Post a Comment On: A Nod to Nothing

Five Boy Scout Leaders Die in VA Accident

Well, if that isn't just disturbing. I'm an Eagle Scout myself, and although I quit giving them financial support until they get rid of their bias against gays (please...I knew several gay scouts and several gay leaders - I was always more worried about my hetero Scouts sneaking off to see a counselor or the Swedish Boy Scouts across the lake at family camp, who were actually co-ed) I follow what they're up to. The Jamboree in question above is the National Jamboree at Fort A.P. Hill, Virginia. It's an immense gathering of Scouts and I went there myself around 1981 (wow, I'm old). The highlight of my time there? sleeping through a live performance of "Elvira" by the Oak Ridge Boys (at the height of its popularlity) because I hadn't closed my eyes in the previous sixty hours.

When I was there, it was not the safest place to be. There were daily (actually a few times a day) explosions -- ground rocking explosions -- as the military disposed of immense pits full of "found" explosives that littered the ground near the testing range. Not just at the beginning of the event either - every day. There were the Scouts who found a grenade and played catch. A live grenade. There were the critters in the lake that prevented us from swimming. Some sort of chiggers/swimmer's itch on acid that pretty much meant falling in the water during boating was out of the question. Not that that stopped other Scouts from ramming your raft and screaming "The South will rise again!" as they tried to flip you. There were the ticks. There were the normal hazards - sharp implements, cooking fires, etc. I spilled a whole pan of sizzling hot bacon grease on my leg and had a blister that stretched from just above my knee to a delta-shaped series of rivulets over my toes - but I felt fortunate that I wasn't the kid next to me at the first aid tent with a hatchet in his thigh (you can bandage around a hatchet until you get to the doc - it's worse to take it out sometimes). There were other immediate dangers, not including getting awakened by the Scottish "foreign exchange" Scouts and their bagpipes at 5 a.m. - but even after I got home, I was getting letters informing me that they had discovered PCBs/Dioxin in the area where the merit badge midway resided - specifically, in the areas where I had played some games.

All said, it didn't seem nearly as dangerous as the time in Scouts when I slipped on egg residue on a cement floor and nearly broke my tailbone during a skit about brown pants (cunningly incorporated into the play), or the time my friend fell off the climbing tower wearing my sneakers and they took him away in an ambulance with my only pair of sneakers, or the time some fellow counselors rolled a van (I was thankfully on leave), or the time I was at a jamboree where 80+ Scouts contracted hypothermia (and I was the Scout in charge of first aid), or just being a counselor for teen Webelos/Scouts period (poison ivy in the underwear anyone? tied to flagpole naked near the nurses' station? all your clothes up the flagpole? spun in a hammock and then whomped? I was much too pleasant to be the victim of these menial crimes, but a few of my close friends were not so fortunate). I never ended up dead, obviously, but it didn't seem to be for a lack of trying.