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Extreme Games
On Friday, we drove through dinnertime traffic and a persistent drizzle to Custalogatown Scout Reservation, north of Franklin. We arrived with little more than forty minutes of daylight remaining to set up our tents. Mercifully, the rain stopped as we pulled onto the sodden field where eight other Scout troops were busily unloading gear and setting up camp. The failing light made it easy to lose a tent stake or a rope, but we are, by now, old hands at setting up our tents, and by eight we were “under canvas” and a muddy game of pickup football with the neighboring troops was in progress. I’m too old for mudball, and so I wandered around checking out the campsites of the more established troops. Our gear is a mish-mash of tents and tarps, some of which don’t leak, and we tend to look and act a little like a bunch of gypsies. Each of the other troops also seemed to have a style and personality of its own. One was like an army unit --- all tents exactly the same and erected in a straight line, propane lanterns on posts for lighting, picnic tables under a long frame tent for meals and meetings, lights out at 10 p.m. Another troop’s campsite was designed by a cook. Tents circled the chuck wagon, which had more shelves, cooking apparatus and condiments than my kitchen at home. There were quiet consultations about the breakfast menu and late food shipments arrived until 11:30 p.m.
When things quieted down, I crawled into my little one-man tent, unzipped the windows, and lay there watching the clouds scud across the moon. Soon the rain and wind picked up again. I was content though; happy to be warm and dry, and confident that the storm, if it was wild enough, would blow itself out by dawn. By 6:30 a.m., we were up and about. The rain had not stopped completely, but, when viewed from under cover, it didn’t seem to be coming down all that hard. We were hungry and in high spirits. Breakfast was three-dozen scrambled eggs and two pounds of fried bacon, washed down with a gallon of Sunny Delight. Sure, the eggs were not entirely free of eggshells, and an occasional drip of water made bacon frying a dangerous occupation, but everyone agreed that breakfast was a huge success. Then it came time to step from under the tarps, and, all of a sudden, the day seemed a whole lot wetter. My legs were soaked before we reached the obstacle course, and no one was the least bit interested in low crawling through the mud for the honor of the troop. By the time we reached the Bowling Ball Shot-put my boots squished with every step, but the spectacle of a bowling ball making huge muddy craters in the meadow cheered me up a little. In the final event of the morning, one Scout would try to kick a soccer ball past a defender and into a goal. You could tell just where on his body a goaltender had blocked a kick by the great brown circles of mud that marked the point of impact. Chilly and wet as we were, this was still amusing, and everyone wanted to be goalie. Extreme Games indeed!
On Sunday, six of us went back to retrieve the troop’s gear. We had no trouble getting into camp, and there I saw the army style troop calm and dry, busily taking down their tents. Across the way, the master chefs were polishing off a sumptuous breakfast and preparing to leave as well. Even the carefree loons had stuck it out, after having made their way up steam to a good crossing and then hiking back to their campsite through the woods. I felt like such an amateur. Baden-Powell, founder of Scouting and inventor of the Scout Motto, was once asked, “Be Prepared for what?” He replied, “Oh, for just any old thing.” This is still good advice today, but it seems it does take some practice. |
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My
favorite troop was a carefree bunch of loons who had nice gear set
up in some semblance of a pattern and who, perhaps better than the
others, knew that they were not there to win or to eat well or to
sleep but to meet other Scouts and to have noisy fun until the
lights were finally turned out at 1 a.m.
By
11 a.m. we had had enough of that and were heading back to camp to
dry out, when some guys from another troop invited us up to a cabin
across the creek. There they had a fire roaring in the stove and we
quickly got warm, if not dry. Our spirits revived with the warmth,
but by the time we were ready to return, the stream had risen 18
inches and we were cut off from our campsite. It was then that the
complications of the day overwhelmed us and, much to everyone’s
disappointment, we ended up calling in the reinforcements to take us
home a day early.