and simple, after the show the scoutmaster and the first vice scoutmaster put on of handing them to me and taking them back in front of the entire troop for all to see. Something had to be done.

There was simply the problem, and even a catch-22 — which is based on the old adage that you can catch 21 of something no problem, but sure enough the 22nd will bite you in the ass, so be warned — of how to get my hands on them. The first vice scoutmaster carried the envelop around in his front pocket like it was a scalp containing lots of little round scalps. At some point he must have decided they were more his than mine, more a natural part of his uniform and belongings. During lulls in a meeting I could see him take the envelop out of his pocket and empty my badges in his hand. Then he would squeeze and crush and roll them around like those meditation balls that help you relax. Then he would open his hand and lift one out with his thumb and index fingers encircling it. Then he would place it somewhere on his sleeve as if picking out just the right spot. When the meeting picked up again all of my merit badges, now visibly chewed up, were stuffed back into the envelop and shoved into his front pocket It infuriated me.

The problem was, he could hold onto them as long as I didn’t have a uniform for boys who scout. All I needed was get that uniform and join officially and the badges would be mine. That was clearly impossible for so many reasons. So I needed to figure out another way. I went to meetings just looking for some opening. Maybe he would set the envelop down and walk away for a moment. That would be my chance. Maybe he would get tired of them and just hand them to me because to him it mattered so little. Maybe I could just ask him for them. But I knew he would then stand on principle and deny my request. Maybe I could say I got my uniform and wanted to sew them on so I could show up present and correct. But that would be a lie, and he could still deny me. Show me your uniform first, he would say, and then I’ll give you these merit badges in this envelop — patting his front pocket.

Most of my time at scout meetings was spent obsessed with getting my merit badges. I followed the first vice scoutmaster’s every move. Learned patterns to his behavior during every phase of the meeting. He had odd mannerisms that I catalogued for possible use. He always adjusted the metal slide of his neckerchief when the scoutmaster approached, as if to make sure he was fortified and ready for whatever command or onslaught. He adopted an air of superiority when talking with the second vice scoutmaster, as if he were was in charge in the absence of the one who commanded him. These were all somewhat fascinating and explained a few things, but mostly useless for my purposes. None of it yielded any fruit. It frustrated me. It made me angry. Sometimes, in the middle of a meeting, I just wanted to scream. On my way back down the road afterward I would fume. It was becoming unhealthy. It was messing with my calm. The only thing that saved me from sheer madness was my own scouting.

* * *

On the Sunday mornings I walked right past the Rec Center, through the field of tall grass, up the wooded hills and into the forest and mountains my aim was to begin scouting all over again. It was clear from the Day of Shame that despite the merit badges I had earned and the skills I thought I had I was Not Prepared in any true sense of the word. So I started over. I developed a plan for exploration. No more spiralizing aimlessly. The scoutmaster was right about that at least. To know where you’re at and where you’re going is first to map the grounds you’re dealing with. This approach goes back even farther to the general himself and his admonishment to men who scout.

To scout, writes Gen. Badminton, is to acquire detailed knowledge of the land you are in. Its features. Routes. Pitfalls. Workarounds. The scout learns how everything fits together so as truly to get to the work of scouting.

For the general, the scout was also something different from what boys that scout came to be. At the end of the day, admonishes the Gen. Badminton, a true scout goes out alone. Not with a team of pals or an entire troops making noise and kicking up dust. A scout is solitary in his heart of hearts. This is the true meaning of the lone scout.

Thus by default and design I scouted solitarily. Along the river to learn its course and features. Down through a tangle of brambles into the ravine to search for different ways up and out. Up the mountain until I reached a steep cliff. Along the ridge to find a seam across and around. Slowly I was developing a true sense of the lay of the land. These were my lessons in orienteering in the manner of a solitary scout scouting so as to go farther and farther into the unknown.

The explorations were also exercises in, well, exercise. Hiking strengthens your heart and lungs, declares the Handbook. It hardens your muscles and straightens your back. Blood runs hot through your veins even on the coldest of days.

This all proved to be true. Every time I went out I encountered a new challenge requiring balance or stamina or sheer strength. In the beginning it was punishing even to get up the first few hills. The word of the day was sweat and wheeze and coughing and bursting and feeble muscles burning only to ache for days after. I didn’t know how it would ever make it into any mountain if this was the limit of my strength and endurance. I returned to the Handbook for guidance and inspiration.

Hiking is not for softies, warns the Handbook. It is only for those who have the guts to face whatever hardship comes their way.

I’m not a softie!, I blurted out.

I have guts, I added without full conviction.

Why do you keep going out, the Handbook then demands, if it’s so hard?

Because there’s roaming your blood, the Handbook answers for itself instead of letting you answer. There’s a roving spirit in you that wants to get out.

I took a look in the mirror. A scrawny kid with thick black hair and no muscles to speak of. Now I was pissed off. I growled. I snarled. I’m not a softie! I have guts! There’s roaming in my blood! I have a roving spirit and I want to get out!

I roared the mantra over and over. I was kind of just repeating the pep talk in the Handbook while making animal noises but I was also taking those words to heart and they really did make a difference. Now with guts and blood and spirit flowing through my veins I climbed the hills and got stronger and traveled into the forested mountains and got stronger still, and with strength I gained confidence and with confidence I found more strength and my explorations only reached farther and farther into the unknown.

Maybe counterintuitively, the goal of going farther was never ultimately to travel up the river or down into a canyon. The destination was always town. My desk. My lamp. My bed. Going out such that I could get back again. This was another lesson I learned the hard way during my Day of Shame. I swirled so much and paid so little attention that I couldn’t retrace my steps to find the way back. I left so many traces, in fact, that none meant anything meaningful when it mattered most.

Now, venturing out always meant traveling deliberately in two directions at once, looking forward while always glancing back to get a picture of what the return will look like. This was a pathless wood I traveled and returning meant taking the same steps in reverse that will often look unfamiliar and disorienting descending versus climbing up or scrambling up and out to reach just the right place versus dropping in wherever you might happen to. Even following the river did not mean the route back, clear enough by way of water, would be a mere matter of going in reverse. The treachery of getting back down poorly chosen slippery rocks or banks of mud I clamber up, and the consequence of falling even just a few feet onto anything slicing or stabbing or shattering was to transform a hike into a self-rescue mission. So choosing a good route going one way always meant good judgment for the full and complete journey.

It was on these trips that I worked to re-earn the merit badges now held in the iron clad pocket of the first vice scoutmaster’s uniform. That way, I figured and obsessed over, when I finally got my hands on them I could display them proudly. And so I started truly to earn my badges. To merit them. Not in the safety of the open field but during my explorations into the forests and mountains far away from town. And not in isolation, where I work on fire and fire alone, or knots and only knots. Skills were always practiced within and alongside other skills all in concert to accomplish real tasks.

Even before I had found a good tent to use I brought a tarpaulin that could be set up into shelter with just a few feet of cordage for a ridge line, the right knots for lashing, and some stakes whittled with a knife. With simple items and skills you could fashion any number of shapes for all kinds of conditions. A buttoned down tent for severe weather. A lean-to facing your fire for warmth and protection while you cook or boil water and then sleep at night. A real live teepee with the help of a sturdy branch as the center pole. The shape of your shelter often depended on the opportunities offered up by the land around you and this required learning variations to suit your circumstances. A large boulder or fallen tree served as a backstop you can build from and will help to trap heat from the fire radiating into your shelter. You can also forgo the tarp and build a shelter in many of the same shapes with thick branches for structure and bushy branches of leaves or needles for cover to block wind and shed water. This is not only old-school shelter. It is shelter before there was even school to go to, I thought nostalgically.

Fire means figuring out what’s around to use. Sometimes you find a wealth of dry fuel without even trying. Other times everything is soaked or you are high above the tree line with just a few scraps to work with. This requires the right skills to survey and identify and collect and process and ignite and sustain a fire only with what’s available so you can actually cook or purify water or warm yourself or dry your cloths or ward off beasts in the night. To make camp or a fire you almost always use a knife or hatchet, and first and foremost this means learning to sharpen your blade in the field with a portable whetstone or even a flat rock smoothed by the river. Purifying water begins with a trusty bottle of salt tablets but soon you graduate to boiling it because you can build of fire, and then to filtering it with the right combination of moss or charcoal.

The best way to learn, says the Handbook, is to do it yourself. You may not get fire the first time you try, the Handbook acknowledges. But you will if you persevere, the Handbook assures.

The assurance is true and encouraging and very false, it must be said, in the best and most dangerous sense of learning. Sometimes practice was just that. I stopped along the way to be deliberate about building and testing skills. This was just as important as getting somewhere and getting back. Other times I had to use a skill because I really needed to. A storm rolled in. I fell into the frigid river. I ran out of water under a blazing sun. The food I packed didn’t get me far enough and I had to forage. Sometimes I failed. The fire wouldn’t light in the rain. The shelter collapsed. There was no creek or pond or even puddle in sight. I found nothing to eat but twigs and poisonous berries. And I only get colder or more dehydrated or hungrier and less alert and poorer in judgment and now I had to figure it out under these circumstances within and all around to get by or get out of the mess I was in. These failures echoed that first day in the dire straits I found myself in, with two differences. They were far more dire, and I was far more confident and skilled and ready. This is when the real test for a merit badge took place where I had to figure out food without food and water without water and fire without fire and shelter without shelter. The test was always unplanned and unexpected and dire. Direness was always the stake that grounded truly meriting a badge. The stake of life or death. Hard scouting as hard liberty so as to become a hardened scout, someone in some scout book called it.

When I did earn a merit badge I didn’t have any round patch to sew on to show for it. I simply carried a felt-tipped marker from a box of big fat markers, the one’s with fun scents like watermelon for pink or lemon for yellow or strawberry for red or blueberry for blue. I liked the purple marker best. It smelled like grape. When I showed myself that I had a skill I took the purple marker from my rucksack and rolled up my sleeve and wrote the skill on my arm. Just the word of the badge I had earned. Nothing more. By the time I stepped back onto the road at the edge of town the word was always smudged and smeared or wiped away entirely from sweat or rain or blood. That was fine. It was enough to write the word on my arm with the purple marker. The ink washed off but the skill remained down deep. This was real merit, I thought to myself.

Plan and Purpose
Strength and Confidence
Skill and Readiness
Doing So Done
Done When Most Dire

Merit according to the laws of a solitary scout, mutually generative and reflective

It was only in that moment that I realized how pointless my pride and principle were to get my hands on those embroidered round merit badges. What were they truly worth? Nothing much. Nothing much at all.

Badges …, I said to myself with disdain. I don’t need no stinking merit badges.

With that I let the envelope go and all that was in it. I pictured dropping it into the river with all those round bits of cloth spilling out and scattering on the water, caught in the current, pulled down around the bend and onward out to sea.

Now there was just one more matter to tend to with Troop 41.

* * *

The next Sunday, at the end of the weekly reading of the Federalist Papers I raised my hand. Troop 41 was approaching the last of the Federalist Papers so that soon all that would be left was one single solitary Paper of Federalist. The room practically squeed with excitement and relief. The end was in sight.

The Bison were giving it their very worst with nobody paying attention and then the reading for the day was done. It was at this point that I raised my hand. Under no circumstance had I ever raised my hand to speak so everyone was shocked in the sense of your pet frog one day rearing up on both back flippers and asking you if you would have any Grey Poupon, but more-so annoyed in the sense of your pet frog ribbiting in the dead of night for no apparent reason. What could the cub who scouts possibly want?, was the general sense of the room.

Once recognized by the scoutmaster I asked what I thought to be a very straightforward question.

When we finished reading the Federalist Papers what will the next reading be?

The scoutmaster had never been asked this question before. He was caught off guard. Troop 41 always waited in silent dread for the sentence to be read. There was nothing else anyone could do.

What did you say?

Um, sir, I was just wondering what the next reading was since we are almost done with this one. All we have to do is figure out the small matter of Trial by Jury in relation to the Constitution and then we are pretty much home free.

But I’m hoping, I continued, that we will start another reading right away since we are really on a roll and I was just wondering what that reading was going to be.

Even though no one ever asks the question, Never Ever, since the question had been asked, albeit by the little cub who scouts, all eyes turned to the scoutmaster to see what his answer would be.

The scoutmaster did not appreciate being put on the spot like that. He was unprepared and had to think quick.

I haven’t decided yet. Do you have any suggestions?, replied the scoutmaster where the word suggestions, plural, said in the manner the scoutmaster said it in said to Troop 41 what everybody was thinking, which was that this little cub would have nothing to offer, zero, and he should have kept his mouth shut in the first place.

I scratched my head and thought a moment.

I wasn’t sure, I said. It has to be good, right? Even better than the Federalist Papers. More foundational. More historical. More of everything. Directly on point and yet surprising, challenging, profound. Something that speaks deeply to the American Republic, the American Experiment, maybe by way of its touchstones and progenitors. Above all, something that reflects your own deep knowledge and love of history. Is that what you’re looking for, scoutmaster?

That’s exactly what I’m looking for. What do you suggest?

I have an idea, but I doubt you’ll want to use it.

If it’s any good I’d be happy to use your recommendation for our next reading. Of course, if it isn’t any good then we need to move on, don’t you think?

I agree. So you’ll take my recommendation if it’s a good one?

I’d be happy to, said the scoutmaster magnanimously.

Scout’s Honor?, I asked, shooting up the scout sign like you do when you are doing Scout’s Honor.

Scout’s Honor was not as binding as a blood oath, it must be said, but it was still not something to take lightly, especially if made before the entirety of Troop 41.

The room froze with baited breath. What was happening was beyond anyone’s comprehension. The scoutmaster was being challenged. By a mere cub. On the weekly reading. The scoutmaster owned the weekly readings. The scoutmaster owned the troop for that matter. To back down would be to loose face in the worst possible way. To refuse Scout’s Honor would be to run scared in front of everyone.

I waited with my scout sign held high.

Sure enough, the scoutmaster never backs down.

Scout’s Honor, said the scoutmaster, shooting up his own scout sign to match mine. Now, what do you have?

Well, what about … how about? I hemmed and hawed with uncertainty.

Now everyone could tell I had nothing and was just stalling to put off the inevitable moment when I would have to admit in front of the entire troop that I had no idea what I was doing. I had gone out on a limb and the gravity of the scoutmaster prevailed. This was going to be good, they all secretly tittered.

What about …. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Mr. Edward Gibbon?

The room was gobsmacked.

I continued.

I remember that the early Federalists Papers mentioned Rome often as a reference point for their own arguments, both in support of and as cautionary tales of a republic become empire become Empire that burned brightly and captivated the world only to collapse feebly and then ignominiously to extinguish.

I had worked on that last part by the light of my kerosene lamp over many evenings, wordsmithing it for some time.

I continued.

If we want to understand the strength of the American Republic as well as the pitfalls we are sure to encounter and must avoid falling into along the way what better story to tell than the Rise and then the Fall of the Roman Empire so that the American Empire, or Republic as it were, never succumbs to the same fate.

I paused.

Then I continued.

Have you read the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, I asked the scoutmaster. I believe it’s a classic that no student of history would be ignorant of. I’m almost sure you’ve read it and know it well.

It was a dangerous word to use in relation to the scoutmaster. Ignorant. But I was in a dangerous mood. The scoutmaster was on the spot. All eyes were back on him.

Of course I’ve read The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, he sputtered in such a way that I don’t believe he had ever heard of, let alone read, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Does it sound like a good recommendation?

It sounds like an excellent choice, he said, trying to recover the sense of superiority by way of magnanimity and tolerance from the master for a mere student who happened, almost by accident, to have a good idea.

So you’ll choose it as the next reading for Troop 41?

I believe I will.

Our next reading will be The Fall of the Roman Republic, by Edwin Bonobo, decreed the scoutmaster to Troop 41 in the manner of a Roman Emperor.

Thank you scoutmaster, I said, with real gratitude. Can I make one more suggestion?

What is it?

In my humble opinion, if we want to get the full story we need to skip the abridged version of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon. The abridged version is for cubs that scout. Not for real boys and their scoutmaster. Wouldn’t you agree?

Of course, declared the scoutmaster, not now to be shown to be only in for a penny.

All Six Volumes, I added. I believe that totals about 4,000 pages, which makes sense since the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon, covers about one-thousand-five-hundred years of history. There is so much declining and falling, though, that I’ve heard that time flies by once you get rolling, especially when read aloud.

Thank you, I said again, lowering the scout sign I had been holding up ever since Scout’s Honor because I was kind of petrified the whole time so once I shot it up it needed to just stay there because I had other things I needed to concentrate on that were more important at the moment.

With that, Troop 41 was dismissed for cookies and punch in the game room.

* * *

As per usual I slid into corner of the game room during cookies and punch. But much had changed. In approximately 2 minutes I had gone from being a no-value target to public enemy #1. Fifty-three years from now, when the great-great grandkids of boys who scout today in Troop 41 crack open Volume VI of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Mr. Edward Gibbons, and wonder why they have been consigned to such a fate, someone will recall the story passed down through generations of how it all went down.

That was fifty-three years in the future, however. For now it was best not to make eye contact with anyone. The kids ate their cookies and drank their punch with particular venom. I could feel the glances and glares and hear the murmurs, plots and planning coming from every quarter only to coalesce. Next week will be a whole new ballgame, I could hear some of the big big kids conspire, with the little kids joining in to be part of the gang that was forming across patrols, troop-wide. It was almost a committee of the whole, a plenary mob.

Next week will be a whole new ballgame …, I thought to myself. I couldn’t agree more. I smiled, almost in spite of me. I stifled the smile. No eye contact. Stay in the corner until the room is empty. Wait until the parking lot clears. Only then would I exit the Rec Center through the swirling doors for the final time.

* * *

The Rec Center was empty and still I waited. When a heavy dust started to settle back onto everything that would be my cue. Over time I had noticed a synchronicity between the dust inside and the parking lot outside. For several hours during the scout meeting dust was kicked up and swirled around and breathed in and exhaled everywhichway. The dust had to be dizzy and disoriented by the time the meeting of Troop 41 ended and the Eggnog Center for Recreating was emptied out. It took time for the dust to gather its senses and ease back into its most comfortable state of being a thick layer on everything. This was about the exact same amount of time it took for everyone outside to load up and drive off so that when the dust started drifting down and settling in the parking lot would almost always be empty, too.

The dust settled. I stepped out from the corner of the room just inside the front door where the curvature of the ceiling slopes down into becoming the wall. I was still short enough to fit snugly without having to bend or crook my head and neck. It was as if the corner was made for me and I was made to stand in it not as punishment but as a place of shelter. It was always the place I felt most at home in the Rec Center.

Stepping out for the last time I turned and raised my right hand with the scout sign held up. I reached out and touched the corner of the room.

Thank you, I said.

* * *

Walking out the swirling front doors I stopped abruptly. The parking lot was completely empty, as expected. Except for one car. A red Camaro. A scout-red Camaro. A red Camaro with the hood replaced by a rusty white hood. A scout-red Camaro with the back left panel replaced by a rusty blue panel. It was the scoutmaster’s scout-red Camaro. The car was pointed out to the road idling with the scoutmaster just sitting there in it. This was not a total surprise. Some days the scoutmaster was first out the door, burning rubber and fishtailing so everyone could see. Other times he would hang around, sitting in his scout-red Camaro as the moms pulled in with him in his scouting uniform and hulking frame just chilling in his scout-red Camaro. He would hang around until the last scout was picked up by the last mom. Then, he would burn rubber and fishtail out of there. If I was walking across the parking lot behind his red Camaro when he peeled out I would eat dust as he raced down the road. I was used to it, and so the scoutmaster still being in the parking lot was not a big shock. It just wasn’t ideal given what had gone down earlier.

To be honest I had dreamed of some kind of showdown with the scoutmaster over the History of Scouting. I was of two minds over what the showdown would be for, however.

On the one hand I had genuine questions. Did he not know the full history of scouting? Or did he know at least some of it and still he told his own bonkers version of the story? Did he really believe his version? What if I told him the truth? Would he accept anything I had to say on something he fancied himself an authority on? In a way I thought it was my duty to set the record straight, or at least try. He was, after all, orienting new scouts with his tall tale of where scouting came from.

On the other hand, I just really wanted to show him. He was always so sure and overbearing. Now I had the upper hand. I knew more than him. I would dazzle him with my scholarship until he was dizzy. Maybe he would fall down only to rise up enlightened by this little cub who scouts. I pictured scales falling from his eyes.

Alongside my obsession with getting my merit badges from the first vice scoutmaster this became my other obsession. It was a twin-headed monster I needed to slay. I worked out multiple scenes and scenarios. Before the meeting even started I would march straight to the back of the room where the big people gathered and start in on my questions. It would be a barrage directed at the scoutmaster where the first vice scoutmaster and the second vice scoutmaster and the third vice scoutmaster and the assistant to the scoutmaster would all bear witness to it. They would be there to see how the scoutmaster withered under the truth.

Better yet, the inquisition would take place in front of the whole troop, maybe at the merit badge awards. I would be called up for earning, say, the Scholarship merit badge, and when the scoutmaster handed me that little round patch the questions would begin and wouldn’t let up. The troop would listen, riveted, and then erupt in applause. I would be carried around the game room on their shoulders in triumph during cookies and punch.

I also contemplated waiting until after the meeting was over and everyone was gone. Everyone except me and the scoutmaster idling in his red Camaro. I would walk up to the car and Tap Tap. He would roll down the window and turn down the stereo with Def Leppard or Quiet Riot blasting. For a moment there would be complete silence. This was the beginning of the final showdown. A reckoning on the History of Scouting. Just him and me in the empty parking lot on the edge of town. Face to Face. Mano y Mano. Silence at first. Then music would begin to swell. A Spanish guitar strumming heavy and exotic. A single trumpet trilling. Snare drums marching inexorably to finale. A triangle going absolutely insane. Our mouths moving, back and forth, more and more heated, with every word drowned out by the clamor until the moving mouths stop. The music stops. All is silent again. I step back as the window rolls up. The red Camaro drives off slow, defeated, down the road. Fade to black. Roll credits.

The scenes were becoming increasingly elaborate and theatrical, if we’re being honest. Fortunately, the more time I spent in the forests and mountains high above the Rec Center the more the reckoning didn’t matter at all because all those histories mattered so little to what I was doing. Solitary Scouting. I was scouting within and beyond.

It still irked me that he told the same tall tale to every new scout. But would there be any new account if I told him what I know? Probably not. Would he keep believing his own story regardless of anything I told him? Almost certainly.

And now, standing outside the swirling doors with the scoutmaster sitting in his Camaro idling in the parking lot after the stunt I pulled in there, just him in his hulking presence and me in the uniform of a cub, was this the right time for a showdown, face to face, mano y mano, just him and me with no one else to see?

Absolutely not!

I quickly slid into the corner of the entrance. It was second nature by now and I did it smoothly and then stood motionless. The scoutmaster sat in his car for a while, revving the engine now and then. I waited in the corner, not moving a muscle, trying to blend in. Then he stirred, shifted the red Camaro into drive, hit the gas and peeled out fishtailing all the way. I was clear across the parking lot but his dust seemed to know I was there even if he didn’t and came straight for me. That seems about right, I thought to myself, eating some of it.

I started down the empty road but stopped and turned. It’s not your fault that Troop 41 meets at you every Sunday morning, I said to the Rec Center, and for a full week during the summer including setting a out-of-control bonfires with Presto logs. It’s not your fault I had to camp way in the back and off to the side while patrols played games and I watched from the sidelines. You haven’t been bad to me at all.

I waived to the Yule Log and the big swirling doors I had pushed open on my first day of scouting for boys who scout when I was so nervous and excited at what was in store. The swirling door swirled in spite of itself. The Yule Log looked on.

I never returned to be among boys and big people who scout in Troop 41. I never pushed the swirling doors open or stepped foot in the Rec Center again. But I do stop and wave every time I pass by, either crossing the road to wade into the tall grass or whenever I come down from the forest and mountains headed back into town. Sometimes, but not always, when I wave, the Eggnog Center for Recreating blinks back.

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