I thought I was ready. It was the fall of 1958 and I was sitting on the front steps of our house on Gregg Street wearing my freshly ironed Scout uniform complete with my new tenderfoot badge. I had my army surplus canteen on my belt and held a paper bag filled with a couple of traveling peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, four chocolate chip cookies and an orange. On one side of me was my official Boy Scout knapsack packed with clean clothes, toiletries, and emergency snacks and on the other my rolled-up Korean War mummy sleeping bag. I thought I was ready for the Spring Camporee at King’s Mountain State Park
There were no Cub Scout troops in the area to ease me into the idea of camping. After six months of knot tying and woodcraft skills plus learning the Scout Laws and Oath, I sat on the steps waiting for Dad to come by to take me to the scout hut for my first camping adventure.
There was a little problem. I was crying big “I’m scared” tears and my fearless father was due any minute. When he rolled up in the driveway there was no hiding my condition. The man was a Marine who served in the Pacific during WWII and his ten-year-old son was crying over going to a camporee. I was humiliated.
Dad sized up the situation immediately and sat down beside me on the step.
“Dad, I don’t want to go!” I wailed, all semblances of pride gone.
Dad talked about how much I liked my friends in the troop and how I would have a great time if I went on the trip. He then told me about leaving home for the Marines. He told me how, as a nineteen-year-old, he had hugged his parents and walked toward a waiting car. He told me how he couldn’t look back because he was afraid he would have turned around and run back to his mom and dad.
For the first time, I saw my father, a man with incredible strengths, as having the weaknesses that keep us all human. He then asked me the question that he would ask me in many forms over and again throughout my life, “Will you feel better tomorrow if you go or if you stay home?”
I went.
When Dad and I arrived at the white two-story scout hut that faced Monroe White Street behind the Methodist Church, boys were tossing their packs into the big bed of a farm truck with slatted-board sides. A small shoulder squeeze from Dad, sent me to join the other scouts. After a short prayer for safe travel from Scoutmaster Odell Pettus, all the scouts climbed in the back of the truck on top of the packs and hay bales and off we headed toward the camporee.
The world was a different pace then. To load twenty-five boys on the back of a rickety farm truck would probably be a felony today. After a slow drive, I guess to keep any of the boys from falling off, we stopped at a church parking lot halfway to Kings Mountain and ate our bag lunches. After two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and the remaining cookie (riding on hay bales made me hungry) I unclipped the black-handled pocketknife from my belt and cut a hole into the top of the orange to suck out the juice. The rest of the orange went into the paper bag with the waxed paper from my sandwiches and cookies.
There was already a bustle of activity when we arrived at Kings Mountain State Park. This was the York District Spring Camporee and boys from all over the county were choosing good sites, pitching tents and gathering wood for their troop campfires. Our scoutmaster drove up to our assigned site and we all jumped out and began unloading gear and setting up our area. Older scouts helped younger ones set up army surplus pup tents so that they didn’t sag in the middle like an old horse.
For the uninitiated, a pup tent was a two-person tent made of waxed canvas. Anyone who has ever slept in one will always remember the smell…a combination of wet canvas, gun oil and mildew. I slept in them throughout my Boy Scout years and even into basic training at Fort Bragg. I was never a fan of sleeping on the ground. I did it but I didn’t like it.
In an hour or so, we had a passable campsite and were sitting around a campfire holding fresh cut sticks with the bark shaved off and stuck through hot dogs. The hot dogs were wrapped in a spiral of bread dough just like the drawing in the Boy Scout handbook. If this was camping, I wanted more of it.
After the meal we sat on logs beside the fire poking it with sticks and listening to stories told by the scoutmasters. Several of the older boys asked for ghost stories but the scout leaders understood that ghost stories on the first night were not a good idea. We didn’t sit long before we made our tired way to our sleeping bags. This was what worried me the most…spending the night on the ground in the middle of the woods. I remember looking at the dying light of the fire and crawling into the tent. I remember listening to the night sounds of the woods, the sound of other boys whispering and laughing, probably at some adolescent off-color joke and the occasional growl of a snoring scout leader. It didn’t take long to fall asleep.
I returned home after two nights of camping and by the grin on my face, Dad didn’t have to ask if I made the right choice.
In the summer of the next year, with a couple of camping experiences behind me, I traveled with the troop to Camp Palmetto (now Camp Bob Hardin) near Saluda, NC. Saluda was too long a ride for the back of a hay truck so we went in an activity bus borrowed from the school. Just as we were getting close to the mountains, the bus pulled over at a rustic picnic area across the road from one of those weathered mountain stands with peanuts boiling in a blackened pot on top of a wood stove, slabs of unsliced bacon, crates of apples and gallon jugs of apple cider.
We all believed that if we bought a gallon of cider and kept it all week, it would turn into “hard” cider. None of us had ever actually tasted hard cider but we were pretty sure our parents wouldn’t approve. We got back on the bus with what must have been ten gallons. There were even a couple of jugs of red colored “cherry cider”. I thought, even at the tender age of 11, that it was probably more red colored apple cider than cherry cider. Time and experience have proven me right. We were wrong about the hard cider thing. It turns out, that after a few days, it just becomes warm sour cider.
At Camp Palmetto we stayed in the wooden cabins that were dotted along the side of the mountain. Triple level bunk beds lined every wall. Suddenly “kick the springs” was a high-stakes game.
We were in cabin eight. I found out that we had escaped by the skin of our teeth. Cabin seven, it turns out, was haunted by a crazed old woodsman who had once been a scout and was accidentally left behind by his troop. Every few years, it seems, he would come down the mountain and…well, let’s just leave it at “He carried a double-bladed axe.”
The showers and toilets were shared by cabin seven and cabin eight. If nature called in the middle of the night, there was a great temptation to answer it right beside cabin eight just in case the woodsman of cabin seven had extended his range to the latrine. I didn’t believe in such a silly, made-up stories during the day but let’s just say I wasn’t the first to water the leaves just beside the cabin in the middle of the night.
In the safety of daytime other scouts and I worked on merit badges, hiked all over the mountains, and swam in what must be the coldest water on the East Coast. Over the years I began to believe that I had exaggerated the temperature of the lake. When my son, Michael was thirteen, his troop went to the same camp, and I went along as an assistant scoutmaster. Anyone who wanted to swim had to demonstrate the ability by climbing off the dock and swimming about 25 yards along beside it. I steeled my courage and climbed in.
No amount of preparing myself could have equaled the shock of the cold water. For the first ten or so seconds I was unable to move and gasping for breath. Thankfully, to keep the scouts safe, the water was only about five feet deep and I realized I could stand on the bottom. Only by moving my arms to mimic swimming and walking through the frigid water was I able to make it to the end of the dock. I was in my fifties when we went to the camp and the plunge into that icy lake was the first time I really feared a heart attack. I spent the rest of the week assessing my age and realizing my limitations.
Early in life we worry about the things that could happen to us. As we reach adulthood, our fears are for our partners, our children and later, for our parents. I find that, as I am solidly into my seventies, I have come to be more and more mindful about the future.
I cannot speak for you or even for my closest friends but I suspect we all have both rational and irrational fears and vary in how well we conceal them from the world. I outgrew the fear of camping and of new adventures and mostly outgrew my wariness of the dark although, once in a while, on a dark night, I am glad of indoor plumbing.
Here is what I fear now…lean in close, this is not something I want to repeat and I hope you will keep it to yourself. I am afraid of dying without leaving anything behind but a headstone. At age 70, I had a slow recovery after a heart procedure and began to realize the futility of all those years of stuffing my head full of the words and adventures of great thinkers and writers, and the humor and wisdom of friends. I was as full of words as an egg is full of…well…egg and all that I had gathered would decay into nothingness on the day when my brain, robbed of nourishing blood would dry up and turn to dust.
That realization is why I torment you with these writings on a mostly bi-weekly basis. These stories are my attempt to empty the well… take the last sip from the cup…leave it all on the field. (Choose your metaphor or feel free to insert your own.) I keep dropping that bucket into the well and to my surprise, it keeps coming up full. As long as it does, you are not safe from my memories.
And, for those times when you are uncertain about a decision, feel free to borrow my Dad’s advice. Ask yourself, “Will I feel better tomorrow it I go or if I stay home?”
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