A Scout is Trustworthy

 

A scout is:

               Trustworthy

               Loyal
               Helpful
               Friendly
               Courteous
               Kind
               Obedient
               Cheerful
               Thrifty
               Brave
               Clean
               Reverent             

I learned those words some 40 plus years ago.  More than learned them, I built the structure of my thoughts and habits and goals around them.  I lived and breathed them then, and live and breath them now.

That’s not to say that I am perfect in any way.  Far from it, I have failed to live up to that standard most of the days of my life.  But I try. 

The first point of the Scout Law above is that a scout is trustworthy.  And like all things that point can really be taken a bit too far.

Some 35 years ago one wonderful summer day, I came across a boy that truly believed in the absolute of the Scout Law.  It surprised me then, it still confounds me now.

I was at summer camp along with 250-300 other boys just outside of Willits California at a camp that is now known as Wente Scout Reservation.

Being one of the older boys in camp, in addition to swimming and sailing, I had duties to make sure that everyone around me was doing the right thing and being safe. 

I needed to relieve myself and so headed back up onto the hill that held the various campsites to use one of the “outhouses”.  For any of you that may not know what an outhouse is, it is a small wooden building built over a deep hole that has been dug in the ground.  Within the building is a floor and raised bench with one or more places to sit comfortably suspended above the hole so that you can urinate or deficate into the pit below.

One of the more aromatic of locations in an outdoor camp, though not the most pleasant.

At this particular camp, the outhouses were actually fairly large and accommodated two or three boys side-by-side.

In any case, I walked up the hill to the outhouse and opened the door to find two fairly large boys holding a third boy by his ankles with that boy lowered down through the seat hole and into the pit below.

I immediately  began to chastise the two boys for what they were doing and demanded that they haul the third boy up.  I  challenged them to explain to me how it was that they were living up to the Scout Law by suspending the poor boy over a pile of shit.

I was just hitting full volume and stride when I heard a voice issue from below the seat saying: “Its okay, I asked them to.  I saw a snake down here that I wanted to catch”.

The two “holders” confirmed that indeed, they had been down by the waterfront when the third boy came up to them and asked if they would help catch a snake.  And so they had followed him, up the hill and he talked them into holding him by the ankles so he wouldn’t fall in while trying to rescue the snake.

 

Now I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t trust my two older brothers to hold me by the ankles over a pit of that muck (course, if you knew my brothers back then, maybe that isn’t saying so much).  But certainly, if family can’t be trusted, complete strangers shouldn’t be.  At least that is the cynical side of me thinking.

Now I cant say for sure what would have happened if I hadn’t come along when I did.  But I have often wondered what happened to that young man, that boy who truly believed that all scouts were trustworthy.

 

 

 Copyright © 2011 - Marty Vandermolen - All Rights Reserved