CV Rick

My Boy Scout Summer: Big R's Collapse

We got back from the high adventure just in time to get back to school.  My Boy Scout Summer was over, almost.

School meant football practice and other before and after school commitments, so I wasn't paying attention to the tragedy unfolding in Lisa's life, until she cornered me in the library one day.

“I need to get out of my house for a while,” she said.  Looking confused as I must have, she continued, “Can you please ask me out on a date?”

Well, I remembered Big R's bulging biceps and not-so-subtle threat.  “I don't think your dad would like that,” I began.

“He's not there.  Mom threw him out of the house.”

Scandal is like the lifeblood of the Mormon church and gossip is the tissue that holds the body of membership together, but this was stuff I hadn't heard.  Of course I was on permanent avoidance from my father and my mother was barely able to say two words to me without getting frustrated and crying, so there wasn't much communication going on in CV Rick's house.  Ah, the joys of being a teenager.  If I had been speaking to them, I'd have gotten the scoop for sure.

I asked her to the movie and made arrangements to double date with my friend Terry and his girlfriend. It's usually a requirement among Mormon kids to double date and I wasn't taking any chances.  Double dates were supposed to keep the one-on-one situations minimal and keep a girl's virginity protected. What it really did was provide double make-out sessions where the front seat and back seat of the car were treated as isolated rooms of encounter.

My Boy Scout Summer: Order of the Arrow

We all sat facing the campfire.  We'd been told not to look out into the woods.  Despite being teenagers, we were all quiet.  We knew they were out there in the dark, stalking about, watching us, making choices.  We were afraid to be selected and afraid not be selected.  The Order of the Arrow was the part of the Boy Scouts, but it was also a different organization entirely.  Most of all it was secret.  The ceremonies, the activities, the purpose - all secret.  You are sworn to never reveal that which is done or the manner in which it happens.  Like all secret organizations, it's unreasonably appealing.  I wanted to be part of it even if I had no idea what it was.

Rule #1 about secret organizations - - - they aren't worth it.

The boy next to me said, "Ow, Shit that hurts" and I knew he'd been selected.   Then I got smacked in the shoulder with what must have been a tree branch.  It did hurt.  Maybe it was a tree trunk.  I'd been tapped out.

Then I was running through the woods trying to keep up with a couple guys in their underwear.  Yeah, you heard me. 

Oh, no.  They were wearing loincloths and were wearing warpaint.  Yes, they had bandannas with feathers.  So, I'm chasing white boys dressed like Hollywood Indians through the woods in the middle of the night because someone smacked me in the shoulder with a tree.

Then the five boys with shoulder bruises were standing around an unlit campfire while an Indian Chief repeated Masonic ritual rites.  No, I'm not kidding.  The Indian Chief was another white boy wearing the dime store version of a Sioux war bonnet and he was making us five repeat grave promises of loyalty and secrecy.  Then we stripped down to our underwear . . .

Have you noticed that My Boy Scout Summer involved me in my underwear a lot?  I just noticed it myself.

and we were left to survive the night alone in the woods, led to some random spot blindfolded.  In our underwear we had to prove that we could survive out in the wild.  I'm sure it would've been harder before us Europeans ensured that all predators were eliminated.

Cold

Tired

Hungry

A day and a half later we're retrieved and brought to the campfire again.  This time we're awarded the honor of Order of the Arrow, an organization using the trappings of Native America and the theater of the Masons - handshakes, pyramids, symbols, etc.  We took on caricatures of Indian names and then lit the fire that was set in a triangular pattern.

My Boy Scout Summer: Cold Lake

Remember Norman Lee Warden the Third? We visited with him and his brother, John way back when my Boy Scout Summer began.  Well, he's back.

The high adventure was through the heart of the Idaho Sawtooth Mountain range.  It's beautiful up there, but hiking was rugged and wearisome.  The replacement scout leader quickly earned the nickname, Sir, Yes Sir.  The reason, if not already obvious, was that he barked out commands that always involved faster and farther.  He seemed to walk with his map in hand, constantly complaining that we weren't going to make it to our planned campsite by dark.

The Sawtooths are high desert and we spent about half the time above the treeline, hiking right below the snow of the white caps.  At night the wind would whip through the canyons, ripping tent ties right from the ground.

Alternately too hot to stand, then wind too cold and strong to withstand, the hiking was brutal, but the scenery contrasted the struggle so well.  I remember coming over a pass and looking down into a valley twenty miles long with glacier fingers stretching into pine forests like hands on either side.  With binoculars we could see bear cubs rolling down a hill while their mother watched lazily sunning herself on a rock.  Another time we seemed to follow a bald eagle most of the day as it hunted from the updrafts.  It'd drop, grab a rodent, then fly away only to reappear a few minutes later for another catch. 

The first couple days John, Shane and I had plenty of time for sightseeing, since we didn't have to get up and keep moving until we heard Sir, Yes Sir screaming at Norman to pick up the pace.  We'd stay out ahead of that firestorm, at least for the first two days.

My Boy Scout Summer - Wolverine Trail

What a summer it was for everyone.  I don't know how I got through it, to tell the truth.  But things were winding down and we only had one big adventure left.  That adventure was truly one to look forward to, because in Boy Scouts the really big exciting trips are called High Adventures.  I'd been on a couple High Adventures to the Boundary Waters in Northern Minnesota and another one to the Daniel Boone Wilderness in Kentucky, but this year's High Adventure was a week-long hiking trip through the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho.  In particular, the trail we were going to take was called Wolverine Trail.  It was filled with dangerous switchback paths, precarious drop-offs, spectacular views and a good chance to see wildlife close up. 

Wolverines themselves are rare in the U.S. Rockies, but they do exist and when one encounters them, there isn't any way to be sure of its mood.  Sometimes they'll attack even humans for no apparent reason other than proximity.  So, wolverines aren't to be trifled with, and the Wolverine Trail was a place where some were sighted every couple years.  I couldn't wait.

Preparation had begun several months in advance with the purchase or borrowing of backpacks, gathering food, fund-raising, begging supplies, etc.  We didn't have much money, and my father was only supportive of my activities with his mouth, so it was all up to me.  There was no way I was missing it, however.  I worked extra hours at the Car Wash (a whole other story) and delivered televisions for cash.  I even hand-washed and waxed a custom Semi-Tractor in exchange for a used tent a church member who also happened to be an independent trucker owned. 

Then, a week before the trip we got the best news of all.  Big R wasn't going to go!  Not that we hated him or anything (although I did kind of fear for my life because of how the summer had gone so far).  It was some kind of family emergency, so instead one of the other scout's father was going to be the only adult leader.  Only one adult leader for eight boys, things really couldn't get much better if you asked me. 

However, I wasn't going to get out of town that simply. 

My Boy Scout Summer: The Whitewater Canoe

Do you have any stories so stupid, so crazy, that if you'd have died you surely would be in the running for an annual Darwin Award? I do, and here it is.

All of the stupidest things men have done have started with these words, “Hey, watch this."
                                                                              - CV Rick

In the town of Jackson, Wyoming there's a sporting goods store with a demolished canoe on a rock pedestal. It's a warning to all people that the whitewater rapids in Alpine Canyon are not for canoes.  It's a stretch of the Snake River for expert kayakers and whitewater rafts navigated by guides.  At the base of that rock, chipped into the stone are five names.  The five men who made it all the way through the Alpine Canyon in a canoe are enshrined on that rock, behind and really low.  Each of those men chipped their initials into the stone at night, after the store closed, because what kind of warning would that splintered canoe be if it were also known to be an award to the guys who succeeded?

Big R had checked out as far as I was concerned.  He wanted nothing more to do with me and I was happy to be rid of him as a scout-leader and happy to be rid of his eternally teasing daughter, Lisa.  I had my Eagle Papers signed, the project was done, the review would be in my favor and there was almost nothing more to do in the scouts except to match Little R. 

I told you before that I was doing part-time service as a canoe instructor up at the camp.  That means I'd drive up once a week and teach all the younger boys about paddling, steering, safety and unswamping canoes in various ways.  So, you might say I was an expert of sorts.  That's not what I said at the time.  Back then I would look you right in the eye and tell you that I was THE EXPERT.  But, it wasn't true then, and it isn't true now.  The one thing I really know was that there was one older boy who could handle a canoe better than I could and he'd proven it. I wanted my chance.  

So, I went to Little R, whose real name was Arthur, and I asked him to teach me how to do the Alpine Run. See, of those five names, one of them was Arthur's.   He agreed and we went over all the precautions and dangers of doing class 4 rapids (at other times of the year a couple of them hit class 5) in an open canoe.  Now as you might imagine, canoing rapids is a whole different animal than kayaking them.  In a Kayak you can right yourself and Kayaks don't easily swamp, meaning they're designed in a way that they don't hold water in.  Canoes will swamp and when they fill with water in a river there's no quick solution.  The trick then is to prevent them from taking in water.

Tricks are clever, and so I was going to be a clever paddler.  Those of you with some common sense can start cringing now. 

My Boy Scout Summer: Big R and the Penny Jar

Big R scared us all.  I don't know why he was a scoutmaster.  He didn't have sons, only two daughters.  He wasn't all that interested in teaching us scouting skills and he didn't really care about making us productive citizens.  As far as I could tell, we were free labor to him. An older boy in the troop, whom we called Little R because his name was Arthur, was really the person we looked toward for scouting skills and leadership.  That was actually a mistake as we'll see in the next installment. 

I misspoke earlier.  I do know why he was the scoutmaster after all. In the Mormon Church, scoutmaster is a calling, and all callings come down as a result of prayer.  So the Bishop and his two counselors sat around looking at open assignments and then prayed to God for the message on who would best lead their young impressionable boys in their quest to become respectful men.  God sent his answer down, “Give them that enormous muscle-bound bastard over there with the super-hot daughters.”  And so we had a scoutmaster. 

Free Labor I said.  A couple times we went up to the mountains and cut wood for him.  A cord of firewood is about two pickup truck loads and takes one guy about four hours to cut, split and stack.  Big R would haul up a trailer that would hold seven cords of firewood and his scouts would fill it up for him.  Since no family can use seven cords of firewood in a season, the detective in me might suspect that Big R was selling the firewood.  Of course no detective was needed since we were the ones who helped him unload the wood at other people's houses.  He always said it was a scout fund-raising project, but I don't recall seeing that money come back to the scouts.

Another example of scouts as labor came when he decided to dig a cellar. When you walked into Big R's house, you were right in the living room and to your left was the top of a spiral staircase leading down to the basement.  The stairs were very shaky, not wooden but instead were steel stairs circling around what appeared to be a fireman's pole.  The wrought iron railing (not banister by any means) always shook and bent giving one the feeling that this ride needed safety harnesses.  The basement was a fully finished family room, weight room, and workshop. The weight room rivals what was available at Gold's Gym – free weights, benches, machines, leg press station, etc.  He had us gut the workshop area, and then we pick-axed through the concrete floor/foundation until we got to dirt.  Then we dug an eight-foot deep hole at least fifteen-feet square where that workshop used to be, poured new concrete for a new floor and walls, and then built a wooden floor with a trap door and stairs.  All this without a building permit, without structural license, and without pay.  Big R got a hell of a lot more out of the scouts than we got out  of his remarkable leadership.

And all that dirt?  We hauled it up those rickety stairs, a five-gallon paint bucket full at a time.  What fools we were.

 

My Boy Scout Summer – Eagle Scout Project

After stealing a canoe with the intention of wandering through the forbidden terrain of Big R's young daughter, I was forced to gingerly tread a minefield of disaster.  I mentioned before that the man was big, but perhaps my description didn't inspire the fear that was part of my being that summer.  His arms were steam engine pistons the diameter of a fire hydrant, and his hands were made to crush the throats of horny boys with designs on his angelic girls.  Every time Lisa came near me I was looking around all for him, nervous and acting like a meth addict jonesing for a fix.

So, one day I arrived home early having quit a job moving sprinkler pipe (which is a whole other story involving an insane farmer and a rattlesnake), Lisa was waiting for me at my house.  I circled the block twice before parking, like an undercover agent losing tails on a top secret mission.

“I talked to my scout leader,” Lisa said.  “They need some showers built at the camp, and it would be a good way for you to make it up to her for all the trouble that night.”

Now, I might be a dimmer bulb than many so this was one I had to slowly digest.  “You want me to build showers for the Girl Scouts?”

“Yes.  My dad says that it could be your Eagle Project.”

Again with the slow digesting.  “Big R knows about this?  He's signing off on me building showers for the Girl Scouts?”  This was going to be trouble.  I knew it and I was all for it.

“He just doesn't want me up there when you install them,” she said.  Naturally, he wasn't too dumb. Then she added, “But I've thought of a way to go up separately.”

“I'm in.”

My Boy Scout Summer - The Girl Scout Camp

Boy Scout Camp was situated on beautiful blue water, below the Palisades Dam in Southeastern, Idaho.  In my research for this post, I've found that the Boy Scout Camp I went to is no longer there.  One can only surmise that the safety of hundreds of boys camping below the dam might have been cause for concern.  The Girl Scout camp, situated above the dam however, is still there.

The organizations, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, couldn't be more different despite their names.  The Boy Scouts as I've pointed out before is quite a political organization dedicated to promoting stereotypes and continuing an unsustainable existence hearkening back to a simpler time of racism, sexism, and exploitation that all true conservatives long for.  Girl Scouts, oddly enough, seem to be about empowering girls through mutual support and companionship while teaching social and practical skills which can round out a young girl's personality.  And Girl Scouts have cookies.

I realize that those are simplistic summaries but I'm sticking by them.

Girl Scout Camp was located up the river, across the dam, and then across Palisades reservoir.  It was enough of a trek that only the truly dedicated boys would dare make the voyage.  My characterization in the previous Boy Scout Summer post might have been a little exaggerated, leading some of you to believe that these two camps were simply on the same lake, but to a teenage boy just having the Girl Scout Camp in the same county was 'right next door.' 

When it comes to girls, I've always been an idiot, truly risking it all in search of the elusive soft skin and pleasant smell of a pretty companion.  Back then was no different.  I was in hot pursuit of Big R's daughter, and he didn't know it. 

Big R was our Scout Leader, a true monster of a man.  A former Marine, his bold forearm eagle tattoo danced under heavy muscles like the last vision a man has before his violent demise.  He stood at least six foot three and defined macho for every boy in the troop: weights, dogs, trucks, and guns.  The guy was a muscle machine with only two soft spots as far as anyone knew.  One soft spot was for his daughter, Mary, and the other soft spot was for his youngest daughter, Lisa.  He would've killed any boy who touched her.

So, I planned to trek over to Girl Scout Camp in the middle of the night to do just that.   

My Boy Scout Summer

Have you ever met someone whose name defined them? Norman Lee Warden the Third was one of those people. I was friends with his little brother, John, who was a fine basketball player.  John was a normal boy, brown hair with freckles, athletic with a really good sense of humor.  He was only a year younger than Norman and to this day I have no idea why they were so different.

When I met Norman I made the mistake of calling him Norm.  “I am Norman Lee Warden the Third,” he said. “My father is a Norman Lee Warden and my grandfather is a Norman Lee Warden.” John rolled his eyes.

Norman had an acne problem which left his face pitted and splotchy and he wore thick, black framed glasses. Unfortunately for him, John was bigger, stronger, and better looking and never hesitated to pound on Norman whenever they disagreed. Without an escape route, few boys reminded John that he wasn't an only child. John stayed in a different cabin, hung out with different boys, and never took any lessons with Norman.  Until swim safety.