Stories from the R-Files: Vol II, No 1

I stayed in scouts much longer than I should have when I was a teenager. All of my friends except for one (Eric Reeves - or Sleeves, as I liked to call him), left scouting when it was no longer cool: around age 12. I stayed in until I was 18 so I could earn my Eagle Scout badge. When I was 12 years old I decided my penultimate goal would be to enter into the Naval Academy and become a pilot-hero who would travel the world and defeat communism. Funny, how at age 33 now I hate to fly and am a communist :) Anyway, to achieve this goal I went against my shy and backwards grain to play sports, keep on the honor roll, earn the school citizenship award every year and attain my Eagle badge. Unfortunately, and akin to the character of Dwayne's ultimate plight in Little Miss Sunshine, I learned that I was ineligible for entry to the Academy because I had asthma through age 13 (the cutoff was 12). My dream was crushed and I eventually had to come around to being proud of the means to my end rather than the end itself.

Nonetheless, my scouting memories are some of the most bizarre moments I have held in my memory banks. During the summer of my sophomore year of high school, our scoutmaster foolishly decided to send the troop to one of what the BSA calls their "High Adventure Camps." This one in particular was the High Seas Adventure located in the Florida Keys. The Boy Scouts own a small 5- or 6-acre island off of Big Key, near Islamorada, Florida. Of course we had images of a tropical paradise where we could kick back, do some hiking and enjoy pristine white-sand beaches in the Caribbean and sip on our smuggled miniatures of Jack Daniels. In reality the island was a befouled wasteland given to the BSA by the Exxon Corporation in the late seventies. Apparently, a massive oil spill had occurred there and Exxon was forced to purchase the island and clean it up. After clean-up they donated it to the Boy Scouts. As our boat pulled up onto the beach, I quickly realized that Exxon did a horrendous job. The "beach" was no beach at all, but rather a gooey, mucky mess of blackened wood pulp, oil and sand fleas. A slurry from hell. I had worked on a farm since I was 13 and this beach looked like a pile of dried cow manure after a storm and then had been heated up in a 100 degree day with 100% humidity. A steamy, smelly mess. All 11 of us stared in horror as the boat pulled up and we literally had to be pushed off the boat. My legs sunk up to my knees in this compost as hundreds of sand fleas jumped onto my arms, neck and face. Wyatt Campbell began crying. I knew that after this 10-day excursion was over, I would be more of a man than anyone who came out of the Naval Academy.

I was the senior patrol leader for this lovely vacation so I pretended I was a field sergeant pushing his troops forward towards enemy lines in battle. For this was indeed a war. We reached the treeline beyond the 100 feet or so of infested black beach and all fell to the ground, wondering how we would survive 10-days in this horrible place. It is funny, but looking back I envision this scene in my head in black-and-white, just like an old WWII movie. There was blood and tears, sweat and fear.

After we regrouped and realized this wasn't a joke, I told the troops to set up camp and prepare for dinner. Since the ground was a wet muck and our feet sank almost a foot into this earth we had to gather driftwood planks in order to set our tents upon. The quickest of us found the smoothest logs while the fat and lazy were left with barky, prickly sticks that slit holes in the bottom of the nylon fabrics and were sure to present a restless night's sleep. We then fashioned a latrine about 20 feet up into a coconut palm tree with a seating station and a hole which dropped waste down into a pit dug into the ground below. To this day, I'm not sure if I came up with the idea or if someone told us to do this for good reason. I don't know why we would do such a thing. As one might expect this idea was disastrous, you can imagine what might happen with such a situation, especially late at night when people are wandering around. Our first night we were all so depressed we chose to go to sleep without dinner. All 12 of our JD miniatures were also consumed this first night...

to be continued after lunch today probably.


Websites I visited today:
Scout Island - Florida (Cuba)
Little Miss Sunshine

Today's High Score

A Treatise on Mind Rot

(Or, "A Testament to Loafiness").

I sit at my desk
Am I working? Not Really
I stare at my screen

Out in the tan shed
A Kegerator with beer
I am almost drunk

On top of my shelf
Cracked jug of hummingbird food
Now I have maggots

White shiny new boots
Clamped by zippers up the side
Just what ladies love

________________________
Places I visited today:
Wikipedia - Haiku
Haiku Society of America

Where the Magic Happens

My office, where I will come up with the brilliant quips that will make this web log the most popular on the Internet. Notice how I use the term "web log" instead of blog. Despite the chaotic appearance of my work area, I am a very anal purist, especially concerning language. I hate slang, and yes, blog is slang for web log. My wife, an English teacher, tells me that there is nothing wrong with slang and that such new terms and shortened versions of words are just part of a natural evolution of language. Well, I'm a hardliner I suppose.

Anyway, on my walls you will see most of my heroes: Don Adams (of Get Smart fame), Che Guevara, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Rene DesCartes, Soren Kierkegaard, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty, and Jon Voight. Oh, and various pictures of my children.