One year, along about when I was 17 my very good friend Brian and I were cooking up breakfast the second morning of the camporee when into the camp came trundling the most woeful looking boy you had ever seen. He was about 11 years old and obviously new to scouts. I have never seen a pair of pants that filthy, with grease stains, and charcoal smudges, and ground in dirt all the while still carrying their original leg creases.
And the boy himself; nice rich “Boy Scout Tan” all over his face and hands; a multi-shaded homogenation of dirt brown, charcoal black, and scab red obscured his hands and face in a staggering array that would have put any self-respecting sniper to shame. His boots were untied, he trod on the laces, and following him was a healthy cloud of dust, just like Pigpen in the Charlie Brown comics. I kid you not.
Brian and I knew what he was looking for, even before he opened his mouth. The only question in our minds was whether the odds were in our favor.
You see, back in those dusty old days, somewhere between the dinosaurs and the horseless carriage, society still knew how to laugh, and you could tease each other without it becoming a UN mediated crisis.
One of the traditions in scouting back then was to pull practical jokes on the new scouts. There were several well-known and routine initiation stunts that were pulled on new kids, usually on their first camping trip. Often a patrol leader would send a new scout out looking for one of three critical pieces of camp equipment that had somehow been forgotten during pack inspections before the trip. It would always be; a Left-handed Smoke Shifter, a Bacon Stretcher, or a Sky Hook.
There were of course no such things, but with the appropriate tone of voice by the patrol leader and the rest of the patrol playing along, every new boy got his chance to hunt endlessly; passed from patrol to patrol, troop to troop. Sometimes with an “Oh, we didn’t plan on using one and didn’t bring one”, other times with an “Oh, sorry, we just loaned ours out to the troop off that way” (pointing the opposite direction from where the boy had come).
But Brian and I had decided to turn the tables that year. We had planned ahead. We were determined to “Be Prepared”.
Not prepared to help the boy mind you, although help it would.
No, we had prepared to harass some unsuspecting patrol leader somewhere who thought he was playing a joke on his new guy, by providing the new guy with what the patrol leader was never going to suspect.
So a couple weeks before the Camporee, Brian and I had gotten together and invented a bacon stretcher which consisted of a couple of hand bent wire hook arrangements that could be used to pierce opposite ends of two strips of bacon, clip over a frying pan rim, and hold the bacon tight across the bottom of the pan. In truth it was never tested, and it most likely wouldn’t have worked…but then it wasn’t ever going to have to work. It just had to actually exist and look like it might work.
And we also dug out an old Erector Set and designed and built a nice compact left-handed operated smoke-shifter out of a flat platform that supported braces and a vertical plate of metal; with a crank on the left side that waved the vertical metal plate back and forth. Amazingly, that one actually worked.
But try as we might, we couldn’t figure out how to create a hook that would just hang in the sky anywhere it was placed without any support.
Thus, when that poor sloped-shouldered, discouraged and bedraggled boy stumbled into our camp we smiled, knowing that we were running 67% odds of helping him get one over on his patrol leader. Vastly better than anyone ever got in Las Vegas.
Sure enough, the poor boy opens his mouth and says: “Hey, do you guys have a left-handed smoke-shifter”. “My Patrol Leader forgot to pack one and the fire smoke is getting in his eyes while he’s cooking breakfast, so he sent me to find one, only nobody seems to have one”.
I looked from the boy to Brian. Brian looked from the boy to me. Brian turned back to the boy and I saw his face light up with his characteristic grin as he said: “Yeah, I got one in my pack, let me get it for you”.
While Brian was gone getting the smoke shifter, I made the poor kid clean up a bit. You know, knock the dust off his pants and shirt, button the pockets, tie his boots, and wash his face and hands.
And while he left his campsite at the beginning of his search filthy and bedraggled, we made sure that he was going to return squared away, with a glowing aura around him, proudly carrying the very tool his patrol leader had sent him in search of. Rather like Monty Python’s delivery of the Holy Grail.
Brian and I followed. Just to watch the fun.
Copyright © 2011 - Marty Vandermolen - All Rights Reserved
Very old I see, but I will still share. When I was 11, a brand new scout with my cervice cap and fold down pockets with red piping, I attended a weekend COR in a large park called Santa Anita, in the San Gabriel Valley. Of course, the search was given me, and I got a lot of exercise, especially for a stocky short legged boy. But, I arrived at a camp and asked about the smoke shifter, and a leader smiled and said; "why you have one with you now; but you are not using it correctly." He told me to take off my service cap and then hold it in my left hand. I did, and then he took me over by his fire and said, "now swing the hat back and forth to make the smoke move away from us". It worked very well, and he explained to me that it could also be right handed, just the opposite of what I had done. But he did not have a bacon stretcher. They had not sent me for the sky hook. Anyway, the leader said he though a friend of his at a camp not far away might have a stretcher. So, off I went. I found the adult he said to ask for, and sure enough, he had one. But, he could nt allow me to borrow it, as he was getting ready to use it. But he showed it to me. It was some kind of odd wire, hook, and spring device with a turn screw. He hooked the raw bacon on a hook, then put another hook on the other end, attached to the spring. Then, be turning the hand screw, the spring expanded and pulled the bacon. So, I went back to camp with one of the items, and the realization that I had been pranked. But, looking back, it is a fond memory. Have wondered if I might build one of those bacon stretching devices, just for fun.
ReplyDelete