When I was a Boy Scout
By Ben Wolford
I was a scout when I was a kid, and — aside from being a dangerously nerdy thing to do — it was a great experience. Politics had nothing to do with it. The most religious thing anybody ever said was that I had a duty to God. It was humbling, not proselytizing. But that’s not what this story is about.
My local council had a summer camp in rural Ohio just for scouts. To attend, you had to bring one cubic foot of dry, non-coniferous wood with no bark. Each stick couldn’t be thicker than your thumb or thinner than your pinky. You couldn’t cut it; the length must have been formed by a clean break. Each branch had to be perfectly straight. My mom and I spent weeks seeking out this stuff, peeling the bark, breaking it to size and bundling it with twine. All the while I had no idea why I was doing this. Nobody would tell us what it was for.
So I arrived at summer camp, and everyone had a stack of wood. One of the first things the camp leaders did was check our bundles. Did they meet the requirements? The guy was coming around, and, of course, I was shitting bricks worrying about my stack of wood. Turns out I didn’t have to worry because I’d never seen such sorry stacks of wood in my life. There was pine wood, bent wood, fresh cut wood, bark-covered wood. And a lot of these kids weren’t even being turned away. The one thing they wouldn’t accept, though, was pine wood. Those boys spent the next few hours pecking through the forest.
The following week was somewhat harrowing, and I learned for the first time what anxiety is. The older boys, who’d been to camp before, all had something called a Pipestone. It was a small totem that hung from a piece of leather on their breast pocket buttons. It was made of pipestone, a kind of red rock, that you were supposed to polish by rubbing it against your greasy nose. The more summer camps you attended, the more levels you had on your Pipestone.
But you had to earn it. There were baskets to weave, swimming skills to accomplish (have you ever built a flotation device with your shirt?), rifles to shoot, hikes to hike, knots to tie and trails to clean. I was a bit unusual because my birthday always fell on camp week. If you had a birthday during camp, you’d be called up in front of the mess hall and asked to lead a cheer of your own invention. This meant asking more than 100 boys and scout leaders to participate in a bizarre pantomime. (The “watermelon cheer,” for example, involved dragging your hands across your chomping mouth and then going PHHHHH — spitting out the seeds.) The other thing is that my parents made a point of driving down to camp the night of my birthday to celebrate. They’d bring Oreos in lieu of cake. But instead of being happy, I was a wreck. It was Thursday night. The Pipestone Ceremony was Friday night. And I still hadn’t earned the requisite number of merit badges. I was also concerned I wouldn’t have time for the swimming requirement. Years later, annual misery is how my parents interpreted my summer camp experience.
In actuality, I was just a budding version of myself: needlessly worrying. Because I met the requirements. My scout masters made sure everyone did, in fact, though some kids truly struggled. Some boys simply didn’t know how to swim, which must have made the swimming category immensely daunting. The fat kid named Bobby, who ate oranges like apples, peel and all, couldn’t swim because he could barely hike. Yet they pushed him to be the absolute best version of Bobby he could be. And on Friday, swelling with pride, we all lined up for the Pipestone Ceremony.
Scout leaders duct taped our pants over our boots to keep our shoe laces from coming undone and mud from getting in our shoes. Despite the twilight, we were forbidden to bring flashlights. We were also forbidden to speak. From that moment, I wouldn’t say one word till the next morning.
Then, we ran. In single file, we ran into the woods. Scout leaders had flashlights, but mostly we ran without knowing where our feet would land. Finally, past the boys in front of me I saw a point of light through the trees. We broke through the forest into a mysterious, golden clearing lit by a massive fire, burning quietly and practically smokeless. The dry wood made almost no noise, though occasionally you could hear the CRACK of someone who snuck in a pine branch full of sap. Sparks drifted to the swaying treetops. That’s when the Pipestone Ceremony happened.
But I won’t say any more about it. At the end, we were instructed to return to our tents in silence and darkness. Then, just before we scattered in a panic, someone fanned the flames into a billowing rage as the glowering ceremony master commanded: “Speak not of this night, lest some dire thing o’ertake you!”
Ben Wolford is a freelance journalist and the editor of Latterly, a magazine of international journalism. He lives in the Dominican Republic.
