By Michael Jewell
The heroes in the comic books of my childhood were titans. Their grotesque physiques acted as pillars of unambiguous moral clarity against the hazy backdrop of my boyhood. In sending me to summer camp, perhaps my parents thought that I would be molded into the shape of these remarkable men. The unintended consequence was that I soon resembled the unremarkable men who drew them. The Boy Scouts of America’s goal is to make ordinary children into examples of honor, strength and self-reliance for their peers. My western Arkansas troop served as a dumping ground for the community’s creeps, outcasts and mouth-breathing screw-ups. We were a plagued crew of losers barely able to cope with the perils of junior high, let alone the naked, indifferent wilderness.
My time with the boys of Troop 110 helped to shape the seething misanthropy I experience today. Ours were years of unspoken shame. One group photo from the Presbyterian Church that served as our lodge shows my group in our full dress uniforms. One boy neglected to close the fly of his shorts, leaving his penis exposed, front row center. This photograph was printed and distributed to the entire troop and their families, with the offending member either unnoticed or ignored. And we were to be examples for the others. Our leaders took this embarrassment as a sign of our hopelessness.Stories of abuse are widely circulated, but in truth our masters were simply resigned to make us feel very small. The chain-smoking mountain man, the Christian demagogue and the half-blind cowboy who let us see his shriveled eye stalk transferred little of their survival skills to my companions and me. Instead, they infused my troop with the pettyright-wing hostility toward minorities that boys of 14 are so eager to emulate. And there I was, a sissy in their midst.
We lazily built fires with matches and spent uncountable hours lounging around the dying embers, talking about video games and other comforts of home. In my initiation to a “secret society” within scouting, the leaders took us to a tree plantation deep in the Ozark Mountains. They fed us only a hard-boiled egg and a slice of white bread and instructed us to work in total silence from predawn till dusk. This was supposed to harden us. We emerged soft and just as weak as before our one day of supposed hardship. I spent one night hopelessly lost in the woods. In my panic, I forgot all training about finding direction by moss, by footstep, by setting sun, and wandered, hysterical, for hours. The cardinal rule of scouting is to be prepared, and I was never less so. As a whole, my troop remained dull, selfish and accustomed to creature comforts throughout our scouting years, remaining better level 10 dungeon masters than masters of the untamed wilds. As the suburbs stretched into the forests, laying waste to the wildlife, so, too, our sense of adventure was snuffed out.
I have little to show for my years of scouting besides a few hollow, arbitrary honors, an impression of my own helplessness and an instinctual distrust of authority. The merit badges I acquired act as reminders of how paper-thin my understanding of myself is against the concrete and corrugated steel of the new American wilderness.
