#what it feels like when you watch the campers next to you toboggan down a hill in a firetub

[danbily]

Goodbye Vietnam

This is a true story about a winter camping trip that I went on.

As a chubby little boy, I was the perfect fit for Cub Scouts. We built birdhouses, sang silly songs, and, best of all, baked cookies. What I lacked in ambition was more than offset by the snacks at the end of each weekly meeting. My small blue uniform was stretched to its limits as I neared the end of my tour of duty. It was time to move on to Boy Scouts.    

My first night at Boy Scouts was shockingly different from Cub Scouts. Mr. Cordy, our scoutmaster, made us suck in our guts as we stood at attention in a straight line while he inspected our uniforms. My scarf tie was on crooked and I could feel that Mr. Cordy was unhappy about my chubby physique. “You will benefit from our exercise program, young man,” was his terse remark as he departed for the next scout in line. I knew then that we were not ending this meeting with cookies and milk, and I was right.

My pack included my best friend, Charlie, my neighbor, Art, my fellow Cub Scout, Paul, and Donny. Donny was the son of our pack supervisor, Mr. Lynn, who’d been an officer in World War II. In addition to our regular troop meeting at the new rec center, we would often meet at their home. The Lynns owned one of the first color TVs in 1958. We would all gather around it and gaze in amazement at actual color film. We compared it to our drab black and white sets at home and laughed. Mrs. Lynn would make us snacks as well. It was so much better than a troop meeting with mean Mr. Cordy.

Just after the New Year, Mr. Lynn announced that he together with Mr. Cordy were planning a winter father-son campout. Each pack would pick their own date and camp just south of Holland, New York, a town known for its lake effect snow.

I was eager to test out my new scout-approved, two-man tent that I’d earned by selling Boy Scout Christmas cards. It was a canvas tent complete with poles, stakes, and a canvas floor. It also had a mosquito net door that would be a nice feature in the summer. The only thing I lacked was an air mattress for the underside of my sleeping bag. My dad and I needed to go shopping for air mattresses as soon as possible.      

The following Saturday, we visited our local sporting goods shop. It was located in a small plaza and had a limited selection. The clerk showed us an air mattress made in France, but made no personal recommendation; he fully admitted that he wasn’t into camping. My father ultimately bought two of the ugly blue contraptions. The clerk smirked as he rang them up on the register. I knew this wasn’t a good omen. On the drive home, I opened one of the boxes and tried to read the instructions. My dad looked over at me in disgust. “Don’t they teach you kids how to read at that school I pay hefty taxes to send you to? Hand me those instructions.” I did as requested and my father pulled over to the curb. After a minute, he turned to me. “Damn things are written in French,” he said. “Mom can read Polish,” I said, “Is that close?” Needless to say, it wasn’t. We struggled with the few crude drawings and I understood why the clerk had smirked.

The week of the camping trip was filled with the promise of a new adventure in my young mind. I loved watching Walter Cronkite and The Twentieth Century on Sunday evenings. The film footage of the mighty German army grinding to a halt outside Moscow in the brutal Russian winter was a fresh memory. Would our pack succumb to the same fate in the heavy snow south of Buffalo? Then there was my image of Napoleon sitting inside the Kremlin, burning furniture in order to keep warm. Was Mr. Lynn aware of just how awful George Washington had it during that winter at Valley Forge? As an officer from our military, I hoped he was well versed in the hardships of a winter campout, especially one that involved the greenest of troops known as the Boy Scouts.

That Saturday arrived with clear skies and bountiful sunshine for our two hour drive to Scout camp.  We had six carloads in all, as many of the fathers had volunteered to accompany their sons on this make believe Arctic adventure. The local weather forecast never came up in conversation. The radio stations were all based in Buffalo and would not have mentioned any snow this far south of the city. It was still sunny and birds were chirping as we unloaded our camping supplies in the parking lot. We had two toboggans with tow ropes for our tents. Our cooking gear and food was in our Scout regulation knapsacks. We all opted for snowsuits and rubber boots versus any regulation uniform, a wise choice for this ragtag little army of greenhorns. Mr. Lynn took out his map and pointed to a trail leading from the edge of the parking lot to a wooded hillside. “Boys, I mean MEN, we will proceed this way.”

The snow had been packed down on the trail from previous use. It wasn’t difficult to follow. We found a tree sheltered hillside after a one hour hike. Mr. Lynn and Art, our only Eagle Scout, declared that we’d “arrived at encampment.”  I personally felt it had more to do with the heavy wheezing now coming from many of the fathers prone to smoking. We were assigned small areas and told to pitch our tents and help with a general mess area for our evening meal. The snowpack was shoveled clear in a twenty foot circle and we started a fire in the middle. We went on a scavenger hunt for every downed tree limb on that hillside. Our fire soon blazed like a blast furnace and our bodies cooked on one side and froze on the other. I understood why the Indians had danced around the fire, they were simply rotating in the heat like chickens on a spit.

The evening meal consisted of beans and weiners emptied from large institutional cans into a five gallon enameled steel cooking pot. We made Scout biscuits by rolling a twig in Bisquick and water. After a dough ball had formed on the end of the twig, it was held over the fire until it turned light brown. We enjoyed the folly of keeping the biscuits on the twig and out of the fire. You either mastered the technique or ate only beans and weiners. I ended up the expert in this bizarre food misadventure and became camp baker for the less able. I must have baked three dozen biscuits that evening. They were served with huge slices of butter. Rounding out our frontier dinner party was hot chocolate and Hostess cupcakes. We all liked to suck out the cream filling first, then eat the frosting.

By the time dinner ended, the wind had picked up and snowflakes were appearing in ever increasing numbers. True to the Buffalo curse, the flakes were blowing parallel to the terrain and entering our tents through the tiniest of cracks in the flap doors. Art, our Eagle Scout, suggested that we lower the mosquito netting once inside, and the screening would catch any snow that made it through the canvas flaps. This indeed proved to be an effective solution, and my dad and I turned in early to the sound of what now seemed like a blizzard and the songs of a rock station on my six transistor radio. Dad only liked “Harbor Lights,” an old song by The Platters that had been recently redone for my generation. Battery life was short in those days and we were soon left with only the wind and our thoughts. My mind focused on those newsreel clips of the mighty German army snowbound thirty miles from Moscow and helpless. That was just about our distance from Buffalo.

Attempting to sleep in the dead cold of winter with the wind whipping the pines above us was a no go from the start. My sleeping bag had been advertised as containing two pounds of genuine goose down. I’d been light on funds at the time and had passed over the deluxe bag with three pounds of goose down. Like the German army, I’d underestimated what cold really means. My father had opted for several dark green woolen army blankets he’d purchased years ago when he and my mother went tent camping in Canada. They were scratchy but warm. So there we lay, me with my teeth chattering from the cold and Dad itching from the coarse army issue woolen blankets. He told me a story about camping in Northern Ontario in early June and having it snow. Even though the fishing went well, my mother never forgave him for the poor timing. I understood her resentment as my own carefree attitude toward camping was waning.         

Halfway through our no sleep night, the hot chocolate caught up with my bladder. My dad was in equal need of a nonexistent bathroom in the forest. We struggled with our flashlights to find our boots and untie the many straps that secured both the canvas door flaps and the mosquito netting. We also observed that our brand new French air mattresses were no longer plump and firm. What could be the problem? My dad suggested that the cold had reduced the air volume and it was of no concern to us. The trek up into the pines revealed a full blown lake effect blizzard had descended on our little party of novice campers. The yellow snow we made was covered instantly by the fast falling fresh white variety. “I hope Lynn remembers the way out. There’ll be no tracks to follow by morning,” my father said, not sounding all that confident.

It wasn’t the morning sun that woke us, it was the sting of cold ice water on our backsides. Remember those deflating French air mattresses? Well, they continued to deflate as the night went on. This in turn put our body heat in direct contact with the snowpack beneath our tent floor. The rest was simple physics. We had to stand up and try to dry ourselves as best we could. My dad restarted the campfire with much effort put into finding the kindling and pine logs now buried under a foot of fresh powder. A squirt of charcoal lighter fluid brought the fire to life. So much for the Indian method we’d seen in our handbook. They were smart enough to have long houses, animal pelt clothing, and all the time in the world to make it work. We stood with our backs to the flames as a small group of teeth chattering scouts joined us in a circle of distraught ignorance. Humility was earned one mistake at a time.  

Mr. Lynn soon appeared and announced that the smarter option would be to hike out and have breakfast in town at the local diner. I heard no dissenting remarks from the red faced, booger nosed tiny army of boys that had been labeled MEN just twelve hours earlier. Art, the Eagle Scout, got out his map and compass and showed us what he thought was our path out. He was wrong, but our luck held. The snow had abated enough to spot the camp mess hall on the hilltop near the parking lot. With our goal in sight, we broke camp and trudged off in knee deep snow. Each step took a deep breath of effort and the fathers who smoked dearly paid for that extra push. After an hour in the Klondike of Southern Erie County, we all reached the parking lot. Here the vast majority our pack fell down in a snowbank to rest. Thankfully, the Scouts had a full time manager that kept the parking lot and service roads plowed. We brushed the snow off of our caravan of 1950s iron and off we drove to Holland, New York.

Over my pancakes and hot chocolate at the Zider Zee Diner, I could clearly see that the military was not going to be in my future. Mr. Lynn had failed to secure an accurate weather forecast, our equipment was a joke, and Art was incompetent. As a final note, Art went to Vietnam as a second lieutenant. He got so many of his men killed that he returned stateside and entered the priesthood. I became a salesman and stayed at five star hotels. So much for winter camping!