Suicide is a good death.

In Deaths of Man, Edwin Shneidman borrows from and elaborates on Avery Weisman’s conception of an appropriate death. “Some deaths are better than others,” writes Shneidman. Some can achieve a “good” death.

Shneidman points to Weisman’s vital ingredients to a good death: harmony and not conflict; dying as one would hope and desire; community with loved ones; recognition of final wishes.

An appropriate death is inclusive. Shneidman writes: “When we speak of a good death, we imply that it is appropriate not only for the decedent, but also for the principal survivors — a death they can ‘live’ with.”[1]

Dr. Shneidman was a founder of the suicide prevention movement in the United States, in the 1950s. His concern is not with “good” suicides. Yet Socrates and Jesus Christ would seem to be exemplars of a good death.

Xenophon reports on Socrates:

It seems to me that his fate was proper to one loved by the gods, because he both avoided the most difficult part of life and gained the easiest part of death. His fortitude was obvious: since he had decided that death was better for him than further life, he showed no weakness in the face of death (just as he had never turned his back on any other good thing either), but awaited it cheerfully and discharged his final duty in good spirits.

When I consider how wise the man was, and how high-minded, I am bound to remember him; and when I remember him I am bound to admire him. If anyone in his search for virtue has encountered a more helpful person than Socrates, then he deserves, in my opinion, to be called the most fortunate of all men.[2]

Plato also reports a good death. In the Crito and Phaedo, Socrates is surrounded by friends. Socrates philosophizes to the very end. There is protesting and weeping, but he comforts his friends. He bids goodbye to his children and the women of his household. He gives final instructions to his family. He baths a final time. And his final words to Crito: “We owe a cock to Asclepius; make this offering to him and do not forget” his final wish.” For death is the cure for life and proper thanks must be paid. That is: death is a cure for life.[3]

The Last Supper of Christ and his Apostles echoes the last days of Socrates. Surrounded by his disciples and friends, they share a meal as Christ announces his death and prepares them for what will follow. He washes their feet. He prepares the way for them to continue living. The night before his death, Jesus prays alone in the garden of Gethsemane, preparing himself for what will come.

While the death of Jesus Christ is not peaceful, this too is part of his design, his hope and aspiration, for himself and for others. And as the death of Jesus Christ was appropriate to himself and his disciples, for many, Christianity itself testifies that the death of Christ was good in itself, throughout the ages.

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[1] Shneidman, Deaths of Man, 28.
[2] Xenophon, “Socrates’ Defense,” 49.
[3] Crito 116a–b; Phaedo118a. John Cooper (ed), Complete Works: “A cock was sacrificed to Asclepius by the sick people who slept in his temples, hoping for a cure. Socrates apparently means that death is a cure of the ills of life,” n.19, 100.

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* * *

Everyone was retired from the dinner table and back to the Big Chair by the Fire. The mood was warm and sweet from the savory meal, but the mood was also sour and not in the sense of the perfect balance in Sweet & Sour Pork, salted and even spiced to perfection, whose bright ruby sauce, sour yet sweet, glows brilliantly beside or atop a bed of sticky white rice. No, the mood was sour. Sour though as yet unspoken. And so everyone just sat there feeling sweet yet sour, except for the Big Chair, which was being sat upon. And the Fire.

Finally, the silence was broken.

I do not like the Story of Suicide Beyond Suicide, said the still remaining Peanut Butter Cookie.

I don’t either, added the Plate of Cookie.

Is it too suicide?, asked the Samovar, which was brewing a fresh batch of black tea for the eagerly awaiting Cup and Saucer.

The Peanut Butter Cookie thought a moment. No, said the Cookie. It’s just not very beyond, if you know what I mean.

I do, I know what you mean, admitted Barry the Fox, who had been here all along but was a very shy Fox who liked to remain in the background for the most part. There’s lots of suicide, list upon list of it, enough for a lifetime, but we never seem to go very far beyond. Suicide above and beyond suicide is what we were promised and yet we are stuck somewhere in mere suicide.

Well said, said the Roast Beast and Potatoes in concert from tummies within. It was difficult to hear them so everyone had to be really quiet and lean in to listen. Where is the above and beyond?, they said. Show us the beyond. Show us suicide above suicide. Show us the above and beyond.

And where’s the story in the story of, said the remaining piece of root of Horseradish, who had, along with Barry the Fox, remained quiet up till now. Most stories have, well, a story in them so that what comes out of them is a story. I see no story here. I hear no story from over there, gesturing at the storyteller.

As Barry the Fox said, said the Horseradish, this story is more of a list of laundry unwashed and heaped high in the woven wicker basket. Stories have to have beginnings and middles and ends, said the Horseradish, with good and bad characters and conflict and action and excitement and special effects and epic battles and exploding spaceships and more exploding spaceships and an exploding planet that is really a spaceship and then a big awards ceremony for only two of the thousands who fought, including not the Wookiee. That is how a story works, declared the Horseradish, and it was clear to everyone else that this root of Horseradish really knew his stuff about stories.

Yeah!, they all cried. Where is the story? Where is the above and beyond. All we have is what’s before and below. An endless list that bounces back and forth, up and down, and goes on and on while going nowhere. How many suicides are there in this story anyway?, and when the word story was used in this rhetorical question which was more a registry of complaint than an actual question looking for a specific numeric answer, though that may have helped, the whole room used air quotes surrounding it. Are we even halfway to being beyond suicide amid all this suicide?

In truth we are just going around in circles, the root of Horseradish began again. And not in the good sense of a story coming full circle to completion. In the bad sense of wandering a pathless wilderness in circles so as not to get anywhere while still being lost. We are lost. This story is lost. The Horseradish then proceeded to elucidate the proper structure of a story and variations thereof, where the implication was that he could rescue this story by showing it the way. The longer the Horseradish elucidated the faster the Horseradish was becoming tiresome to the room. Kind of a know-it-all, it now seemed. Apparently he’s quiet at first but once he gets to talking he won’t shut up. We liked it better when he stayed silent, said the room individually each one to itself and thus collectively so that that’s how the room truly felt. To its credit the Horseradish seemed to pick up on this mood and quickly wound up his lecturing without really solving anything but to everyone else’s relief, and kind of sulked after that.

I did like the image of disappearing behind a cloud of ink, interjected the Cherry Cobbler, which always tried to find something positive to say and was now bubbling in the oven. That sounded fun, the disappearing of oneself behind a cloud of ink.

Yes, imagine spraying a dark cloud of ink when someone tries to grab you, and the ink goes into their eyes and nose and mouth and while they are enveloped by ink and sputtering you simply slip away. The Saucer and Cup of tea were thrilled just imagining slipping away leaving no trace, let alone saying it.

What a wonderful idea! How comforting, said the room.

The room was now comforted and no longer sour but not entirely satisfied either. The Fire looked on. What could be done?

Then, suddenly. I want more bonk bonk on the head!, said someone.

Yes, bonk bonk on the head, cried the others as they closed their fists and pistoned their arms up and then down upon their own heads. Bonk bonk on the head! Bonk bonk on the head!

A pause.

Bonk bonk on the head!

In expectus.

Bonk bonk on the head!

And still a pause. The storyteller had had no reaction thus far. Would the storyteller now resume the story of scouting? The story of scouting beyond scouting, even? Or would the storyteller press on with the Story of Suicide Beyond Suicide? Nobody knew how this would unfold.

Bonk bonk on the head, but now in a low murmur, maybe to give the storyteller a moment to think. To reflect upon. To decide. Bonk bonk on the head, in a murmur dying down so as both to die down and to show by its very dying down that it could easily rise up again in the manner of Murmurdons.

Still more pause the likes of which had been seen before while still retaining a note of suspense. And then.

Second only to the Eager Salmon factory along the bank of the river that runs past town, the storyteller began, the landmark of the character and community is the once-thriving business on the edge of town, which gives way to unfarmed fields and hills become forests rising to mountains and craggy heights, called Eggnog’s Yule Logs.

Hoorah!, they cried as the leapt to their feet. Hooo – rahhh! were the keynotes to dancing ‘round the Big Chair. Hoorah!, they would not stop and they danced like savages as tom-tom drums parumpapumpummed and ankle bells chimed in. Hoooo-raaahhhh HHoorrrrrah! with a Bonk bonk on the head! folded in now and again.

When they were spent they settled back into the Big Chair as the Fire blazed on and the bubbling hoo-rah in the oven by the Cherry Cobbler simmered down. Everyone simmered down. Everyone was ready for the storyteller to continue telling the story of scouting.

The storyteller had waited patiently for this democratic storm to blow over and then he proceeded.

The fates of the Eager Salmon and Eggnog’s Yule Logs were interwoven, in fact, in more ways than we imagined. You see, many years ago the Eggnog family arrived in town with a drink in hand that had been passed down from generation to generation. The drink was so familiar to the Eggnog family that they simply gave it their name. Have some Eggnog, they would say to each other, as if to say have some of us that we’re having. Soon after arriving in town and settling down they said it to everyone else too. Have some Eggnog, to you and you and you. And it was a smash hit! But only during the Christmas holidays for some reason. The Eggnog family drank their family drink year-round, whenever they could. Nice and hot in the winter months but cool and creamy in the heat of summer. And so they made a small yet surprisingly seasonal fortune for the family. With their newly-minted eggnog nest egg they looked around for another family favorite to coin into gold and what they came upon was Grandma Eggnog’s famous Yule Log. Everybody in the Eggnog family loved her Yule Log, year-round, and they were sure the world with everybody else in it would love her Yule Log too. Thus the seed was planted and the business and the building sprouted up on the edge of down. Eggnog’s Yule Log, Inc.

The building received immediate attention both for its lifelike design and the man who designed it, that famous architect Frankoid Right, who happened to be traveling through town when the call went out for, quote, Inspired building ideas to match a business built on yuled inspiration, unquote. Mr. Right announced himself with the boldness of a new material called corragated roofing as an encompassing design philosophy that would withstand the test of time and the fickle of fashion.

The Eggnog’s Yule Log headquarters was divided into two parts. The smaller front section served as the gift shop with curved walls lined with world famous logs of yule and a secret passage cleverly concealed in the wall that opened up to reveal a wondrous koi pond and a small pen with a live reindeer in it and a little plaque hanging on the wire fence. The larger back area of the building was where the miracle of Yule Logs happened. From nothing but ingredients and workers and machinery Eggnog’s Yule Logs came into being night and day. Out back behind the log factory old-timey freight trucks with a big brown yule log with pinkish white filling and a crown of holly leaves and berries taking a big and satisfying bite out of itself painted on the sides pulled in and loaded up and sped off to market, day and night, throughout the year, year in and year out, filled with nothing but Eggnog’s Yule Logs.

There were two fatal flaws to the business. The second one was Grandma’s secret recipe. For you see, our town was already a salmon town and she loved salmon more than life itself. It was salmon this and salmon that for Grandma Eggnog and thus was created the Salmon Moose Yule Log, with whipped cream filling made with real bits of salmon and moose, as well. At the time the supply of salmon was virtually unlimited with no possible end in sight, and at least once a week, usually around 10 p.m. on Wednesday nights, it was not an uncommon for a moose to wander into town and saunter down mainstreet as if it was just there to see the sights. And so Eggnog’s Yule Log made one and only one kind of log of yule and that was the Salmon Moose Yule Log coming in three sizes, Calf, Cow and Bull, to represent the sheer amount of moose meat you will get in your salmon yule log made with real cocoa and coated with a bittersweet chocolate frosting.

Needless to say, when the flow of salmon dried up, the Eager Salmon went belly-up and up went Eggnog’s Yule Log’s belly right along with it. Now, the Eggnog family was a pillar of the community and they would not go down without trying to do good in the process. And so in a final act before they packed up and left town in disgrace they donated the world headquarters to the town for the sole purpose of opening a Recreation Center, officially christened Eggnog’s Center for Recreating. The main stipulation was that the outside appearance of the main building would remain as, quote, deliciously brown, unquote, as the day the business opened and that the decorative holly leaves and bright red berries remain in perpetuity atop the building as a beacon to the world within and all around.

The town was ecstatic. That is until the Eggnog family had left town and the building was handed over and the townsfolk were welcomed in to discover everything being just a little smaller and more cramped and awkward than they had expected. But they made due and were grateful until the money to maintain the Rec Center started to dry up as the town itself went down the drain. The carpet became warn, furniture and equipment were now second hand, lines weren’t repainted when they faded, and a light coating of dust settled on everything. Outside, the fields become overgrown with dandelions even as the grass shriveled and died. A track was hastily constructed for Phase 2 of the Rec Center, but now with an empty budget and thus according to the existing shape of the property, which was naturally a rectangle. Fences sagged and the swimming pool cracked and leaked and emptied under the hot sun. Thus stood the Eggnog Center for Recreating at the edge of town as a landmark of the character and complexion of the community.

This is where the troop for boys who scout who are boys meet on Sunday mornings beginning at 9:00 a.m.

* * *

To approach the Rec Center from the road leading to the edge of town is not first and foremost to see the Rec Center from a distance in its brown deliciousness. What looms high above and draws the eye is the massive remote craggy peak atop the mountain range from whence the river runs down through the forested mountains and hilly forests and unfarmed fields straight past town and onward out to sea.

The craggy peak looms by showing great or little but never all of itself and so is seen and unseen and known partly by what is unknown and unknown in light of what is known. What is unknown gives fuller shape to what is known even as what is known lacks for what is not known. A white whale looms to a ship at sea. A ship at sea looms unto itself. The craggy peak high above town shows great or little but never all of its craggy peakness and its peak cragginess and this is what truly captures the mind’s eye. Loomings.

Furthermore, the craggy peak looms in what we absolutely cannot see and yet we see right before us. You cannot see the snowy bowl nestled within the craggy peak that issues forth in water that flows down the mountain and right past town. You can, however, see the water issued forth before your very eye’s along the banks of the river flowing past town that shows so very little of the bowl from whence it came and yet the bowl looms large in the water flowing before our eyes so as to roll onward out of sight and mind on out to sea to rise up and float high above amid clouds that drift and tumble down on the craggy peak in the manner of tiny snowflakes. Semi-Loomings.

Of course the craggy peak does in fact not always loom by showing even great or little of itself. Sometimes it shows none of itself. This is because of people being indoors or it being the dead of night when a well-fed moon shows none of own self as it hordes and gorges on its own reflective light so as not to cast down upon the mountains and the craggy height. So the craggy height does not always loom due to walls and roofs or that goblin moon, except that the craggy peak always does show itself high above even if there is no one for to see.

Moreover, people just don’t look up there all the time thought it’s hard to miss unless you avert your eyes, you demure, you shy away from looking so as not to see while clearly knowing what is shown so as to loom. In this case the eye sees neither greater nor little so as to see nothing at all of what appears steadfastly in the mind’s eye as loomings. Loomings in the second degree.

Of course the craggy height does not loom for newborn babies who know nothing of the craggy height and haven’t yet the intellect to apprehend anything as an object or a concept. So the craggy peak that shows great or little is lost on babies of this kind. No loomings.

But the looming of the craggy peak looms for these blissfully ignorant animals. Just they wait. Pending loomings.

And of course regardless of what you can see from town of the craggy peak that looms you can see nothing of the other side of the craggy peak and so the craggy peak looms in a double sense that is really just a single sense since this is just part of the showing little of itself as showing nothing of what’s on the other side in the looming of itself.

In fact nobody knows what the craggy peak truly looks like since nobody has dared to venture up to it even by crossing the unfarmed fields and entering the woody hills and hilly mountains and mountainous forests or if they have no one has ever come back to town to tell about it. So nobody from town really knows the craggy peak in itself and what is truly known is the stuff of legend and hearsay and speculation.

But if everyone can see the forest and mountains and high craggy peak and if everyone knows the river flows down from up there why has no one ventured up to see what they can see first hand?, asked the remaining Lemon Bar on the Plate of Bar.

That, I can tell you in one word, said the storyteller. The Spectre.

Everybody gasped and recoiled in horror. The Spectre, they murmured turning to each other to ensure they all heard right and knew.

It is the Spectre that nobody wants to encounter on the way up and it is the home of the Spectre that no one wants to enter into to disturb and anger the Spectre in. To even approach the craggy peak is to risk awaking the Spectre that no one wants their having called attention to themselves to.

Why?

Because it is the very same Spectre that descends down from the craggy peak and forested mountains across the unfarmed fields and into town.

But … but what does the Spectre do in town?, asked the Samovar practically quaking in its boots as tea steam rose from its top.

Ye-Yeah, said Barry the Fox. Wh..what does the Spectre want in town?

The room grew tense. Nobody expected there to be a Spectre up there or that it would come into town.

Let’s just say the Spectre isn’t here to sightsee.

And … how often does the Spectre come to town?

Regularly.

And then where does the Spectre go?

Back home, to the craggy peak from whence it came.

Alone?

Yes. And. No.

That answered that. Everybody understood. And that’s why the townsfolk avert themselves to what looms that can been seen in the mind’s eye that shows great or little but not all because of what seeing all truly means.

So to approach the Rec Center on Sunday morning was first to look up to what looms and then to turn my sights back to the Eggnog Center for Recreating and that creamy swirling front door through which would be my first meeting of boys who scout who are boys. Just a few more steps and I stepped up to the door. I stopped and looked down at my buckskin pants with fringes on them and my leather moccasins with colorful beads sewn in in the shapes of thunderbirds. Are we ready?, I asked. Deep breath. Exhale. And I pushed the door open.

* * *

The room was empty. Nobody was there. Just a gray light illuminating heavy dust wafting through the air. Was I in the right place? Was I too early? Is this even the right day? Confusion washed over my little heart and mind. Just then from behind I could hear the roar of cars pulling up and kids getting out and they were wearing scout uniforms and big people parked and got out of their cars and started walking toward the door and they too were wearing scouting uniforms with khaki button up shirts dripping with pins and ribbons and badges and the scout-red neckerchief rolled and cinched up with a big metal scout slide, and some were even wearing scout pants in a dark olive while others sported scout caps with a bill and side panels in olive where the front was the scout symbol, a large golden fleur de lis, emblazoned against a scout-red background. They did look sharp. And because of how sharp they really looked and how badly I wanted the put on that scout uniform I felt even worse that I was wearing my old cub scout uniform. But I was relieved that I was in the right place at the right time and so I stepped into the small grayly lit room.

Past the front desk I could see a foosball table and a ping pong table and one very small pool table and round tables with chairs around them. I didn’t know where to go or what to do so I quickly slid off to the side until I reached the near corner of the small room where I wedged myself up and into the most severe curvature of the ceiling become wall that plunges down and into the ground and presumably continues on into the depths of the earth so as not to call attention to myself as the new kid and especially one showing up in the uniform for scouts that are still cubs and not boys who truly scout.

The kids and the big people in scouting uniforms poured in and dispersed throughout the room. Some piled onto couches and sank into the cushions and just sat their with their legs dangling and kicking the front skirting so their heels could sometimes catch a piece of the sagging springs underneath. Others gathered around the round tables or sat Indian style in circles on the floor.

A select few were first ones to the game tables and started up immediately so the room quickly rose in a racket of hollow clonking of pinging and ponging back and forth against the smash of a foosball up and down the table as the steel rods holding foosmen captive slam and throttle side to side with the rising din accented by the ceramic break and knock of pool ball colliding with pool ball. The gray dusty room sprang to life in the stochastic music of boys at play while the big people in their scouting uniforms huddled in the far back of the small room. Nobody noticed me as I tried to stay in the shadows, except for when one of the big people glanced up, trained his eyes on me, and then went back to the conversation among the other big people.

The scene was overwhelming to be honest. Our little Den in Room 13 of Leaper Elementary School had a sprinkling of boys who where cubs that scouted and a Den Leader who sat behind his desk and gave orders that were repetitive but predictable and so somehow comforting. It was nothing like the welter and sheer volume of scouting in that room. The room was a little scary. I knew nobody. I recognized no one. Not one friendly face in the room. Not even a scary big kid from Leaper as a familiar face. Where did all these scouts come from? There were so many of them. Did they come from other schools? Other towns? Other planets? I had no idea.

And something else was different. The big kids that roamed the hall at Leaper Elementary School were not nearly as big as the big kids here. The big kids here were really big as in big big. They were much taller and in some cases heavier and bulkier and of much greater mass and magnitude. Just their presence was different. As they talked and joked or shot pool you could hear a deepness in their voices that you never heard in the squeaky chirping of any of the kids at Leaper Elementary School. And even in the gray light I could see something else was different. Little dark hairs sprouted above their lips or along their chins or down the sides of their faces. Still just downy fur but these were not the normal faces of kids. They were becoming something else entirely.

Some of the big big kids smelled different too where the difference was that they really smelled. Instead of the smell of a little kid, even a dirty little kid, who somehow still retains the scent of a puppy or kitten, some of the big big kids smelled pungent and sharp and acidic and overpowering. I quickly learned who had that smell and I stayed away as much as possible. Or when I had to be near them I sealed my lips tightly and took in only the smallest sips through my scrunched up nose to draw in as little of that infected air as possible.

They also sweated. Not like a little kid who has a sweaty forehead from playing hard. These big big kids sweated in buckets in new places I didn’t know were possible for a kid. Especially in the heat of summer as we roamed the field out back under the hot sun sweat poured out and soaked their scouting shirts and stained the areas under their armpits. Sweated seeped through the backs of their uniforms and all around the front along the path of the buttons. Light khaki shirts darkened in a sea of dark brown sweat.

After a time the biggest man of the big people in the back of the room stepped forward.

Troop 41 gather up, he commanded.

Chatting ceased. The games stopped. Boys broke from where they were and reconfigured into six distinct groups arrayed before the big man. These were the six patrols of the Troop 41.

But what is a patrol?, asked the Big Chair we were all sitting in.

That is an excellent question. For the answer we can look to our bible, The Boy Scout Handbook. The Boy Scout Handbook states that a patrol is a group of six to eight boys who, quote, pal together because they like to do the same things, unquote. Then, quote, A patrol is your team. All the members who together play the game of Scouting, unquote. In short, a Troop is made up of however many patrols there are and however many patrols there are is determined by however many scouts there are in the Troop. It’s mutually generative and reflective. Thus, there were six patrols in Troop 41.

Is that all there is to know about patrols?, asked the Big Chair, who suddenly had lots of questions.

There is much more to know about patrols, in fact. The Handbook also states that each patrol shall have an animal name of its own. That animal shall appear emblazoned on a standard that the patrol makes and displays and carries into wherever they go into inside or outside at the Rec Center. All standards are then returned to the broom closet behind the front desk at the end of each meeting. That animal also appears on a circular patch that each member of each patrol has sewn to his uniform so the patch matches the standard of the animal of your patrol.

Most important, each patrol has its own patrol call to call out and to respond to each other that nobody else can use.

The Handbook explains: When your patrol wins a contest you should shout your call and give your yell to let the Troop know who you are. Hiking in deep woods your patrol leader will sound the call for the patrol to gather. The members of the patrol will understand, but others will think that it is just one of the natural sounds of the woods.

Now, with all six patrols assembled all eyes are on the big man in the uniform. Then from behind the big man and out of the shadows steps an older boy. An older boy, a big big kid, the tallest of them all, standing straight and grand with a neatly pressed uniform and a tightly rolled neckerchief straight and correct affixed by the big metal slide, and a close cropped hair cut and a distinguished amount of fur growing above his upper lip, stepped forward. This was the junior scoutmaster. A boy who scouts that is a boy that is a master of scouts such that being a scoutmaster and yet a boy makes him a junior.

At-ten-shun!

Everyone in all six patrols snapped to attention. Standards went up to represent the patrols and to reveal animals of the patrols in the Troop 41. In short order the tall boy called out each patrol by name. This was roll call where each patrol let out its secret patrol call in reply to let everyone else know they’re there and what their call truly is.

One patrol was the Foxes who called out in a sharp and shrill bark. Barry the Fox took great interest here and was very pleased at being represented, though he did not appreciate the characterization of the bark as being shrill. It’s music to our ears, he said underneath his breath.

Another patrol was the Rattlesnakes. They did not call out per se. Instead they carried taped-up empty cans of Eager Salmon filled with marbles they could shake and then shake back to each other in the same way that real live rattlesnakes talk to each other. Rattle rattle they replied to the junior scoutmaster. The Rattlesnakes also rattled around most of the rest of the time with the marbles just rattling around in those empty cans so you knew where they were even when you couldn’t see them.

The third patrol was the Bison who moo’ed deeply and slowly and resignedly.

Then there were the Owls who, unsurprisingly, called out, Who Who? And the reply was, Who Who? And by answering the question with the question the question is never really answered and yet it really is.

Pine Trees were the fifth patrol. As such the Pine Trees made a soft whooshing sounds as the wind rustling through them and it was hard to hear and I’m not even sure how effective that call would be at a distance or when it’s windy. Also, pine trees are not animals.

Finally there were the Black Crows whose call was one of murder.

All present and accounted for, the taller boy announced to the room and specifically to the big man standing in back of him.

Next, he raised his right hand and shot the scout sign into the air and all hands followed and mine with them. And it began:

On my honor I will do my best
To do my duty to God and my country;
[To stand for what’s right, never to do what I know is wrong,]
And to obey the Scout Law.

To help other people at all times;
[No matter the cost or reward.]
To keep myself physically strong,
Mentally awake and morally straight.

Next will be read the Order of the Day, said the taller kid, and a shorter heavier big big kid stepped forward. He was much shorter than the tall boy but bigger so that his substantial belly mightily strained the buttons of his scouting uniform. This big big kid was literally really big. He was also the assistant junior scoutmaster. I would later learn that he was the prime suspect in the case of boys who are scouts who smell bad. I tried to stay away from him as much as possible. He also like to lord over the smaller kids because he was so big.

The Order of the Day, said the assistant junior scoutmaster, is:

First, dodgeball: Snakes and Crows and Pine Trees versus Bison and Foxes and Owls.

Oh yeah!, the patrol fizzed and bubbled erupting in a chorus of crosschatter. We’re going to kill you this time. Bring it on suckers. You don’t stand a chance. In your dreams. This cross-talk built and built until all the patrols had run out of words and started calling their patrol calls and rattling and mooing and barking and whooshing and who whoing and murdering at each other in a maelstrom of calls consuming one and all with no one spared and everyone enveloped until the calling reached what can legitimately be called the climax of the crescendo where it held and remained at a fever pitch of calling until it truly felt like everything would shatter into a million pieces.

Quiet, commanded the big man, though he looked well-pleased at the ease of the frenzy whipped up within and all around the six patrols.

He nodded to the assistant junior scoutmaster, who continued. After dodgeball we will move outdoors to the open field where we will break into groups by merit badges. You can choose between:

Knots

First Aid

Poisons and their Antidotes

Tree Identification, in which we identify the big Elm tree at the far back corner of the open field

Indian Sign Language

and, Potent Potables.

As you can guess, said the storyteller, a merit badge is similar to an activity that you complete as a cub so you can certify and make permanent that you did it so it was done by filling in the paw print at the bottom of the activity page in your Wolf Cub Scout Book. Except merit badges aren’t just simple activities. They are really big deals involving many activities to get one single merit badge. Merit badges mean having and showing serious skills.

For instance, to get your camping merit badge you had to show your patrol leader and the junior scoutmaster and the assistant junior scoutmaster and at least one of the big people that you know and have the right gear for camping including backpack and clothes and boots and all the equipment you will need packed away in your backpack, and then you need to go on at least two overnight hiking and camping adventures with your patrol or the Troop as a whole and when you are ready to camp you need to set up your camp by finding a good place for your tent and then setting up your tent by clearing the ground and laying the ground tarp on the clear area and then pitching your tent on top the ground tarp and then stowing all your sleep gear including sleeping back and sleeping pad in the tent and then gathering wood for fuel to make a campfire and then building a campfire and then actually lighting the campfire and then cooking a real meal on the campfire with proper cooking equipment that you brought in your backpack and food that you packed in and then in your down time you need to make useful camp items like a clotheslines or camp furniture from an old stump you drag and roll to the campfire and then when it’s night you have to go to bed in your tent and climb in your sleeping bag and sleep there all night until morning when you wake up and make a new campfire for breakfast and then cook breakfast and clean up and ultimately break camp and hike back from whence you came all while leaving no trace, and doing all that at least twice. Only then and when everybody already mentioned okays it can you get your merit badge which is a circular patch with camping embroidered into it that you sew onto your scouting uniform, which I did not have yet.

This is all to say we are no longer in pencil holder land.

You can also guess that accumulating merit badges, just like adding more and more paw prints to make tracks, gets you to the next rank of scouts that are boys. Cubs had animals. The Bobcat. The Wolf. The Bear. Scouts start with the Tenderfoot. Becoming and being a Tenderfoot means you were off to a good start with your first rank and badge, which was an oval patch with the gold boy scout symbol set on a black background wreathed in gold, but remember that you are still weak and feeble and practically useless as a scout. Next comes Second Class. Then First Class. Then, no, not Zero Class. Then the ranks move to an entirely different progression that honestly has no logic.

After First Class is the rank of Morning Star, with a big Gold Star dawning on a deep blue background. Then, the rank is one of Life. Life is a big red heart on a bronze background wreathed in scouting red. Finally comes the legendary Eagle. Eagle Scout. The highest rank that a boy who scouts can earn. This is the pinnacle. The peak. This is what made the taller kid the most distinguished above and beyond his height and demeanor and facial hair. Sewn into the left breast pocket of his neat and laden scouting uniform was nothing less than that Great Silver Eagle set on a red, white, and blue background wreathed in silver thread and set upon a more expansive red background on which was emblazoned the words Eagle and then Scout, all wreathed in another ring of regal silver thread. Only the tall kid even among big big kids was an Eagle Scout. He literally soared above all scouts who were still mere boys who scout.

The Order of the Day droned on. If you’re already working on one of these, said assistant junior scoutmaster, you know where to go. If you aren’t, pick one you can start.

I’m gonna start with First Aid, I thought to myself. That’s the most elemental of skills and something I’ve been so eager to learn since the wheelbarrow accident in Room 13 at Leaper Elementary School where nobody knew what to do.

Finally, said the assistant junior scoutmaster, we will return to the gym for the reading of the Constitution. We’re at, let me see, Article IV, section 2. This will be read by the Owls. A groan from the Owls was amplified by a groan from everybody else too. The weekly reading of the Constitution was not the most beloved part of the meeting and yet here they were working their way through the U.S. Constitution, Article by Article, section by section, start to finish. The activity was clearly not the idea of the boys who scouted in Troop 41. It was by order of the big man who commanded the troop. Hearing groans the big man stepped forward again. Next up after the Constitution, informed the big man to match the grumble of boys with firepower of an entirely different order of magnitude, will be the Federalist Papers. All 85 of them, he promised, and everybody believed him though no one knew what the Federals Papers were. Newspapers, obviously, probably, but beyond that was the kind of mystery everybody dearly did not want to learn the answer to.

Finally, concluded the junior assistant scoutmaster, cookies and punch in the game room. The mood lifted in expectus of cookies and punch. That’s it, said the shorter, but very big, big big kid, and he stepped back.

At-ten-shun!, said the taller boy. Dismissed to the gym.

A stampede for dodgeball ensued. Kids rushed into the big room and slid on the dusty concrete floor and broke up into teams and the games began.

That left me back in the corner wondering what to do. Looking up the big people were huddling some more, discussing something. No one looked at me. Then the huddle broke.

The big man gestured me to a spot on the floor in the middle of the room and the others pushed three round tables together to make one snowman-looking table with five chairs set up on one side. I stood before the snowman on the other side.

The big people took their seats at the snowman table with the big man at the center. All faced me and I faced them.

Welcome to Troop 41, said the big man. I am the scoutmaster.

To my immediate right, continued the scoutmaster, is the first vice scoutmaster. The first vice scoutmaster nodded to me. In case of my death the first vice scoutmaster shall assume the roles and responsibilities of scoutmaster, the scoutmaster added. The first vice scoutmaster nodded again in acknowledgement though with a careful lack of interest about being or becoming scoutmaster as if to say perish the thought.

To my immediate left is the second vice scoutmaster, continued the scoutmaster. To his left at the end of the table is the third vice scoutmaster. And at the far right end of the table is assistant to the scoutmaster, who reports directly to me, though I do from time to time delegate such assistance to one or several of the vice scoutmasters. All three vice scoutmasters nodded first toward the scoutmaster and then toward the assistant to the scoutmaster who nodded back, first to all three vice scoutmasters in ascending order of vice, and then to the scoutmaster.

Welcome, said the scoutmaster, to Troop 41. And welcome to your Orientation. This is where we orient you to the most salient [a word I did not and still do not know the meaning of] aspects of scouting. Do you understand?

I nodded as though I did understand the word salient and by deduction of being new and oriented to the most salient aspects of scouting I inferred that salient somehow referred to the Scout Law and motto and handshake and the Troth, which I had said over and over and done a little wordsmithing to, though nothing too invasive. In that moment everything I had practiced and prepared for raced through my little mind as a final check before it was time to really do it. I was sure they would ask me, quiz me, surprise me, spring it on me, thinking that I didn’t know any of it yet. Thinking that I was not prepared. But I did! I was! My heart raced with nerves and excitement. I brushed the sides of my buckskin pants to make sure the fringes were still there. I wiggled my toes and shifted my feet inside my leather moccasins with colorful beads sewn in in the shapes of thunderbirds and got to a firm but flexible stance. In that moment I knew that I was ready.

First and foremost, said the scoutmaster, where is your uniform? He paused, but not so much for an answer as for the sudden effect.

Are you still a cub or are you here to become a true boy that scouts? This is Troop 41. Do you want to go back to your Den meetings with all the other cubs or are you here to be part of a troop? Troop 41. Real scouting for real boys.

We can throw you back in the shallow waters if that’s what you want, added the scoutmaster.

I was shocked at the precipice I was on. I didn’t want that more than I didn’t want anything else. I tried to explain the situation in fumbling words and nerves spilling over into everywhere, that I had my Handbook, which I was clutching and I raised it to show him, but the uniform might take a little more time. I was working hard to get it, I promised.

The scoutmaster was unmoved. How can you be a scout without the uniform?, he demanded. How can you display the number of the Troop, Troop 41, to which you belong as a set of two large red rectangular patches each with a big number in white thread embroidered into it, where one patch is the number 4 and the other patch is the number 1, and where they are sewn into the upper right arm of the scouting uniform if you do not have a uniform worn by all scouts in Troop 41 to sew them into? How can you join a group of six to eight scouts who are your pals if you cannot display the patch of animal of the patrol to which you belong on a uniform you don’t have?

Maybe we do need to send you back to being a cub for a while longer until you’re truly ready to become a boy, said the scoutmaster. Be Prepared is our motto, if you did not know, and you clearly are not. Clearly, you do no.

And that was that, I believed. My heart sank to the bottom. So long being a boy that truly scouts before it ever even happened. Back to being a cub in the Den in Room 13 of Leaper Elementary School.

Just then the first vice scoutmaster cleared his throat as if to say something. Perhaps, he offered, this boy can join provisionally. He can attend our meetings and learn the ways of scouting and participate in activities. He just can’t be an official member of Troop 41 and he certainly can’t join a patrol. Maybe he can rotate patrols week to week so he can meet all the scouts and learn the ropes. And when he gets a proper scouting uniform he can join, officially. How does that sound?

Until then he will wear his cub uniform, the first vice scoutmaster proposed.

It was a terrible idea that everybody thought was fine and the first vice scoutmaster was visibly pleased at how fine everybody thought his idea was especially when he didn’t have any lead time and came up with a solution on the spot and then said it.

And so, said the scoutmaster, Welcome to Troop 41, provisionally. Now, if there’s nothing else, let’s begin the Orientation of our new, provisional scout.

* * *

Scouting is, the scoutmaster posited. But what is scouting?

Some will say scouting is hiking and camping and whittling on chunks of wood and learning to swim in rough water and navigate rugged terrain or doing Indian sign language. Others will point to all the merit badges you can earn and the ranks you reach one after another until some, though not all or even very many scouts, reach the hallowed rank of Eagle. Eagle Scout.

Some will point to all this and say, That’s what scouting is. Yes, I say. That’s all part of scouting. Part but not nearly the whole. What then is the whole? What is the essence of scouting?

He waited. He looked to me to answer. His look dared me to answer. I thought better of it so I shook my head dumbly.

The essence of scouting is … organizational structure. Corporate hierarchy is the scouting essence where scouting is the body, the corpus, the very being of anything that becomes scouting. This is the whole of scouting. This is the scouting condition for all scouting possibilities and only through scouting possibility is there any actual scouting. Thus, the actuality of organizational structure means the very possibility for the actuality of scouting, on the ground, day to day, here and now. This is what scouting truly is in its heart of hearts, body and soul, for boys who scout who are boys even if they don’t know it, which most boys don’t, said the scoutmaster in equal measure sadness and disdain.

Troop 41 is different. Better. Better than all the rest. We are the best because we begin with the essentials. Back to the basics, I always say, said the scoutmaster as a revelation of means and method.

Where to begin, then? We begin where scouting begins, of course. And where does scouting begin?

This was going to be a long Orientation.

Scouting begins, said the scoutmaster pointing a finger up and toward and almost at me in what I assumed would point to the symbolic everyscout until the finger veered off and away and back to its source landing squarely on chest of the scoutmaster. Scouting begins with the scoutmaster.

Organizationally speaking, said the scoutmaster, the scoutmaster is the not without which of scouting. From the scoutmaster naturally flow the vice scoutmasters and the assistant to the scoutmaster, as the hands of the scoutmaster radiated out to the right and to the left of the scoutmaster on his side of the snowman table.

And what is the junior scoutmaster if not appointed by none other than the scoutmaster? Yes, he admitted, the assistant junior scoutmaster is selected by the junior scoutmaster, but always with the advice and consent of the scoutmaster.

The scoutmaster continued in descending delineation of organizational origins to the effect of those origins in actual scouting through patrols and patrol leaders and assistant patrol leaders and how they are all selected with each higher level of the Troop. Layers of onion, declared the scoutmaster, as advising and consenting all the way back to the scoutmaster, though I remember thinking that that metaphor didn’t quite work for what he was trying to describe.

Then there were the orbiting agencies and agents of the Troop by way of the leadership corps and the leadership council and the counsel to the leadership council, which was the first vice scoutmaster or in the event of his death or disability the second vice scoutmaster. Each agent and agency entailed its own process or processes of selection or appointment or election along with the grounds for removal in all cases excepting scoutmaster who could only be removed, it having already been established, by death itself.

Then there were the committees of scouts within Troop 41 comprised of representatives of each of the six patrols and assigned a specific scope and purview such as gym games or refreshments or summer camp activities, and most distinguished of all, fundraisers like the sale of Boy Scout Crackers — A Scout in Every Boy, A Boy in Every Cracker, being the slogan — designed to break off a piece of that cookie money from the iron clad monopoly held by girls who scout who are girls.

In all, there were 15 committees in Troop 41 where each boy in every patrol had at least 3 committee assignments and, today’s meeting being a rare exception, where much of the weekly meeting was spent in committee or subcommittee or reporting back to the Troop. There was also the executive committee which was comprised of one representative from each of the other committees and on special or emergency occasions everyone in the Troop top to bottom was called to order as a committee of the whole. And it all flows from the scoutmaster on down, even to you, he said finally pointing to me and my provisional place in the order of things.

This is scouting, said the scoutmaster proudly as if now he could truly smell scouting in every particle of the heavy dust hanging in the air. But it doesn’t end there. This is just the beginning.

Mon Dieu, this was going to be a long Orientation.

By virtue of office, said the scoutmaster, the scoutmaster embodies and thus represents the troop on the district council of troops. The district council is the council of all the scoutmasters of all the Troops in the district. A Troop of Troops if you will, said the scoutmaster, savoring his bon mot.

The district council members then elect a council president to lead and command them, the scoutmaster continued. This year that president happens to be …. and the finger again … me. The district, continued the scoutmaster of Troop 41 and district president of the district council of troops in the district, through proposals submitted mainly by the district president, can establish policies and make decisions for all troops in the district. This can range from simple measures like coming down on the question of rolling your neckerchief in forward or backward turns with the upside facing toward or away from you — The answer is forward and up Always forward and up. — to settling territorial and other disputes between Troops in the district, which are more frequent than you probably imagine.

From the local character and flavor of the district of troops the scoutmaster then moved onward and upward to big leagues, as it were, and the majesty of the regional council. There are eight regional councils in all of the states of this great nation, said the scoutmaster. Each regional council is made up of districts within that region and all districts in that region are represented on the regional council by districts presidents. For our district, that representative is … again, the finger.

Our regional council is the Mazama Regional Council, so named for George Mazama who was one of the founders of the organizational structure that is scouting back in 1910. Other regional councils are named for other founders of the organizational structure way back in 1910. In fact scouting goes back to that year when it first appeared as if by magic and a message from God. There’s so much history in scouting from that point on and up until now, said the scoutmaster with a touch of reverie. But I am getting ahead of myself. We’ll cover all that next week when we get to Part II of the Seven Part Orientation on Scouting. Part II is titled The History of Scouting.

My little beating heart stopped beating.

This will be followed the following week by Part III: The History of History.

Part IV covers Whether History.

Part V is a History of Weather.

Part VI is Whither History as in where history goes if not into more and more history, with the subtitle, Whither History as decline and fall in and as History.

Part VII will cover the Scout Law and the handshake and all the rest.

After standing in front of the snowman table for a while now with all the big people in their scouting uniforms on the other side and the scoutmaster looking down at me as together we climbed the organizational chart to the very top I started to go in and out of consciousness. All I heard was bits and pieces. Something about a board of directors. And that son of a bitch chief executive, J.L. Tarr. Tyrants one and all. And, If I was running the show … Someday. That’s about it.

The background roar of dodgeball and the fun everyone was having and the all yelling you do when you’re having fun had long ago ceased and everyone was out back in the field practicing making bandaging each other up because of third degree burns or drinking poison and finding the antidote.

Back inside the game room we were now on to the corporate designation of scouting as a nonprofit organization and the special status of our corporation as being one of the select few incorporated by an Act of Congress and not in the commoner’s way of incorporation in just one of the several states in the Union, and the tax implications for donors by being a nonprofit that is a 501(c)(3), and not a nonprofit that is a 501(c)(4) or 501(c)(6), for example, under the federal tax code.

My knees were growing week. I felt faint. Dizzy. I had to stay standing. Are you still a cub or do you want to become a boy that scouts?, still echoed in my head. Do you want to go back to your Den meetings or are you here to be part of the Troop?

No, I said to myself. I am a boy who is ready to become a scout who is a boy. There’s no going back. And so I steeled myself and listened hard and was oriented, if faintly and barely. Then it happened. I simply and perhaps mercifully blacked out.

When I came to I was still standing. I was in the same spot and hadn’t moved or fallen over. But now I was all alone. The snowman table was still set before me but the scoutmaster and the three vice scoutmasters and the assistant to the scoutmaster were gone. Looking through the doors into the gym I could see the entire Troop gathered around the Owl patrol, with their standard perched high in the middle. They were reading slowly and poorly from the U.S. Constitution. They were just finishing their assigned section, in fact.

… shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due, read a small, squeeky voice.

Here endth Article IV, section 2 of the Constitution, said the junior scoutmaster. Next week the Rattlesnakes will read section 3. At-ten-shun! Troop 41 dismissed to the game room for cookies and punch.

Oh oh!, I thought to myself. They’re coming back in. My legs were stiff and my brain was foggy but I quickly slid back to the corner of the room while the Troop ransacked the cookies and punch table and raced back to finish their games or settled back to their groups on the couch or sitting Indian style on the floor. Soon cars started pulling up and boys pealed away and the big people packed up and got in their cars and drove off. Soon the room was empty except for the gray light and a heavy dust drifting down to fill the void. When all was clear I slid back out from the near corner.

As the swirly cream doors closed behind me I stepped into the parking lot and took a deep breath. Then I looked up and far away to what loomed. With my hand still clutching the Handbook I waived faintly and weakly with almost all my strength and spirit gone. The craggy peak looked on. Then I turned to go back the way I came in the morning to get to my first meeting of boys who scout who are boys. I was now one of them. A member of Troop 41, provisionally.

* * *

I would be lying if I said I didn’t dread the next meeting. But now I knew what to expect and I was ready for it. As ready as I could be. The History of Scouting, promised the scoutmaster. So be it.

But honestly it was kind of interesting. This time it was only the scoutmaster and the assistant to the scoutmaster sitting on one side of the round table. Instead of having me stand before the table the table was pushed up close to one of the soft and smelly couches and I sat sunken into the center of the couch while the scoutmaster detailed the History of Scouting from across the table and up above.

The History of Scouting always begins at the beginning, began the scoutmaster. That beginning was in the year of our Lord, 1910, anno domini. In 1910 a man named General Badminton sailed from a far-off nation called Angleland, which is home to all the angles, bringing two messages. The first was the message of scouting. General Badminton had been a general in the just wars of Angleland and had specifically commanded men who scout. In fact, he wrote the book on it. Twice. Literally. The first book was titled, Reconnaissance and Scouting first published in 1884, and the second book was titled, Aids to Scouting, published in 1899. These books were about scouting for men who scout and this was General Badminton’s first message when he set foot on these shores. Go forth and scout.

The General was practically ready to burst with his message and the first person he saw on the street he just had to tell. This first person was a man named Mr. William Boys, a newspaper from Chicago who was walking the street on his way from one place to the next. He was stopped suddenly by General Badminton who revealed the message of men who scout who are men. It might have ended there had Mr. Boys not had a flash of insight. If men can scout why not boys? Why not start them early? By the time they are men it might be too late for them truly to scout. Besides, this nation of so much promise was sick at heart, poisoned from within by men who were boys who started out as bad apples. God and Country meant nothing to a bunch of bad seeds. Maybe the antidote was to cultivate a new orchard of boys who scout. Maybe then the nation of God and the God of this nation will find a rejuvenation.

This was Mr. Boys’ thinking. Just then a book fell from the sky and landed in the space between General Badminton and Mr. Boys. They looked down. They looked up at each other. They looked down again. Ecce librum!, said the Book. Behold me. And there it was.

What was it?, I asked, to show I was interested and engaged, which I actually kind of was.

Do you see that Handbook that you hold in your hand?, asked the scoutmaster.

I looked down at my hand and it was clutching nothing less than The Boy Scout Handbook (9th ed.), with that famous illustration on the cover of boys scouting painted by Mr. Normal Rockwell. I looked up and nodded furiously.

That was the very same Handbook that fell from the sky, from the heavens no less, and landed at the feet of Mr. Boys and the general from Angleland. Home of the Angles! That Handbook, continued the scoutmaster, fell from the heavens and landed full and complete. Complete with the very same words you read today, and complete with a full set of illustrations, unlike most books, which are not helpfully illustrated to show as well as tell.

Well, without hesitation Mr. Boys bent down and picked up the Handbook and held it close to his manly breast. The General reached his manly hand out and pressed it against Mr. Boys’ manly hands that pressed The Boy Scout Handbook close to his manly chest. From behind the clouds the sun broke and a chorus of angels sang in heavenly host. In that moment the organization of boys who scout who are boys was born. In that moment a nation was reborn. In that moment a nation of God and Country was born again. In that moment the holy union of God – Country – Scouting was born. A lot was born in that moment, said the scoutmaster without understatement.

After conveying his second message on the rules and regulations of the game called badminton, the general boarded a boat and sailed away, back to the Land of All Angles, never to be heard from again. But the seed was planted and the plant blossomed and spread like wildfire. Men of prestige and influence and concern about this diseased nation gathered around Mr. Boys and those men attracted more men and together, in 1910, they built what we are today. Men by the names of Mr. Beard. Dr. Mustache. Gen. Burnside. And Mr. Seth Seton-Seethly, of course. Not to forget our regional council namesake, Mr. Mazama. And many more. Colonels and Captains and all manner of future veterans and deadmen of the First World War. Judges. Professors. Journalists. Politicians. Together they formed the corpus, the body and blood, of scouting whose sustenance was nothing less than manna from the sky, The Boy Scout Handbook (9th ed.).

That corpus and the Handbook that feeds and animates the body and blood live on today, concluded the scoutmaster, as the condition of all possibilities of scouting.

Holy snot!, I thought to myself. Maybe the scoutmaster was right in Part I of the Orientation: The Essence of Scouting. Maybe not right in the sense that the scoutmaster meant as the scoutmaster, and probably this scoutmaster, being the true center of scouting, but still right in a sense. The essence of scouting was in fact big people. It was big people who decided what scouting truly is for us kids, where the scoutmaster sitting before me is the symbolic everyscout of all those big people. Together big people form one single artificial big person, stronger and greater than the natural in body, spirit, and soul, whose holy scripture — whose bible, if you will — is The Boyscout Handbook (9th ed.), fallen from the sky whole and complete and inerrant and unchanged and unchanging since 1910.

Yes, conceded the scoutmaster, that son of a bitch, J.L. Tarr, was right about at least one thing. And one thing only, the scoutmaster quickly added.

* * *

The shortest part of the Orientation was the final part, Part VII, where we covered the Promise and the Troth and the Laws and the handshake and the motto and the sign. After all those extra weeks of practice I was literally beyond ready. It all happened in the form a quiz, as I expected, and the quiz was over almost as soon as it started. What is this? What is that? Bam and Bam. Done and dusted. It took about 6 minutes in total. And that was that. The Orientation was over. But not before all the middle parts, of course, which were take it or leave it and believe me I would have left it if I could of.

Part III: The History of History, for instance. What was the scoutmaster even talking about? How can History have a History that’s not just the very same History? How about the History of the History of History? Or the History of the History of the History of History? My gosh. When does it end?

And Part IV: Whether History. How about Not. No. No, thank you. No History just now, thanks very much. Try Part VI: Wither History as in History can shrivel up and fade away, just like this Orientation.

I must admit that Part V: The History of Weather was fascinating to a degree. The scoutmaster pointed out how amazed everyone is that Eskimos have a hundred words for snow. Plain. Simple. Cold. White. Snow. Falling or on the ground. And a hundred words for that one thing, when it’s all just snow, well, one thing! Doesn’t it seem both remarkable and silly, marveled the scoutmaster rhetorically, to have so many words for one simple singular snow?

I nodded both because I kind of agreed and because I had never thought about it before and this was not the time to both think about it and then come up with a new thought especially if it contradicts what the scoutmaster obviously thinks about it as being both remarkable and silly and then say that thought and then see what happens where what happens probably would not be so great for me. So I nodded for both reasons but mostly because I did pretty much agreed with him on this point.

But do we not, sprung the scoutmaster, have as many names for rain? Plain. Simple. Water. Water falling from the sky.

He looked at me, inviting an answer, as if he read my blank and stunned little mind.

Woah Nelly, I said to myself, as if I were a Horse. But then again, he was right. Finally, this was something in the Orientation I could speak to. So in a still small voice I came up with a few.

Shower. Drizzle. Sprinkle.

Yes, he said cautiously. Any more?

Mist. Downpour. Torrent.

Are there raining rains?, he inquired. If so, what are they?,

Hard rain, I answered. Light rain. Steady rain. Intermittent rain.

What about rain and the seasons?, he asked.

First rain. Warm rain. Spring rain. Summer rain. Freezing rain.

Keep going, he encouraged.

Torrent, I already said, I said. But how about Torrential as in rain torrents in the adjectival?

Do we not even use words for rain that is now on the ground, wondered the scoutmaster aloud. What is this rain called?

A rain puddle, I answered. Or puddle for short because everybody knows its from rain, I added, now with growing confidence.

He paused in a manner that was not unpleased.

What about rain on the very edge of being not rain?, the scoutmaster wondered aloud.

Oh, this was tricky. I thought hard. It was certainly a riddle. But was it a trap? Don’t be too confident now you silly kid. Was I supposed to say there is no such thing? Or what if I say there’s no such thing when there really is such a thing especially if I that’s what I suspected all along. Or what if I come up with something only to discover there’s no such thing so that my something is in truth no thing at all and I should have just said there’s no such thing. Think. Think.

Sleet!, I cried out. Sleet! Sleet as rain where it’s snowiness means it’s not plain and simple rain anymore, and where its raininess means snow is not quite snowy enough.

I bet the Eskimos don’t have a word for that!, I gloated.

They do, said the scoutmaster. It’s kannik silalummik akullilik.

Oh, I said. Of course they do. Now I was ashamed.

Do we have a word for rain while the sun still shines down such that the phrase, Come rain or shine, becomes a false dichotomy?

We don’t, I thought to myself. But we do!, I realized. A sunshower! My goodness.

So you see, concluded the scoutmaster. It’s all just water falling from the sky and even puddled up on the ground. And yet rain is never just rain and nothing else? Do we not know rain for what it is by all the ways we truly know it and all the names that tell the tales of what rain is truly? Rain is what rain means. A spring shower to water the world, continued the scoutmaster. A warm summer’s rain walking hand in hand. The warmth of the water falling from a sultry sky. A drizzle that signals a change in seasons. Being cozy together by the fire drinking hot cocoa and listening to rain pitter-patter on the roof above. Autumn by the window as a hard rain pummels the earth. A torrent falling and rising within and all around as she walks away. Driving through the dark of the deluge to get her back only to see two figures off in the distance dancing between the drops and growing only warmer, arm in arm, deeper and deeper inside each other. Walking away as sleet piles up and turns to snow so as to bury you alive in a world of wet and cold even as strangers up and down the street sit cozy by their fires sipping hot cider and eating blueberry scones looking out the window upon the very same, this gathering wonderland of wintry white.

Yes, said the scoutmaster, concluding the History of Weather segment of the Orientation, rain is not just one thing. Rain is a fiction of unity that both conceals and reveals a multiplicity of true meanings all hiding, taking shelter, growing strong, rebelling, warring, leaving in shambles what resides under the word of one roof. Rain is like love, said the scoutmaster apropos of nothing. Love is like rain. A fiction of unity, as his face flashed. A bundle of fictions. Flickering. Fleeting. Fickle. Feckless. Faithless. False.

Unlike scouting, he said with vehemence. For there is only one true way of the scout and only one true scouting organization to shepherd the way. All the others are pure heresy. Pure. Heresy. Heresy pure and simple.

I didn’t know what the word heresy meant or what being hairy had to do with what he was talking about but it sounded awful and hateful and to be rejected.

There is only true scouting, said the scoutmaster. True scouting is the only unity amid so much fiction. Remember that. On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and Country. Scouting, God, and Country. The Holy Trinity, declared the scoutmaster bowing his head.

Scouting — God — Country

Yesterday. Today. Forever and Ever.

There he stopped and fell silent but you could hear imperceptible with a perceiving ear the inner voice of the scoutmaster whispering solemnly:

Amen.

I bowed my head too. It felt like a sacred moment. A moment to be remembered.

Having completed the Orientation I was released into Troop 41, provisionally. Still not having the scouting uniform I was introduced and then passed around patrol to patrol first to the Bison and on from there, week after week, month after month, while I scrimped and saved for a uniform so I could become a real boy who scouts.

* * *

Being shuffled from patrol to patrol was exactly like you would expect it to be. I was neither anyone’s pal nor part of the team. I was an intruder, a spy practically, unwanted and unwelcome, dressed up as a cub in the silly blue uniform with a yellow kerchief wrapped around my neck. I was painfully conspicuous so as to invite being brushed aside and ignored. So I tagged along with a patrol for the day in the sense of being stood and tolerated because of scoutmaster’s orders and then at the end of the meeting I simply disappeared, dissolved from view, out of sight out of mind, only to show up next week with the next patrol. Then six meetings later I was back around in the manner of coming full circle so as to start the cycle all over again, such that each week became the restart of one of these cycles while five other cycles were in some phase of waning then waxing till I fully came round to them again, and then round to them again, and then round again, and then round, and then again, and again, week after week, in the manner of spinning plates while the plates spun me.

Working on merit badges was a little easier because the patrols broke up and everyone remixed according to which badges scouts were working on. So each time a new set of badges was on the menu the Troop as a whole reshuffled into all sorts of new combinations. And yet each scout from each patrol was still part of the greater, which was of course the Troop, each with the same uniform and the same set of white numbers on a red background, spelling the number 41, sewn into the right sleeve just below the shoulder. So each patrol member easily blended into these temporary teams working toward the same merit badge and each temporary team was made up of kids who were already pals from the pool table or from playing foosball or joining forces in dodgeball or sitting Indian style on the dirty floor of the game room just shooting the breeze.

Nevertheless, I worked hard because there were things I wanted to learn, like fire making and orienteering, along with first aid and all the basics you would need to walk into the deep woods and expect come out alive again.

Curiously, as the weeks passed I noticed that Troop 41 never actually seemed to walk into any woods, deep or shallow, near or far. Troop 41, nor any patrol therefrom, never ever even seemed to leave the Eggnog Center for Recreating whilst scouting. Meetings always began in the game room only to move one room over for a big activity in the gym. Then the Troop breaks into committees or subcommittees, with time often reserved for practice on merit badge requirements in the open field or in the gym depending on the nature of the badge and weather conditions.

The denouement of each meeting was the Troop 41 reading of, now, the Federalist Papers. This is where all strands of scouting are woven together, the scoutmaster would say. Finally, cookies and punch. And that was it. A formula well worn, tried and true, never deviating and never departing from the Eggnog Center for Recreating.

In fact the only time anyone from Troop 41 ventured forth was when a delegation of scouts was deployed across the street to the Everlasting Gardens Nursing Home to do a good deed like sit and play UNO or hold wheelchair drag races and push old people down the center hall of the capital H that was the Everlasting Jardins Nursing Home. Always in head-to-head competition, single elimination, winner take all. Legends were made and bragging rights secured in those races while dreams could be crushed in an instant. The old people loved it.

Other times a patrol would be called over to help pack up the belongings of someone who had moved out. Nobody liked doing this. Old people looked weird and they smelled even funnier than big big kids and they always had something crusty or gooey oozing or clinging about their faces or stuck to the fingers that petted and fawned over boys who scout who are boys. Almost by rule this meant that all their possessions looked and smelled weird and that the same crust and goo oozed and clung to almost everything they owned. An acrylic knit blanket they draped over their lap caked with crust practically baked into the warp and weft. Fresh and semi-dried ooze in splotches on the cover of a scrapbook by the bedside with bits of crust flaking off and onto everything around. Scouts were always relieved when they could exit through the patio doors and breath in the open air and cross the road and return back to the Rec Center.

Otherwise, Troop 41 never left the confines Rec Center. The room to roam at the Rec Center was so much bigger than Room 13 at Leaper Elementary School and yet the open field started to feel smaller and smaller and the curved walls of the Yule Log closed in and wrapped around tighter and tighter.

I heard that a scout once questioned why no one ever went anywhere. All we ever seem to do is meet so we can have meetings and sub-meetings and take minutes and report out, the scout complained.

The scoutmaster heard this and pounced. The real action of scouting, he roared, is being knee deep in committee work. This is the true wilderness of man. Learn to tame these wilds and the world will be yours. Fail to learn the lesson and the world consumes you. As for wandering into those woods, added the scoutmaster. Do you really want to go up there? Into that? To find what? The questions were rhetorical, as if to say, I’ll take you in that’s what you really want, knowing full well that everybody knew what was up there and more importantly what came down from way up there, and that’s not what anybody truly wanted to find out anything about and the scoutmaster didn’t think so. Word about the exchange spread fast, scout to scout, patrol to patrol, and was passed down, generation to generation, and no one ever questioned the scoutmaster again.

In fairness there were positives to having a big open field so we could practice skills necessary to earn merit badges. The first and foremost skill to practice and learn was, of course, fire.

Firemaking is what sets us apart from wild animals like bobcats and wolves and bears, says the Handbook. Firemaking saw man separating himself from himself as savageness becomes civilization. Firemaking is what allows civilized man to venture back into savage lands. Firemaking is the heart and hearth of scouting.

To earn the merit badge we learned the four elements of making, which, when combined combusts as the alchemy of fire. The key was not to shortchange any step along the way. Don’t be a lazy or skimpy alchemist, admonishes the Handbook.

Step 1: Gathering Processing Staging

The first element of firemaking is gathering and processing and staging your fuel, which is firewood. Look for deadfalls or trees standing upright that are dead already. These kinds of woods have a better chance of being seasoned to make firestarting and burning much easier. Plus, why cut down and kill a live tree when you can utilize and repurpose what no longer has a purpose of its own any more?

And remember, says the Handbook: Collect more than you think you’ll need. Have enough wood to cook your meal and warm yourself and your pals into the evening and burn through the night only to surprise you with glowing embers in the morning to light your fire anew to cook your breakfast before you set off again.

To process your firewood be sure to bring an axe or hatchet or a sturdy knife, preferably with a full tang and scandi grind. Most preferably the blade of your knife will be carbon steel for reasons we will see in a moment. When you imagine chopping wood you picture a heavy axe whaling away on a log set upon another log, log on log, splitting big rounds into firewood stacked high. The skill and strength to do this is important. But more often you will find small trees or broken branches that you simply cut down to length rather than split by girth. These smaller rounds can still be split if needed but more in the manner of a whack or thwap rather than a whale.

Step 2: Tinder
The next element flows directly from the first as the firewood you gather also becomes your tinder. The wood you chop and thwap can be broken down and down and down by way of more chopping and breaking and batoning and whittling until you turn some of your firewood into one kind of tinder called kindling as shards and twigs and pencil sticks and even shavings just like feathers.

In fact, a conscientious firestarter will stage wood according to the phases of fire-making. Firewood rounds. Then firewood halved and quartered. Then firewood broken down and down and down some more. Each phase will be stacked and piled neatly one next to the other. Your stacks form a buffet of wood and as you build your fire you go up the line picking fuel smaller to larger until your fire is full. The end goal, of course, is a campfire piled high with big juicy logs burning hot and bright. But try lighting a log.

No, a fire begins with the your tinder, which will most often but then again not always be kindling for all kindling is tinder but not all tinder is kindling. A pile of dry grass or leaves works like or as an equal measure of dry twigs or feathered wood shavings. Birch bark peeled off in a strip and then shaved or scraped into a fine dust becomes a potent mound of wood and rich oils. Fat wood, or wood saturated with sap in its heart of hearts, is also prized as fuel literally awash in fuel. Certain fungi that cling to the nearest tree, including your favorite and mine, Fomes fomentarius or horse’s hoof, also make excellent tinder. If you have ever seen the sculpture in limestone by Mr. Albin Polasek, titled Man Carving His Own Destiny, in which the man in question emerges by scupting himself out of his very rock you will know what Fomes fomentarius looks like and how to identify it. It is the hoof of a horse galloping itself out of the very tree from whence it came even while it clings to the tree as if it’s life depended on it, which it does. The difference is that the limestone man hewing himself is both metaphor and fiction while horse’s hoof, when cracked open, is dry and porous and fibrous and takes a flame or spark easily.

Step 3: Starter
This brings us neatly to the third element, the flame or spark. It only takes a spark to get a fire going, sings the song. This is obviously both true and untrue. And yet, aside from lightning heaven-sent or a young Ms. Drew Barrymore in the role of Charlie McGee, who, let’s be honest, has every right to rain down fire on everyone around, a spark or flame on the down low is in fact what it takes to get a fire started.

Matches, waterproof matches, or, God forbid, a BIC lighter, are the obvious choices in the sense of being the dullest and most unskilled choices for starting a fire, says the Handbook. The true scout knows primitive and technical and truly spectacular methods. Start with the ferrocerium rod, or ferro rod, for short. The ferro rod is a cylinder of hard shiny smooth black material which you strike with the back of your knife with a carbon steel blade. The strike sends a shower of sparks hotter than the sun down upon your awaiting tinder, tinder in expectus. Speaking of weather, a ferro rod works rain or shine, in wind, unlike the lighter, as well as in fair weather. A ferro rod is practically inexhaustible, as well. Long after you run out of matches you will be striking that ferro rod for the hundredth or thousandth time so as to throw a million-billion sparks before you wear the rod to the nub.

Then, there are even more primitive methods of making fire. Flint and steel and the bow-drill are prime examples. And don’t get me started on char cloth, says the Handbook. Just don’t. Yes, to be a real firemaker is to know all these methods for making fire and not just relying on a box of matches and a silly lighter.

Step 4: Building

Now that you have all the material and methods at your disposal you are ready to build your fire. To build, says the Handbook, you first must dwell in the art and science of firemaking. But to truly dwell in fire you must then build it. After clearing a spot on the ground your tinder is set down as a small mound of birch bark or feathered strips of wood. You can also cradle tinder, such as dry grass or twigs, in your hands as if holding a bird’s nest that welcomes a spark into its ineffable folds and nurtures that spark so as to burst into flames. Your ignited tinder will then ignite your firewood from below or above or next to depending on the structuration of the wood as teepee or log cabin or raft or lean-to. A Dakota fire is one of the most advanced and sophisticated types fires, perfected long ago on flat and windy planes by savage Indians. The Dakota fire adopts the idea of fire in a hole and a hole dug twice over, in which fire is made in a small pit dug next to another small empty fireless pit, with them both being conjoined by a tunnel that draws air between, fueling the fire by oxygen, which the savage Indians knew nothing about, all while limiting smoke so the marauding U.S. Calvary can’t detect you while you cook food and warm yourself.

To light and start a fire is to build it up from dust and feathers to twigs and branches, then split wood and quarters so that finally you lay upon your fire full rounds of solid wood that are now consumed in the flames of a fire able to feed upon itself. The moral being, concludes the Handbook, fire made from different materials and methods. Fire under all conditions, dry and wet, rain and snow, summer and winter. This is what true firemaking is. And because the Rec Center had an open field we could actually light fires that were not heated and illuminated by a flashlight. However, because there was only one tree in the open field at the Rec Center, the big Elm tree at the far back corner of the open field, we were limited on what fuel we could gather and process and stage and burn. And because none of the instructors had ferro rods or knew how to make a bow drill the solution was Presto logs, strips of newspaper, and some lighter fluid splashed on and lit from a book of matches, though all was done in an authentic manner mimicking an array of methods and material so as to become familiar with playing the full sonata of fire in its many movements using only one single solitary note, as it were.

* * *

Orienteering was also something we could learn in the open field. It was a rare honor to be instructed by the scoutmaster himself. Usually the scoutmaster wove in and out of the groups to make sure everything was being done correctly and truly and by the book. The Orienteering merit badge was a distinct exception where he did it himself. The scoutmaster loved to instruct scouts on how to navigate and encompass the wide world. His method was very precise and there were generations of scouts who learned orienteering straight from the scoutmaster.

We began inside the gym at the center of the center circle of the basketball court. This, said the scoutmaster, is true north. This is where Scouting meets God and country.

We all shook our heads.

Now, follow me outside, instructed the scoutmaster. All except you, he said, pointing to me. You stand right here at the exact center of the circle. Don’t you move a muscle.

Stepping outside across the track the scouts reached the very tip of the upper corner on the right of the open field. The scoutmaster stopped and from the long side pocket of his scouting pants with a loop hovering above so as to tote a hammer around the scout master drew out one scout-red stake. He bent down and plunged the stake into the hard earth at the very point and intersection of the upper right-hand corner of the open field just out the doors from the gym.

Then the scoutmaster issued his commands. Everyone on the line, single file, facing the stake, said the scoutmaster as he motioned them down the line so their backs faced the patio of old people sitting there watching the goings on with great interest.

Now you, first in line, get down on your hands and knees and look through the scout-red stake into the gym and tell me what you see.

The first scout followed the order and brought an eye up to the red stake looking right through it past the open door and into the gym.

What do you see?, demanded the scoutmaster.

I see the stake lined up with that little kid in a cub uniform standing at the very center of the circle of the basketball court, answered the scout.

That’s correct, replied the scoutmaster. And what is the very center of the circle called?

True north, they all replied.

And what is your true north?

True north is Scouting, God, and Country.

Correct!, rewarded the scoutmaster.

This, gentlemen, pointing to the red stake in the ground, is your magnetic north. This is what your compass points to to point the way to true north. With a direct line through magnetic north you will always find north that is true. Do you understand?

He motioned for me to join the group outside. I scurried out with my compass in hand. I was excited to use my new compass that I had bought used with some of my uniform money at the Army-Navy Surplus Store. The Army-Navy Surplus store was in a rundown shop on the corner of a rundown block in a rundown part of town. It was also one of my favorite places in all of town to go to. To walk in is to get bowled over with the heavy smell of oiled canvas and rusting metal and mothballs and mouldering gear, which was to my little mind the rugged smell of freedom and adventure. Walls filled with canvas packs from armies around the world, some with thick rubber linings for waterproofing. Racks of webbed belts with quick release buckles and eyelets to hang holsters and canteens and ammo packs and first aid kits. Off to the side an array of gas masks hung ghostly and ghoulish overlooking the store. Colorful military patches and breast bars were displayed in an old watch carousel that you could turn round and round to reveal ranks and insignia of fierce animals and thunderbolts and steeds rearing up and tanks rumbling down the road.

On the back wall were banks of cubbyholes stuffed with camouflages shirts and wool pants and jackets for rain and snow and thick woolen socks and watchcaps and fingerless gloves to keep your hands both warm and dexterous. Next to the clothes were stacks and stacks of steel helmets in different shapes and colors — green, brown, grey, blue — that were worn on every continent of the world and rolling over fierce waves on the high seas.

There were shelves and shelves of camp supplies like tin cups and cooking pots, canteens and small stoves, hanks of rope and twine, and small shovels that fold up for easy packing. On the floor in front of the shelves were boxes simply opened up and left there to reveal military rations in olive green pouches with black letters printing their contents. Beans and rice. Spaghetti and meatballs. Chicken and dumplings. Tuna salad and crackers. My mouth watered just looking at them.

At the front near the register were the glass cases with Bowie knives and bayonets and knives with jagged blades for stealth and maximum damage. There was even a bin of real grenades, with the fuses removed of course, but with pin still in the lever. They were six dollars each.

It was at the Army-Navy Surplus Store that I got my compass out of the used compass bin. It was a tough decision to use some of my uniform money for something that wouldn’t help me become an official member of Troop 41. But I really wanted to learn how to navigate rough and unknown terrain and this was my only chance. The compass was nothing special. Just the standard sort with a clear baseplate. It was bruised and battered and obviously used but none the worse for wear. The top half of the baseplate consisted of a large red arrow pointing straight out and off into the distance. This is your direction arrow. You point this in the direction you want to travel in. On the bottom half of the baseplate is your circular housing reciting the cardinal points — North – East – South – West — along with a lot of numbers. Inside the housing is the guts of the compass. Here you find the compass needle, half red and half white, floating gently on a sea of tranquility. My compass was old and weathered but it was a true compass and I was excited to use it. I clutched it even harder as I rushed out to be with the group.

For the Orienteering merit badge the scoutmaster first taught us how to determine our exact location. Begin by locating the scout-red stake signifying magnetic north, said the scoutmaster. Then look to the sky to find the Spouter Star which spouts out other stars in the manner of a sparkler. This sidereal fountain follows you wherever you go. Next, use the corrective of 4’33” in both time and distance because you will always be off a little. Finally, look down. This keeps you rooted so as not to free-float away. Combine these four coordinates and you will always know where you truly are. The scoutmaster called it the quadrilangulation of current location and warranted that is far more accurate, 133.333% more accurate, than the older more primitive way of triangulating, a word he said with a touch of pity and disdain so that we all adopted the very same sentiment about triangulation.

Of course knowing where you are is only half the battle, continued the scoutmaster. Knowing how to get somewhere else from where you truly are so that you truly go there, and knowing the lay of the land out and about and in between is the other half of the battle. Together they make up the whole battle.

And so using the scout-red stake as our magnetic north the scoutmaster deployed each scout to travel a path so as to formulate a map of the open field to get from point A to point B and onward. He called this the mapping of the scouting grounds as a map of the world in miniature.

Each and thus every scout began his journey at the scout-red stake with a heading of due south as the anti-direction. The direction of heresy, the scoutmaster called it. With one sneaker heel touching the stake that is magnetic north the scout proceeded south in paces called sneaker-paces or scout-paces, toe to heel, heel to toe, counting paces as you go. The job of each scout was both to get to where you are going and to count the number of sneaker-paces it took to get there. This will provide you with exact distances covered, from which you can calculate the total area covered.

How far do we go in this direction?, asked he scouts.

Go, until you cannot, the scoutmaster commanded. Go until you, quote, reach the outermost limits, unquote. And then stop. In a practical sense this meant going until you reach the bottom point on this side of the open field. If you go any farther you cross the track and then walk into the road and end up on the patio with old people now gathering around you petting and fawning. And so in an essential sense the other end of the open field on this side was also the true limit of how far you really want to go in any case.

When you reach the southernmost outer limit on this side of the open field, the scoutmaster called out, you will use your compass to turn directly east. This is a 90° turn to the left. A right angle in direction of left, if you will, the scoutmaster chuckled at the dichotomy.

With scout-paces, he continued, you will proceed due east until you reach the next sheer boundary, which by now obviously meant the opposite bottom corner of the open field. In this case if you go any farther you cross the road that ambulances travel up and down on and wander into unfarmed fields that rise up hill to mountain, wood to forest, mountain to craggy peak that simply looms. The point of stopping where you stop because you cannot go any farther was plain to everyone.

Now, turn left again, said the scoutmaster. Face up the line of the field and proceed with your scout paces. The scouts paced off the distance until they arrived at the fourth and final corner of the open field.

From this point, quizzed the scoutmaster, where is your magnetic north? Dumbly and gullibly all the scouts used the line they had just sneaker-paced shot it straight out in front of them in the direction that ran past the Eggnog Center for Recreating and ended up in the river that flowed down from the east and continued on to the west and out to see.

But look down at your compass, counseled the scoutmaster. Where is the needle pointing?

Over there, pointed the scouts, to their left, to the scoutmaster standing at the scout-red stake in the ground where their individual and collective journeys began. A full 90° from where they thought they should be pointing.

Return to me, commanded the scoutmaster. Return to you magnetic north. Line up again and look through the door. What do you see.

We see true north floating above the circle at the center of the basketball court.

And what did you see from over there at that point?

Everybody shrugged because they really didn’t know.

What you say, the scoutmaster answered, was a north you thought was true but was really false. It was a false north. You felt like that was your magnetic north, but it was not. It was a lie. It was a direction meant to lead you astray so you land in the middle of the raging river. So your are swept out of town and into the deep blue sea. So you are lost. Lost to scouting. Lost at sea. Lost forever. Lost for good.

The difference between magnetic north, this point, this trajectory, this orientation, this scout-red stake, and all the lies wrapped up in that point over there is called the declination, informed the scoutmaster as he swept his hand across the field to illustrate the vastness of error that was possible. In orienteering, said the scoutmaster, the declination is the angle and trajectory and area of deceit.

Why is it called the declination?, asked one scout.

Because to know the deceit is to decline it. To say No to the false north. To put the No in north when it is false.

Isn’t there a No in north when it is true or magnetic?, asked another scout.

The scoutmaster did not appreciate all the questions. The answer was simple, however. You do not say No to what is true and what truly guides and pulls you in the right direction. Therefore, there is no No in north.

Before the scouts could process all that the scoutmaster moved on quickly. Now, for the final lesson. What happens when you are lost and deceived?, asked the scoutmaster. The answer is simple. Do what you just did. Find the scout-red stake and go to it. As fast as you can. Count sneaker-paces, if possible. If not, just run. This is the direction of progress and a better tomorrow, oriented by magnetic north that always points to north that is true.

Here endth the lesson.

In this manner everyone earned their Orienteering merit badge. Everybody but me.

I swear I followed the scoutmaster’s instructions to the letter. But something went terribly wrong. Beginning at the scout-red stake that is magnetic north I followed the needle of my compass in a south-bound direction until I ended up not at the bottom point of the open field but at the far right corner of the baseball field. Then, turning left I reached the bottom end of the baseball field facing the old people now beginning to gossip about the strange blue scout off on his own while the other scouts reached the other bottom end of the open field where they should be. We were now literally two fields apart.

As they followed their false north in the seductive whisper of a Baal or Belial I was on my way to the other far corner of the baseball field. I was in a panic. What was happening? Where was I? They were all over there and I was over here making a mess of everything.

Then, as if by magic, we both turned left again and walked the lines we were on and somehow all ended up back at the scout-red stake that was magnetic north. I was just a few feet away on the corner of the baseball field. I used the corrective of 4’33 and, voilà, I was back at magnetic north.

I was relieved and a little confused. Maybe the scoutmaster didn’t notice. But looking up the scoutmaster was staring right at me. Through me. He visibly displeased Enraged even. He sputtered and frothed. Was this a joke? An affront? Was I mocking him?

No, I pleaded. I was following my compass and your instructions and doing my best. I don’t know what went wrong.

He walked up to me so his hulking presence blotted out the sun. He snatched my compass and held it up, side by side, with his own. He stood there a moment just looking, back and forth, compass to compass. Whatever he saw the look on his face went from rage to one of being gobsmacked. He didn’t know what to make of it. He didn’t know what to say. He was speechless. He simply gestured to show me. I leaned in to look at what he saw.

Holding the two compasses side by side, his compass pointed directly to the scout-red stake. Mine, however, pointed due east in the sense that the red needle pointed to the N on the dial of my compass that aligned with the big red arrow shooting off into the distance you want to go, and this all pointed to what should be magnetic north, except that everything about my compass pointed due east.

It’s not even pointing south as the heretical direction, muttered the scoutmaster, finally finding words to describe his feelings. It’s point east. What compass points east? That made no sense at all. As he mumbled to himself he turned slowly in a circle, both compasses still in hand, with each compass needle moving so as to remained fixed on its magnetic draw. It was just an entirely different magnetism that drew each of them. He had never seen anything like it in his life.

Where did you get this infernal compass?, demanded the scoutmaster.

I told him.

The scoutmaster was still turning in a circle watching the two needles draw while trying to grasp what was happening. It was simply not possible. And yet it was possible because it was actual.

The scoutmaster stopped circling himself. With one hand he placed his own compass into the front pocket of his scouting pants safe and secure. With the other hand he released my compass to fall to the ground amid the weeds and dried grass. Then with the force of Hephaestus setting hammer to anvil to break a little body of a rebel to the gods the scoutmaster drove his heel into my compass so the compass shattered and the liquid floating the needle bled out and the needle snapped all was buried in the cracked earth.

It’s broken, he announced.

The scoutmaster seemed satisfied and walked away, now with a slight limp probably from hyper-extending his knee from the sheer force of pulverizing my compass, back into the gym along the line described between the scout-red stake still in the ground and the center of the circle of the basketball court and all the other scouts scurried after him.

So not all of my efforts to earn merit badges with Troop 41 during the weekly meetings at Rec Center were successful.

This is where self-study comes in. The only time you could do scouting beyond the confines of the Eggnog Center for Recreating was what Troop 41 called self-study, which was not a study of the self or the being that is the self or the self that is a relation of the self to the self studying being.

No, self-study meant selecting and doing merit badges on your own time outside of Troop 41 meetings. Scouting by yourself, on your own, in other words. This was in recognition that the meetings could only cover so many topics given a limited number of qualified instructors and the time allowed meeting to meeting. In general weekly scout meetings mostly covered the required badges that every scout would need at some point or another. Here I did start to earn many of the standard merit badges that every scout needed to have and that I really wanted.

But to rise in rank you needed more and more badges that were not part of the basics. For instance, to reach the rank of Morning Star you needed five extra merit badges on top of the standard merit badges. Becoming a scout with the rank of Life, with the scout-red heart on a sea of bronze, meant earning seven more merit badges on top of that. And an Eagle Scout required you to earn 10 more merit badges on top of the top of all that.

Much of my self-study, or preparation for self-study, took place at night next to the single flame of my kerosene lamp. This was a quiet time where I could scout far away from all that goes on at scout meetings. I was no where near needing extra badges for those higher ranks. I was still earning the required core badges one at a time. It was slow, but I was enjoying finally learning real things in the real world, small albeit but larger than Room 13 at Leaper Elementary School. I also wanted to plan ahead and know what’s in store and what I wanted to work after that. I wanted to Be Prepared. So at night I would look through the full catalog of merit badges at the very back of the Handbook and bend the corners of the pages of a merit badges I wanted to work on.

The catalog began with all the standard merit badges. Fire. First Aid. Swimming. Canoeing. Camping. Knives. Shooting. Ordnance. Indian Sign Language. This was the most traveled and referenced and used part for any scout. It was the first five books of the Old Testament, as it were. Everybody starts there and takes them to mean what most of scouting truly is.

Then you get to the largest section, which is the middle section, containing the most number of merit badges that scouts can pick and choose from. Where scouts go and don’t go is more a matter of taste and preference and predilection and circumstance and it just really depends on what a scout is interested in and takes to heart.

A scout might be drawn to the Identifying Nature series of merit badges. Bird Identification. Insects. Trees. Flowers. Plants, edible and poisonous. Mammals, furry and less furry. Fish, clever or stupid. Reptiles, friendly or no. It was all there to learn and identify and record. For each merit badge you kept a notebooks of what you saw, mostly in town since nobody goes out of town unless they head down river after the closing of The Eager Salmon, in which case they mostly likely never return. The notebook is a log of sightings and identifications. What you saw. Where you saw it. When, both date and time. Notables like weather conditions, behavior of subject, reaction to you looking at it. And, if you are able to draw a little picture, please do so.

A scout might also just try one of these badges without needed to do more or all of them. The easiest was the Tree merit badge since we mainly have the old Elm tree in the back of the open field, and logging that was usually exhaustive enough of trees in town that were possible to log to get your merit badge.

You could also earn merit badges of a worldly quality. There was the Citizenship Troika: Local Citizenship; National Citizenship; Global Citizenship. Together they form a unified, seamless, and uncontradictory whole, three horses pulling together so as never to pull you apart. Then there was the scoutmaster’s favorite. Robert’s Rules of Order. If you wanted to get on his good side and if you ever wanted to even think of becoming junior scout master or assistant junior scoutmaster you got the Parliamentary Procedure merit badge and you were quick and willing about it.

There was also an entire section of the middle section pointing you to avocations like engineer or geologist or fish factory manager. Every scout was drawn to a different combination of these middle merit badges. This was the land of plenty that fed your ambition to rise in rank and stature.

Then there’s the final section of the catalog of merit badges at the very back of the back of The Boy Scout Handbook. These are the Amoses and Obadiahs and Habakkuks and Haggais of merit badges. Almost no one ventures into this barren and inhospitable land. Almost nobody studies what what lies herein. If you do stumble on these merit badges because it’s your first time out and you don’t know any better you soon discover you have traveled way too far and so you turn around and never look back.

Take for instance the merit badge for Household Living, which included requirements like taking out the trash, mowing the lawn, painting a picket fence, building a picket fence if you don’t already have one, painting your new picket fence, and rewiring your electricals. The list goes on and on and on as the greatest hits of things a boy, whether a scout or no, does not want to do and will avoid if at all possible. At best a good boy will figure out how to trick other, dumb boys into doing them.

I bet you’re too weak to stack that pile of firewood over there. Way too weak to do it.

You’re too young to paint fences with this big paint brush and heavy bucket of paint. That’s for older boys.

Am not. Are so. And so on.

Then there’s the Personal Finance merit badge, which begins with an assurance. If you, the scout, invest your tuppence, wisely in the bank, says the Handbook, it will be safe and sound. Soon, that tuppence, invested in the bank, continues the Handbook, will compound.

The Personal Finance merit badge requires setting up a meeting with the bank manager and, if possible, the full governing board of the bank including its chairman who will be an old person like the ones across the street numbly playing UNO. But this old person will be very sly and cunning, so beware.

Bring your tuppence to the meeting to open an account, the Handbook instructs. At the conclusion of the meeting let that tiny hand grasping your tuppence open like a flower that the bank may pick and pluck so that you now have prudently and thriftily and frugally and scoutingly invested in the, to be specific, in the Dawes, Tomes, Mousely, Grubbs, Fidelity Fiduciary Bank.

It was surprising that the Handbook would recommend one specific fidelity feduciary bank among so many other fidelity and/or fiduciary banks. In any case, what scout joins scouting to own railroads in Africa or a plantation in the Carribean, or Carribean, however you say it. I, for one, was saving my tuppence for a real scouting uniform so I could become a real boy who scouts in Troop 41.

Enough of Personal Finance. Keep traveling through the wasteland and you arrive at merit badges like Papermaking and Quill Nibbling and Bookbinding and Scholarship. I could not think of a constellation of merit badges so distant to hiking and stalking and hunting and dressing and butchering and knives and archery and guns.

That being said, I began to read the Papermaking merit badge with genuine interest. The story it told was intriguing. Papermaking as the ancient art and science of vellum. Ink as words and words on skin. Inscribing meaning on the very body of the beast, the surface albeit.

The companion merit badge was obviously Quill Nibbling. What is nibbling a quill, asks the Handbook tantalizingly, if not a highly skilled and delicate version of whittling a stick? In the woods you sharpen the end of a stick to spear a fish or poke a hotdog to roast over the fire. Nibbling a quill is simply no different yet way better than whittling a dirty stick from the ground. Instead your tool is a delicate feather. The instrument of flight. In many ways the quill is scouting in essence, said the Handbook enigmatically, as the instrument of flying away.

Bookbinding is then the binding of skins with words on them inscribed in ink by a nibbled quill. There are two and only two different kinds of bookbindings, says the Handbook. First, there is the binding of a book by way of needle and thread, which weaves a web that never lets the pages of the book go once they are gotten together. The book is bounded forever. The other kind of bookbinding is called Perfect Binding such that the pages of a book are bounded together with hot glue in the sense of being the most imperfect kind of binding there could possibly be.

The Boy Scout Handbook is, in fact, perfectly bound, meaning it is bounded terribly and poorly and impermanently, which is curious for a book eternal and immutable and fallen from heaven whole and complete such that it so easily comes apart in chunks and pieces the more you crack it open and leaf through its pages and read and return to readings so the book just kind of sloughs off itself. If nothing else, the merit badge on Bookbinding explained why its own binding, the binding of my Handbook, was breaking down so fast that pages were blowing away in a heavy wind. A gust. A gale.

I never worked on the Bookbinding merit badge except that I did learned to sew by reading the instructions for binding a book and now when I do get my scouting uniform I will be able to stitch all the badges and patches onto my uniform so they never come off.

The very last merit badge, the Malachi of merit badges, was Scholarship, which to be honest sounded a lot like schoolship, which was not my favorite part of the day or the week or the year. Much like Household Living, why would I want to do more of what I already did and was a real chore to do? So I skipped reading about the Scholarship merit badge, on page 577, which was the very end anyway and I turned the page and arrived at back cover and that was it for The Boy Scout Handbook. What a way to finish. I blew out the flame and climbed into bed and went to sleep dreaming, surprisingly, of animals of all sorts roaming the wild with words in ink written into their skins so they told stories to each other just by walking around. The animals reading them would laugh and cry and everyone would hug and it was all great fun.

* * *

The only time self-study intersects with scout meetings is in the final demonstration. To show or demonstrate meeting all the requirements for a merit badge, says the Handbook, is just that. Demonstrate it. Telling about it isn’t enough. You must show, not merely tell, that you know how to do something and that you did it so it is done. For Troop 41 this meant forming an ad hoc committee of big people and big big kids to get to the bottom of it. It is the ad hoc committee that sits in judgment as you show and not merely tell about meeting all the requirements for a particular merit badge.

In some cases, of course, it was impossible to demonstrate that you did something directly. The merit badge for Operating Heavy Machinery is a case in point. It’s impossible to drive a bulldozer or backhoe into the small game room and then doze a mound of dirt or smash and dig a big hole in the floor. But there are other ways to demonstrate what you did. Puppet shows with props like a toy bulldozer, made by Tonka®, can reenact everything with near perfect accuracy. Scouts have also been known to write a short story or even an epic poem to dramatize the meeting of the requirements for a merit badge. The possibilities are endless.

Once you earned a merit badge at scout meetings or through self-study the awards ceremony at the last meeting of the month was the biggest and most anticipated part. Once a month merit badges would be presented at the cookies and punch portion of the meeting after the reading of, by now, the Federalists Papers which were not newspapers articles at all but very very long and boring and highly technical and pseudonymous essays in one gigantic book that took forever to get through. We thought the Constitution was long. We had no idea what we were in for with the Federalist Papers. It was just typical. Start with something relatively short and sweet and self-evident and then have to write all about it using far more words to say what was truly said or truly say what was not said or speak against was was falsely said by other words writing about what is true or not and the number of works and words only grows because that is how words about works and works about words truly work to get to the bottom of it.

Anyway, at the awards ceremony each scout that earned one or more badges that month is called to be in front of all the other scouts where the scoutmaster and the first vice scoutmaster and the second vice scoutmaster and the third vice scoutmaster and the junior scoutmaster and the assistant junior scoutmaster, along with the assistant to the scoutmaster, off to the side, all stand up front and it is customary for the scoutmaster to hand the round embroidered merit badge to the scout and shake his hand and then his patrol calls out in their secret call except when my turn came the scoutmaster would hand me the badge and announce the badge awarded and then he would reach out with his other hand and take the badge back, adding the word provisionally, and hand the badge to the first vice scoutmaster for safekeeping because I had no scouting uniform to sew it on to, and the first vice scoutmaster would place the badge in a little envelop and tuck in the flap of the envelop holding all the other badges I had earned and place the envelop in his uniform pocket and because I was not part of any patrol the room would be silent and I would go back to my seat or more often to the far corner of the small room.

* * *

As weeks turned to months the atmosphere of the troop changed. The troop was buzzing. Everyone in Troop 41 was now preparing for summer camp. There were so many things to do to get ready, individual and patrol, patrol and troop. Summer camp was the scouting event of the year. First and foremost, summer camp was a full week of scouting, all day long and overnight, day after day, night after night, and not just a few hours on a Sunday morning. The Eggnog Center for Recreating was closed down all week just for us. We would have the run of the place around the clock.

Camp would be set up in the outfield of the baseball side of the the outdoors of the Rec Center, which we were never allowed to set foot on during the rest of the year. We would pitch our tents in little clusters by patrol and build campfires as the focus and locus of each campsite. This is were we would cook our food and sleep and sit around the fire telling jokes and stories. Standards would be driven into the ground and radiate outward at full power to mark territory.

Summer camp also meant being able to work on merit badges that just weren’t possible throughout the year. The Camping merit badge itself was a prime example. We started with a long hike round and round the track with full packs laden with gear and equipment before we turned into the baseball field to set up camp. To meet all the requirements for the merit badge, the patrols would strike camp mid-week, hike out and then turn around to hike back in to re-set-up camp. Then, at the of the end of the week when Summer Camp was over patrols struck camp a second time for the long hike out. This would cover both of the two required camping excursions, and was invaluable experience.

Water-related merit badges were also hard to come by with a pool that’s always empty, except that once a year during Summer Camp the Rec Center runs a garden hose that slowly and surely fills the pool with clean clear city water that once a year lifts the big red holly berries from the parched bottom of the pool so they merrily float and bob along the surface.

Then, it all happens at once. Practically the entire Troop gets to work on all the water-related merit badges before the before the cracks and fissures in the pool drain all the water out again.

There’s the Swimming merit badge where you have to master all kinds of strokes. The crawl. The sidestroke. The backstroke. The deadman’s float, which is the deceptive stroke of looking like you had a stroke and died but you are biding your time. Waiting until it all blows over.

Then, there’s the Life Saving merit badge which includes the making a flotation device out of your denim blue jeans. Lifesaving also means saving others, and so while some scouts are swimming other scouts are diving in and pulling them out.

During all this, the Canoe merit badge scouts stage their canoes on deck and then portage them to the water. The canoes are lowered in gently. The scouts, each with a paddle and a bright orange life vest, carefully step in so as not to tippie the canoe. Then the canoes race around the pool in a furious melee of paddling and splashing and laughing. It’s all great fun.

The most coveted merit badge that you could only get during summer camp was, of course, Shooting. This was a martial affair involving the entire Troop in one capacity or another.

For one whole day the entire open field was designated as a shooting range.

Eight targets were set up at equal distances just inside the track on the side of the field that ran along the road that ambulances drove up and down on. Beyond the road was where town ended and the unfarmed fields turned to hills that rose up wooded into forests and mountains atop which the craggy height loomed and from which water flowed down in the river that ran past town and out to sea. Each target, incidentally, was a life-sized image of one of the leading townsfolk from the town just down river. The town that built The Ecstatic Salmon factory on the river below and before us. That town. Some wounds just don’t heal.

On the opposite side of the open field nearly to the short fence an equal number of firing positions were set up with a straight shot down range to their respective targets. The reason for this particular configuration of the firing range was simple, explained the scoutmaster, who, during summer camp would appear in full uniform with bars and badges and ribbons. He would stalk the camp in high black leather boots and old fashioned leggings and an official scouting hardshell helmet. He did not ride horses or have horses but he also wore puffy riding pants and carried a riding crop around so he could point to things and slap the side of his leg to emphasize things and nudge things or people around him with it. Most important, once a year he would strap on his legendary nickle plated pistol, a classic 1911, chambered in .45 ACP, with a beautiful ivory white handle engraved with his initials, S.M, and holstered in a polished black leather holster.

The reason was simple, said the scoutmaster. There’s nothing to hit over there. Literally, nothing. With that he drew his pistol, aimed wildly, and fired off three shots into the unfarmed field which only rises higher and higher from hill to mountain to craggy peak. What’s behind, said the scoutmaster, is the Mother of All Berms. Pure nothingness. Nothingness pure and simple. With that he let go two more rounds and reholstered his sidearm. The scouts of Troop 41 were thrilled at the way the scoutmaster handled his revolver and frightened in a fun way at the explosions of the gun and they were reassured that they would hit absolutely nothing up there when it was their turn, which was coming up fast. The open field of scouts shimmied and shifted in anticipation as the craggy peak looked on.

To minimize causalities, one scout was positioned at the far left of targets and another just beyond the far right target to serve as lookouts.

Cease fire!, the scout would yell if an ambulance was approaching or slowly departing the nursing home.

Cease fire!, the scout would cry if an old person on the track was approaching the left-hand turn that would take them into the line of fire.

Upon the command all scouts in firing positions would stop shooting and wait. And wait. And a silence would descend upon the land as the old person made the left-hand turn and shuffled or crept behind a walker or rolled along softly crunching pieces of gravel embedded in the dirt track that every could hear in the extreme impatient silence.

When the old person finally reached the other end and had successfully made another left-hand turn the scout on that end would call out what everyone was waiting to hear. Open fire! And scouts would let loose, resuming the barrage.

Shooting took place by patrol. One patrol was on the firing line. Another was on deck. A third designated the spotters. A fourth managed rifles and ammunition. A fifth stood at the ready to administer first aid. The sixth had just finished firing and sat in a group off to the side telling war stories.

The entire shooting day was divided into two sessions. The first session began just after breakfast and concluded when we broke for lunch. For the morning session the patrol on the firing line was issues a specially designed rifle called the Moschetto Balilla Carbine, or Balillia, for short. This was a rifle, chambered in .22 LR, made especially for kids in the country of Italy in the 1920s and early 1930s when they needed Italian boys to learn to scout and it was special because it was a smaller sized rifle than the regular, heavy one that big people used, and because it shot blanks. In fact you couldn’t shoot a real bullet with it because the barrel was a solid piece of metal inside and out. But you could chamber a round and fire it. It would just be a blank. A dud. All sound and fury. That sort of thing. But it was a perfect beginning to start scouts off with all the basics of handling and marching and loading and aiming and clearing before they truly fire a live round.

It was a good way to start the day. But the scoutmaster also knew it could get a little boring. Aiming at a target down range and firing knowing that nothing was really happening was just not like the real thing. So for this portion of the day he would sometimes set one patrol loose on the range and they would run around and dive for cover so we would have moving targets to practice on. This livened things up a lot. The patrol on the range would even call out using their patrol calls so it felt just like hunting foxes or rattle snakes or pine trees. We couldn’t do this when it came time to use live ammunition, of course, so every scout on the firing took advantage of the moment and shot at the moving targets with relish. Sometimes an argument would ensue, however, about whether or not a scout actually hit his moving target scout.

Did so.

Did not.

It would get heated. Confrontational . Even almost coming to blows as a point of honor about an accuracy that nobody could prove except by say-so or or by doing it for real.

After lunch the Balilla rifles were stowed back in the broom closet and a whole different rifle was brought out. This second rifle was the Remingington 4-S. It was specially made for scouts who are boys who scout, the scoutmaster told us.

Like the Balilla the Remington 4-S was a smaller version of a big people rifle called the Remington Model 4 Rolling Block. The 4-S was about the same size as a Balilla and it was also chambered in .22 LR (and SR, for that matter). But unlike the Balilla the Remington 4-S Rolling Block was the real deal. A real live rifle that fired real live bullets. Afternoon session is when things really came alive. The zing of rounds flying this way and that. Targets in tatters by the end of the day. The Berm riddled with lead. Everybody was having so much fun.

So much fun in fact that I don’t think anyone noticed something curious about the rifles, the second ones, the Remington 4-Ses. Stamped on the metal plate of the receiver were the words:

American Boys Who Scout Who are Boys of the United States of America

Simple enough. We were boys who scouted who were boys in and of America. Maybe this is what we were called at one point. But that wasn’t our true name now. The difference was curious. In fact, not all the rifles had those exact words engraved. Some had different words. U.S. Boy Scouts. American Boy Scouts. Boy Scouts of the United States. Some even had an entirely different reference, with the words American Cadets or Junior Cadets of the United States stamped out. It was very odd that these rifles were made for us like the scoutmaster said. Seemingly they weren’t. Why did we have them? How did we get them? I scratched my head but beyond that I didn’t think much more about it.

While swimming and shooting and camping were exciting parts of summer camp the crown jewel was the Summer Games of Troop 41. This was the camp-wide competition between all the patrols on all manner of things to compete over.

For the opening of the games Troop 41 solemnly assembled by patrols with standards high in the open field. The scoutmaster stepped forward. He looked splendid in his full uniform with high leather boots and riding crop and revolver holstered at his side. He rose to the stage as if ascending on escalator from behind and below with a backdrop of sky glowing bright red with white billowy clouds and streaks of blue.

At-ten-shun!, cried the junior scoutmaster.

The scoutmaster paced back and forth like a caged animal. Then he stopped at center and surveyed us all.

I want you to remember, said the scoutmaster in slow deliberate cadence, that no scout bastard ever won the summer games by laying down and dying for his patrol.

The pacing resumed.

He won it by making the other poor dumb scout bastard die for his patrol.

Scouts love a winner, pressed the scoutmaster. And will not tolerate a loser.
Scouts play to win all the time. To boys who scout who are boys, the very thought of losing …the very thought …

The scoutmaster paused. He stopped for what felt like an eternity. He stood motionless. The thought of losing hung heavy in the air.

The very thought of losing, said the scoutmaster, is hateful to the scout. Hateful.

Then the tone changed to one of camaraderie.

Now, a patrol is a team, he said instructively. You live, eat, sleep, and fight as a team.

A scout is part of a whole and the whole encompasses each and every single scout. No scout is an island unto itself. A scout scouts for thee. And thee. And thee.

Now, some of you scouts are wondering whether or not you’ll chicken-out under the pressure of the games. Don’t worry about it. I can assure you that you will all do your duty. Those other patrols are the enemy. Wade into them. Spill their blood. Shoot them in the belly, figuratively speaking.
When you see your best pal captured and carried off in our epic final game of capture the flag, his face bruised and bleeding, his eyes desperate for rescue, believe me, you’ll know what to do.

Look at you, said the scoutmaster, stopping and raising his riding crop and scanning the field arrayed with scouts. Lean, mean, fighting machines. By God I pity the other patrols.

Each and every scout bubbled with pride and confidence and zeal that they would absolutely demolish the other scouts in the other patrols and live to tell about it.

A din of patrol calls erupted and rose to the heavens raining down on the open field in a torrent and the scoutmaster bathed in it. And that’s how the Summer Games commenced.

Competitions involved cleanest and neatest campsite. Loudest patrol call, individual, on average, and in the aggregate.

A popular competition was Hide the Totem, in which three totems, small, medium and large, floated around camps and you didn’t want to get caught with any one of them. They might be hidden in your tents, in a backpack, secretively tucked into someones back pocket. Everyone was on the lookout.
It was the opposite of capture the flag. It was a ticking time bomb. If you found one you had to get rid of it as soon as possible. Plant it on some scout bastard in some other dumb bastard patrol.

Everything became a competition. A matter of life and death. Foot races. Fire building challenges. Knot tying. The water balloon toss. A tug-of-war tournament.

Competition carried into the evening Pow Wow, which was a special time when the entire Troop gathered around a big bonfire built up from an ungodly number of Presto logs piled high on the pitcher’s mound at the center of the baseball diamond. Flames would rise up and illuminate our scout faces in this fun and solemn evening ritual.

Pow Wow is where patrols do skits or sing songs and the scoutmaster and first vice scoutmaster and second vice scoutmaster and third vice scoutmaster form the judges panel, or committee, and points go to the best act, the most original, the funniest, and the most powerfully dramatic.

The most classic skit of them all is the change of underwear skit, where the patrol leader informs everyone that finally every scout will get a change of underwear after a long week of summer camp and the punch line is that each scout has to exchange underwear with another scout. Everybody rolls with laughter because the skit hits so close to home.

An ambitious patrol might try a carefully choreographed song and dance number. But there were risks. The scoutmaster hated jazz hands and if jazz hands accidentally slipped into a number it was the death of it. Zero points. No exceptions. The scoutmaster called jazz hands the breaking of the 11th Commandment. It was an abomination of nature deserving of fire.

The Pow Wow was also where something magical and mysterious took place. On the second-to-last Pow Wow of Summer Camp the bonfire is fed with Presto logs to overflowing. The fire can take no more Presto logs and says so and still Presto log after Presto log is thrown onto the conflagration. The entire Troop forms a big circle around with each scout facing into the flames. Not a word is said. Behind the circle of boys who scout the big people form a close unit, a pack, and begin to circle outside and around the circle. They circle the circle. Round they go. Slowly passing one scout and then another. The circling is suspenseful and deliberate. Deliberative. Purposive. They are looking. Choosing. Deciding. You don’t know who it will be. Tension builds. If you have ever played Duck-Duck-Goose you know exactly what this looks like and how it feels.

While the fire blazes everyone in the circle follows this pack of big people circling behind. It is the only thing that matters in the moment. Then, the pack of big people stops. It stops behind one single solitary boy. The scoutmaster steps to the boy facing the bonfire. With both hands the scoutmaster reaches out and taps the boy on his shoulders. Both hands of the scoutmaster tapping both shoulders of the boy. A firm tap felt by everyone even as the tap is for one boy and one boy alone. The tap. And then another tap. Two firm taps. Tap. Tap. On the second two-handed Tap the scoutmaster’s hands grasps the boy’s shoulders and slowly guide him backward, out of the circle, away from the bonfire. The boy disappears into the night. The fire blazes on and a hole opens up where the boy once stood. The pack of big people continues round the circle. Looking for more. Searching out for who will is chosen. They stop. The scoutmaster steps forward. Tap. Tap. Another scout recedes into darkness. And on it goes. Boys are pulled out here and there. From almost every patrol but not necessarily all. Not many are tapped. Just a select few. Here and there from around the circle. Then, the pack of big people stops. They too disappear into the night.
The junior scoutmaster steps forward.

At-ten-shun!

Dismissed.

And with that the Pow Wow for the evening is over. Those left standing around the broken circle drift away untapped back to their campsites.

What just happened is that boys who are scouts were been tapped to join the Order of the Arrow. A secret organization. A troop within and beyond Troop 41. An elite group who do scouting that nobody not in the Order of the Arrow knows about, though all at the Rec Center, of course.

All we see the next day is that the boys tapped the night before reappear looking different and with a new badge sewn into their uniforms. The badge is a white rectangle with a scout-red border sewed length-wise just under the left pocket. Facing the badge you see a long red arrow with fletching on the left and a pronounced arrowhead pointing to the right with severe barbs reaching back to never let go of what was gotten. A half-disc in the same scout-red rises out of the arrow with long rays shooting far into the sky. This badge is called the Arrow of Light. It signifies membership in the Order of the Arrow. It symbolizing true scouting today toward a better tomorrow. The Tap was the call. The question. Do you not know? Have you not heard? Has it not been told from the beginning? The Arrow of Light badge on your uniform says that you hearkened. You heeded the call. You are now one of them.

As the pack of big people circled behind us I had no expectation of being tapped, but just being part of the ceremony and witnessing the Tap Tap as the bonfire blazed was moving and memorable, and even though I had no hope of being tapped each time I felt the pack of big people pass behind me I still tensed up in anticipation as if to feel what it would be like to get ready and then to feel the firm taps and so to hear the call and to hearken and to heed it. That, apparently, is how the heart and mind of a small boy works at times.

* * *

Did you ever become a member of the Order of the Arrow. Did you ever get your Arrow of Light badge. Did you ever get your uniform so you could join Troop 41 and sew all your merit badges on? What did you do during summer camp since so much of it was patrols doing everything together. Where you able to join a patrol? What patrol did you join? , asked the horseradish, who was trying to be more contributive and less of a know-it-all and everyone else appreciate the effort and his questions, which they were all wondering too.

Let me answer the patrol question here, said the storyteller. Then we really must have some of that Peach Cobbler, don’t you think?

Every agreed. The Peach Cobbler smelled wonderful and it was high time for strong black tea.

It was easy just to pass me around week to week, said the storyteller, but summer camp and more importantly the Summer Games made it much more complicated. Would I camp with one patrol the whole week or change camps night after night? What team would I play for? I didn’t have my own uniform or patrol patch or true allegiance. And in truth there was no patrol I wanted to not die or to spill the guts of another patrol for. Summer Camp only heightened the fact and feeling that I was a nuisance and an inconvenience. I didn’t even have the equipment that everyone else brought to camp. No tent or backpack or sleeping bag. No cooking gear. Nothing really. Everything I got to use was old gear loaned to me by the scoutmaster that smelled of mouldering canvas and rusty metal and not in a good way, like at the Army-Navy Surplus Store, but in a neglected, forlorn kind of way.

The more basic question was, As a provisional scout in Troop 41 could I even attend Summer Camp? That question lingered unanswered in the weeks leading up. The suspense was killing me, to be honest. I wanted so bad to go and I was afraid and sure that I would be left out. Finally, it was decided, again at the recommendation of the first vice scoutmaster, that consistent with my provisional status, I could attend summer camp, provisionally. I was to camp in the general camp area in the grassy part of the baseball field, by my campsite was to be set up apart from the patrols at the far back corner of the field closest to the road that you cross to get to the Everglades Evergarden Nursing Home filled with old people clustered on the patio watching day and night because for some reason they too looked forward to Summer Camp for boys who scout who are boys. This is where I set up my borrowed tent and built a fire and cooked my meals and slept with the flap of the tent facing not the patrols or the old people but open to the unfarmed fields rising to hills and forests and forested mountains the mountain range where the craggy peak loomed.

The biggest reminder of my provisional status each day was at night. Bedtime was when the campground, sleepy during the day, came alive. Under cover of darkness boys laughed and joked and snuck out to prank other patrols and the pranking escalated with retaliation and counter-prank and pre-emptive prank and voices yelling and laughing and pranking and sneaking and calling out and counter-calling until the scoutmaster stepped out of from shadows.

Quiet!, he commanded, and everything settled down for a bit, until the joking and laughing and pranking resumed, right on schedule. Most pranks involved attacking the campsites of other patrols and defending your own. Throwing water into tents. Setting tents on fire. Throwing water onto your burning tents. Tackling scouts trying to sneak into your campsite to set the fires. Fire and water seemed to be the dominant elements at play where Earth and Wind were the major and minor conditions of pranks and Quintessence merely looked on. Above all, protect your standard at all costs.

Off in the corner, my campsite never got pranked not because the patrols exempted me on purpose but because I don’t think they even thought about me over there on the fringes of Troop 41. Patrols were at war with patrols. I had no standard to steal. I had no desire to steal anyone’s standard. As a matter of combat I did not even exist. And so as the battle raged on I laid in my tent listening and tracking all the activity through the night until the noise died down of its own accord and all the scouts zipped up in their and fell fast asleep while I looked up at the craggy height looming in the moonlight.

During the Games and the Pow Wows and so for most of Summer Camp I truly was on the sidelines watching just like the old people across the road. The scoutmaster would inspect my campsite but there were no points at stake either way. He would just tap deficiencies with his riding crop and move on. No one bothered to plant a totem on me. It would have been a wasted explosives on a no-value target. In general, everyone left me alone. They were at war with the hated Bison or Crows. That was where they spent their energies in a week of uncorked unbridled scouting by boys who are scouts of Troop 41.

Shall we stop there to have some delicious Peach Cobbler along with a Cup of hot tea from the Samovar?

Hoo-raah!, everyone cried.

You will return to the story of scouting though, won’t you?

I can.

Oh, you must!, exclaimed the room. Bonk bonk on the head, picked up again.

What about the Story of Suicide Beyond Suicide? That has been completely derailed. Wouldn’t you like to see how that story ends?

The room shifted awkwardly. Uncomfortably. Then a chorus rose up.

The story is so boring though.

It was taking forever to get to beyond.

It felt like it would never end.

Must you narrate the footnotes, too? And the commentary on the footnotes. That’s just weird. And confusing. We don’t know what’s part of the story and what’s not. Could you at least leave those out?

The airing of grievances was gaining steam and seemed certain to roll on for a while. Everyone had something to say and most we’re queuing up for a second and third round.

Finally, Barry the Fox barked in his shrill bark to get everyone’s attention.

What if, said Barry the Fox, what if … and this is just a suggestion … What if you left out all the footnotes, and all the commentary too … It is a little jarring. It’s like being yanked back and forth for no good reason, or taking a walk through the garden and ending up surrounded by funhouse mirrors … It’s just so confusing and distorting and fragmented … So, what if you left those parts out and streamlined your story … and what if you …. Went straight to the ending?

Barry the Fox paused. The room was intrigued. The room hummed. Barry the Fox was thrilled at this reaction and he let out a small shrill bark in spite of himself. He continued.

Just tell us how the story ends so we know the part about beyond suicide that is suicide. We are excited to know this part of the story, which is in the title after all. That’s the big attraction. It’s just the story leading up to the real story that’s weighing the story down. So what if you told us the ending now? Then, if we really want to hear the rest of the story of suicide leading up to point of being beyond but just before you can tell us that too. That way, you get to finish the story. And if the ending is so good that we don’t need to know what led up to it the story, then you don’t need to tell us the rest, and the story is still a success and everybody’s happy. How does that sound?

The room really liked Barry the Fox’s idea. It seemed very reasonable and accommodating to everyone in question. Barry the Fox had a reputation for being reasonable and this only showed why. Nods were given all around and all eyes turned to the storyteller. They also glanced at the crispy buttery gooey Peach Cobbler that was gently steaming fresh out of the oven in expectus along with everyone else.

These are the last lines of the story, said the story teller. This is the ending. Are you ready? Everybody nodded some more and waited.

Suicide is going home. Suicide is homecoming. Suicide is waiting in welcome. Suicide is welcoming. Suicide is being welcomed. Suicide is being home beyond suicide.

Fini

Fade to black.

Cue music.

Roll credits.

That is how the Story of Suicide Beyond Suicide ends, said the storyteller.

A smattering of clapping could be heard in the room. That was a wonderful ending, offered the Samovar. Just perfect. Poignant.

We thought so too, said the Roast Beast and Potatoes gurgling from within. We could hear most of it and what we heard was really good. We really liked it. Especially the part about … well, we really liked the whole ending. We wouldn’t change a thing.

Do you want to hear what came before the ending? What the ending means according to what led up to it?

Everybody looked to each other with a sense of alarm that they tried to pass off as the act of conferring.

The ending was so good I don’t think there’s much more to tell, said the Horseradish. You said it all. The meaning was clear as a bell. Home. Homecoming. Going home. Welcome home. It’s all about home in the end. I know that when I get home from a long hard day I leave everything that happened out there on the doorstep. None of it matters in the end and I am happier for it once I get inside. I think I can honestly say, pronounced the Horseradish, that this is one case where the end of the story tells it all. It really is enough to be the beginning, middle, and end all together all at once.

Here here!, the room exclaimed. That’s what we think too. Leave everything at the doorstep. You said it all. There’s nothing more to say.

Let’s have some Peach Cobbler!, the Peach Cobbler cried out. A mild stampede to the oven ensued. Then you can keep telling us the story of scouting. I like it very much. Me too. Me three.

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