I suppose it had been a long time coming, this trip. Now that it's over, I recognize how special and interesting it is, this thing called American boyhood. It leaves me nostalgic, and puzzled, and frustrated and inspired all at once. All this from a weekend of fishing and camping with some of the boys from the local Scout troop.
There are a couple things burned into my mind about this trip, most of them are images of my son who is now 12 years old in full boy bloom. Saturday afternoon he was shirtless in short pants holding a huge tree branch over his head on which he had impaled a large rotting fish. He was marching triumphantly through 6 inches of brackish standing water as four other boys followed with similar style their splashing feet covered with the mud from below. As I busted them they were crawling under a fence at the lakeside trying to find out just how deep the water was. I tried to appreciate at the time that these were classic signs of adventurous and curious boys testing all limits of propriety and manning the territory but all I could say was something like 'get out of there, have you lost your mind?' I was being the adult, which in Scouting is a very particular thing.
I have been meaning to write up my notes for Youth Protection. You see several weeks ago, I was certified for this by one of the District officers whose job it is to instruct us about the nature of sexual, emotional and physical abuse. It's remarkable how much you can learn in two hours if you have the right materials and right instructor. We did. I took 7 pages of notes and I promise to write them up. One of the things I learned, I flunked on my very first outing. Adults and kids sleep in separate tents. I managed to get a couple kids other than my son to help me assemble my large two room tent. Come nighttime I was fairly certain my boy and his best friend would be in the front room, but the Scoutmaster booted him. It was a little embarrassing to have such a massive tent with only two people in it, I offered to trade so that a bunch of kids could share the larger tent and my boy and I could have one of the many smaller ones, but Tim declined my offer. Smart man, Tim. As the babble continued late after lights out it dawned on me that he'd been here before.
It was the sixth grade when I learned to curse. My favorite thing to do was to put every curse word I knew into one huge 19 syllable phrase the last of which was 'punk'. None of the kids I heard were so bad as I, so far as I heard anyway. But there was more than enough boy talk to remind me how funny it must have been to talk about balls sometime back in 1971. Nothing says 12 year old boy like repeating juvenile rhymes about shredded gerbils as pizza topping or rearranging the lyrics of 'Iron Man' to include Michael Jackson and a minivan. It's as aggravatingly simple-minded as you could possibly imagine, the 15th time you hear it you want to throttle somebody. But you can't because somebody rips a fart during ghost story time and you can't help but laugh yourself. Or finally you hear a joke about yo' mama that you actually never heard before. This year the thing that nearly sent me skidding off the freeway with laughter was a perverted Christmas carole:
Get a job you stupid bum bum bum bum.
Money don't grow on trees you bum bum bum bum.
Won't you stop drinking that rum rum rum rum
Because it's making you so dumb dumb dumb dumb. Dumb dumb dumb dumb...
You get the picture. I almost got the truck inverted, and almost blew my adult status. But that's something I can't afford to do, nor can any of us. But what I could never do is blow my man status, which is exactly what the boys want you to do, or not.
I am greatly fortunate to have grown up in a family of boys, in roughneck neighborhood full of mostly boys. I attended an all boy's prep school as well. So I am acutely aware of male goings on. And what boys want to do is challenge and grow. They have a strong desire to follow men when they don't know what's going on, and then dispose of them as soon as they think they do. Of course they still need men because something will go wrong, and no boy is as smart as he thinks he is (nor is any teenager as badass as they think they are.) The trick is to get them to take what they know as seriously as possible and make them responsible to it, while keeping the actual complexity of the situation within their peripheral vision. Practically speaking it means letting them get close to the snake but not letting them kill it or pick it up. It means letting them swim out in the channel but not past the point you feel comfortable diving in to save them. A bold boy will quickly exhaust your ability to answer why and why not, get the gist of the situation and act on impulse. There isn't an adequate intellectual way to constrain them. This is what men know about men, or should. And it is why boys learn best by following examples.
As a Scout dad, part of my job is to (assess and) bond with the other Scout dads on the trip. We make a leadership hierarchy. You have to understand that the only way we keep values in force is by committing ourselves to submit to the rules. Every man has to lend his strength to the team in order to project a greater governing power. This creates the boundaries within which boys can be boys. Without this, it is impossible to control thirty 10-13 year old boys. This is what older men know how to do, so save up their strength and be at the precise tipping point at the precice moment and apply just enough strength to be superhuman. This is expressed in a thousand ways in life. Watch an old pro play racquetball against a younger, faster newbie. The pro knows where the ball is going to be, the newb smashes it with all his might and yet is run ragged by the pro. In camp, you use The Voice, but sparingly. You can't go down to their level, but you have to prove that you can. You may not catch any more fish than they do, so you expound on tying flies, or bring up another unassailable fish story. You don't have to chase an actual bear out of camp, but they sleep sounder knowing you did once. You hope, with some loyalty to the rules intact, they eventually discover the complexity and balancing act you did so seemingly effortlessly.
These are the rules of life and this is one of the ways we learn. I have no question in my mind but that they are universal.
Tom and Tim were the leaders in this expedition. In the course of discussion, it didn't come as any surprise that Tom was retired military or government service. Tim's son was the Eagle in charge of most of the hands on ordering around of scouts, and kept them entertained with various tricks with fire. Tim drove a pickup truck with a lightbar. Tom knew which unit of the Forest Service rangers were overseeing the campsite we rented, and I'm sure he let them know which Troop we were. There is a recognition that we're all part of a bigger sort of stewardship over our natural resources, over our children, ourselves.
I thought a little bit there, and more now, of how some boys seem obnoxious and incorrigible, but if we listen to them long enough we come to understand their fears and weakness. Sooner or later boys will invent credentials and posit a "wouldn't it be cool if" with the "I knew someone who did". They were already talking about features of Halo 4, a year before Halo 3 is due to be released. Oh isn't it just the same with politics? You hear all of the dirty talk and testing the depths of waters. You try to use The Voice sparingly, but for the sake of liberty you let boys be boys. (My cliche is 'boys will be monsters'). But in the Troop, the Eagle in charge of the patrols can always call for the Scout Sign and all will calm down and salute. The order of the day, the rules can be invoked to keep the engagement moving forward, and then the chaos gets a bit more orderly for a moment, and things get done.
In current events I often find myself standing on the shore watching people swim out into the channel. I hear the invented dirty talk and the nerve, and I wonder if they ever stop to salute anythin gor anyone. Sometimes I think people actually think they owe their allegiance to the Earth and not to each other. I wonder if they ever consider committing to submit to the rules for the good of the Troop. I often believe they revel in the realization that they can be part of thirty uncontrollable boys, asserting that anything goes and fetishising their own energy.
But those are thoughts for the city. Back up at the lake, aside from the pain of sleeping on anything less than my Sealy, what I most remember are the smooth motions of a boy growing confident with a rod and reel. Of best friends horseplaying in the river, of a father and son fixing a collapsed tent in the rain at 2:30 in the morning, of a long row of wildflowers aside a dirt track, of clouds wafting by 2 miles above the gap in the massive oak trees above our camp. I remember filthy shoes and breakfast burritos, boys whittling spears and men watching from canvas camp chairs. Faces around a campfire waiting for the 'Gotcha!' and lucky #2, the second porta-potty from the left. Cheeseburgers and rabbits, mudflats and driftwood; the purple dragboat you could hear 2 miles away; the 18 inches of squishy silt in the channel oozing through my toes. The two year old boy whose squealing finally died down after 20 minutes of his father cajoling him in smooth Spanish, the rowdy twins throwing mud everywhere. The tatooed grunge dude who asked if alcohol as legal, the 6 foot 4 black dude who walked so slow and grunted hello with his pants hanging low. The middle aged black man with the triple rig who swooped in caught two fish and left before any of us got a bite, the young dudes with the dyed hair, the six steaks, the Johnny Walker Red and the brand new Malibu wake boat.
Of course there were our boys in the Troop, but you don't get to know them from me. I'm part of their protection, and proud to be. But they reminded me of how fragile boyhood can be. You simply don't know what you don't know, and you have to trust that those tipping point moments, when The Voice is used on you, are the right moments, and the authority is the right authority. You can't know, as a boy, how safe you are, how smart you are. I watch the boys interact with their friends in escalating wars of "but did you know this?", or joking around animatedly with some and quiet or sparring with others. I watched them as I dropped them off at home go from Scout to child. I listened to them call each other names, and some fight back and some cry uncle. But I do know this for sure: Scouting is a great place for all of them and with us men and women looking after them, they're going to have a time in their lives where things had some structure and liberty under the stars - where they could explore and learn outside of the confines of certain expectations.
Sometimes you just have to march through the muddy bog with your friends at your side and a dead fish over your head. I understand. I truly understand.
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