The ground we pitched on was sloped a bit. I put Caleb up near the top, figuring he is lighter. He still managed to creep down and give me about 6" of sleeping room.
That first night was one of my best memories from the weekend. Everyone went to bed about ten o'clock. Caleb and I put our pajamas on and slipped into our sleeping bags. I was tired, but he felt like reading a bit--he's working on the third Harry Potter book. So I let him read by flashlight next to me. So I'm laying there in my sleeping bag. Caleb is reading next to me by flashlight. And the sounds of the forest--we were far back into the woods--were everywhere. I thought, "This is why we came. This is why we do this."
Sometime about 2 a.m. the rain started. At first, I thought it was just the wind through the trees, but then you could hear it falling on the tent. The temperature dropped a bit; I zipped up my bag. When you go camping, you expect to be miserable. That's one thing I'm learning. You have to throw away your baseline expectation of comfort and decide to take things as they come. If you're wet or you smell, that's okay. If you have to shoo daddy long legs away from the door of your tent so you can go in or out--that's okay. Peeing in the dark into tall grass with no idea what may be creeping around you, that's okay. If you can keep dry, warm, and keep your clothes moderately clean, then all is good.
The rain quit about 7 a.m. the next morning. It was a cold, in the low 60s. I'd packed for cold evenings, so Caleb had one pair of jeans. He wore them. I didn't want to wear jeans, so I wore shorts and a T-shirt all day. I was a little chilly, but everyone was so active that it didn't matter. The bathroom was a spider-infested dungeon of a building. The shower was worse. No one showered. We had to kill a monstrous spider to make the toilet safe for use. Caleb, of course, has to poo in the morning. I worried all night about what to do when he needed to take his morning constitution. Perhaps, I thought, I could take him to the visitor's center first thing. Maybe he could poop in the woods or something. Didn't matter. He'd eaten too many peanuts the night before and woke up with problems. We rushed into the dungeon. There was no choice, no visitor's center. Thank God I'd packed more underwear for him than he needed.
The big event for the day was a two-mile hike. The leaders had neglected to buy a trail map. They used their iPhones and tried to make a go of it. We spent some time sorting out which way to go. The kids didn't care. They made walking sticks, stood too close to creek banks, threw rocks at trees, convinced themselves that every weed was poison ivy, and kicked a lot of mushrooms.
One of the older boys was particularly brash. He was the first to pretend his stick was a weapon. It was a spear. It was a bow-and-arrow. He "shot" one of the weirder kids with make-believe arrows. He told the loudest fart jokes. (There are a lot of fart jokes in gangs of elementary school boys.) He kicked beautifully large mushrooms without need, not even considering the beauty of the thing now spread over the ground or how long it had taken to grow. Other boys clustered around this young Achilles, including, to a certain degree, Caleb. This is the great balancing act of manhood played out in miniature: how to negotiate with alpha males. You can ignore them and pay a social cost; you are the one getting shot with make-believe arrows. You are "dead," but you keep your pride (though alone). You an follow them and lose your freedom of choice, finding belonging and freedom for harassment in obsequience to tyranny. Or you can negotiate a truce with them, taking on some of their ways or even playing around with them and joining some of their games without giving in to the whole. Violence and machismo is an ingredient of masculinity, and these sort can teach you that. They make you grow, but you retain an inner allegiance to yourself and to hopefully better and higher goals. This is learning to control Dionysus, to bring control to bear against unrestrained anarchy and the doctrine of might makes right. It is a step toward the necessity of political and ethical maturity.
Later that day, D had the boys work on trying to light kindling with flint and steel. This was a very difficult task! The boys struggled to push hard enough on the steel to produce a spark--and it was hard to do. As they worked on it, D talked about the importance of fire for survival, about how to feed a fire once the kindling caught, about the importance of packing a good camp knife, and about safety. I like D. He is an involved dad, and he isn't laissez faire about the rules of scouting (i.e. he quizzes the boys about the scout motto and the scout rule and such). Also, he prepares for sessions. Already he's better than 90% of the leaders I've ever met.
The boys in general also had a lot of time to play. D told me there would be down time, so I brought Caleb's football and a Frisbee. Caleb played a lot of football, especially. They also had these PVC pipe blowguns that they used to shoot the little marshmallows at each other. Caleb and I are going to make one of these for future camp outs. D also wants Caleb to achieve the scout qualifications to carry a pocketknife. Somewhere in there, the boys played tug-of-war and Caleb lost his hat. (I was chatting with a few of the adult leaders at the time or I'd have taken pictures and made sure he didn't lose his hat. I looked everywhere for that hat.)
That night was the big campfire. Each den performed tiny skits, and a den master led everyone in several cheers. There was a campy song or two. One of the leaders ended the night by taking up a Ziploc bag of ash. She explained that the founder of scouting began a practice of taking some ash from a camp's fire and mixing it in the fire of the following camp. (An idea that I'm sure he got from the Christian doctrine of apostolic succession.) "Mixed in these ashes," she continued, "are ashes from the worldwide jamboree of 1933, other national jamborees, and regional jamborees of the past. As I put them into the fire, think of those first scouts, just like you, in 1933. Think of scouts all over the world who also have ashes from those fires that were taken back by their leaders." She had mixed a little bit of a chemical into the ashes, and when she put them in, the fire glowed hot and dramatic with a fierce green tint. The evening ended with an emotional, formal retirement ceremony for three U.S. flags. Everyone, standing, said the pledge of allegiance. Then another leader read a poem called "Old Glory" as each flag was gently placed in the center of the flames. I wondered what the boys thought. The adults thought about the same things: 9/11. Fifteen years of active combat and thousands of wounded and war dead. Our friends, brothers, and fathers, and grandfathers who served. I'm always very sensitive about public religion. Christians were killed for not participating in the imperial cult, after all, not saying "the pledge of allegiance" in their day. They were deemed enemies of the state and atheists. Therefore, Christians play a wary game with patriotism. Nevertheless, love of country can be a penultimate to the ultimate of the Kingdom of God. We can honor veterans and respect our military and pray fervently for the day when swords shall be beaten into plowshares and soldiers are no longer necessary. Here we are again: negotiating with Dionysus and struggling with the push-and-pull of politics, community, and ethics.
Exhausted, Caleb and I went to our tent and fell asleep with little difficulty.
I woke up with the woodpeckers. Three of them. Better yet, the sun was shining at the door of our tent; we'd faced the tent east on purpose for some woodcraft reason that bubbled up from my subconscious. Eggs and bacon and sausage and cereal. I wondered silently whether a camping version of a french press couldn't be used to make decent coffee. The night had been cold, but Caleb and I stayed warm. He didn't want to get up--he was sleeping well on nearly the entire mattress. There is a cozy quality to tent camping when everything isn't wet. The boys started waking up. Caleb got up and a someone started throwing a football. I broke the tent. More daddy long legs irritably vacating our rain fly. Once everything had been packed up and all trash picked up, the pack sang a few songs around the fire pit. Scouting has its roots in the same quasi-Christian-religiousness that the YMCA was born in. That part messes with me a little. It is very respectful, and faith is treated respectfully, but that mix is a thing of the cultural past. I don't like it, and don't want to get rid of it at the same time. Not having an answer, and there being no harm in it, I go along. There is even a religion badge that scouts can earn. The curricula for the badge is legion--there being different curricula developed by different faith groups. There is a Lutheran one, and a Roman Catholic one, a Hindu one and a Judaism one, a Ba'hai one and a Baptist one, and there's an Episcopal one. Each tradition developed the curricula, and scouting asks that the scout do the curricula developed for their faith, with the support of their parents and religious leader or pastor. This is what I mean by respect. Scouting didn't try and do something like this on its own. It leaves the religious element in its overall program, but the content of that element it turns over to people who are in that sphere. It is a compromise that this time in history would not even make an effort to try. We are a people these days who do not compromise or listen well. We are much closer to Dionysus than we'd care to admit, and so have become more childish about our politics and or ethics.
Then we drove home.
So that was the weekend.
In typical adult style, I got home and mowed the front and back yards. I was so tired last night--though couldn't figure out why. We'd slept more hours per night during our camping trip than I do at home. In camp we went to bed at 10 p.m. and woke at 7 a.m.
Caleb and I are planning on going camping again in a few weeks. The state Jamboree is being held in Nashville this year. They'll be Boy and Cub Scouts from all over the state.
It is odd to be involved in scouts. I wasn't much for it when I was a kid; my scout leaders were rough hillbillies who saw it as an excuse to fish, and I didn't have the maturity to negotiate with the alphas. I got shot with a lot of make believe arrows (and some of them not so make believe.) I see scouting as doing two things that are vital today.
One, they get Caleb away from technology. This is another god to negotiate with, right? Prometheus, who steals fire (technology and mastery over the elements) from the gods and gives it to humanity. The worship of Prometheus is alive and well in our day. Social, behavioral, economic, environmental ills--sicknesses of the body and of the mind--everything will be taken care of by our technologies. They will bring in the promised land and then keep updating it so it gets better and better and better. Once again, we have to negotiate with this god. I'm typing this on a computer in a cubicle in the middle of dozens of other cubicles. This is the working future that we're educating our children to join and to master a living from. So I think technology is very important--but so is peeing in the woods. As the incarnation reminds us, we are images of the transcendent God, but we are also mammals. Scouting is an organized way of kicking (mostly me) in the pants and getting more mammal into his (and my) daily life.
The second thing that scouting provides is a liturgy of togetherness. Here is a way to keep Caleb and I in each other's lives. Without it, trying to see each other is very hard. Adulthood is so busy, so time consuming, so tyrannical that it devours time to just be with him. It judges that time as silly and useless because it is not productive. Another hour of Minecraft, building little towers and canals! How wasteful! (Note Capitalism as not only an economic system but an ethic or anthropology that seeps into every human relationship and asks of it, "What are you producing by this?" In its hand is the sacrificial knife called Opportunity Cost.) Further, kid logic is impenetrable and its world of teacher and peers and school and imagination is a deep and silent fortress of secrets. Without some liturgy that makes summits between childhood and adulthood so that the gates open and our ambassadors can meet together, then I'm left to the this-and-that of spycraft.
The older I get, the more I've come to believe how much we need catechism and liturgy in our lives. I knew this in my bones when I was a kid, and I knew that scouting was such a catechism, but my pack was run by children. Only adults know how to catechize. Liturgy is not a child's game, though it is for children. Our time has forgotten adulthood. I think they remembered what it was back in 1933. Adulthood does not shirk from the politics and ethics necessary for healthy communities. Adulthood keeps its allegiances clear in the midst of many competing gods. And adulthood remembers its mortality, that it is mammal and mortal, and so catechizes the young and creates liturgies within which catechism can happen. When adulthood has gone missing, we lose ourselves to competing gods, become subject to tyrants in and outside of ourselves, and forget our liturgies so that generations become strangers to each other. Freedom is the exact opposite of this. Not unbounded freedom, but a liturgical one, a political one (where politics is what it means to work and live alongside others).
What do you do when you've forgotten adulthood? You look with others for freedom among the liturgies.
