If No One Else Volunteers

I never encouraged my son to join Scouts. Maybe it was because my brother had set his bedroom on fire the night he was to advance to Bear Cub. My only other Cub Scout memory was helping my mother make Royal Canadian Mountie hats from brown grocery bags and round cardboard pizza liners for her den. When six-year-old Robert came home with a flyer announcing the Cub pack sign-up rally at his elementary school, I informed my husband Jim, “I’ll be PTA Mom—you can be Scout Dad.”

The plan worked perfectly for nearly four years. Then Robert’s den mom resigned and the new leader needed an assistant. “I’ll do it if no one else volunteers,” I half-heartedly offered. I pause here to explain something to anyone under thirty reading this. “If no one else volunteers” is equal to stating that you’re planning to do the job. No one hears anything after the words: “I’ll do it.” So that is how I came to be a Cub Scout den mom.

This is not a drill.

When Robert was in the fourth grade our Cub pack was invited to the scout council’s big Spring campout. Jim had to be out of town and I was forced to go along as Robert’s designated parent. Scouting is very particular about mandatory parent participation, especially with the younger scouts. Prior to this I had managed to duck out of anything involving a tent, a cot, or a campfire. Mind you I had backpacked with Jim in the foothills of Southern California in the 1980’s—once. The bones in my heels have long since been covered over by new skin growth.

Before being allowed to take responsibility for our brave little son on our first campout together, Jim insisted that Robert and I perform tent-raising drills and packing exercises in the back yard. He bought me an inflatable air mattress, so this campout was shaping up to be much more luxurious than my backpacking adventure. On the big day, Robert and I joined the other Cub Scout families in the parking lot of the church where we held our pack meetings. We pulled all the SUV’s and minivans into a circle and planned the route we would take into the wilderness.

Wagons dustward.

Sid Richardson Scout Ranch, or “Sid,” as it’s called in the scout world, is a 2500 acre scout camp on a vast, working cattle ranch in north Texas. From the main highway, a winding, gravel road takes campers past working oil wells, over cattle guards, and through the dust of thousands of years of Texas droughts and dirt storms. Hundreds of vehicles caravanned through the ranch, spinning up so much light brown sand and dust that you could barely see the tail lights of the vehicle ahead. The trees and brush on either side of the road were covered like a Michigan forest after a winter storm—only it was a blanket of dust, not snow. Even with the windows of my SUV rolled up and the air vents closed, the dust came in and choked us, making it difficult for Robert and me to talk to each other. When we finally arrived at our campsite it was almost impossible to tell what color any of the vehicles had been before they became the color of Texas dirt.

Eat your heart out, Martha Stewart!

There were two other moms in our group, both den leaders, and the rest were dads. After setting up our tents, Mary, one of the other moms, and I carried our air mattresses to our cars to inflate them. I was startled at the heckling we took from the men as we hiked back to our tents with our mattresses on our heads to avoid puncturing them on the mesquite and cactus needles. I assumed Mary was a novice camper like me until I learned that she and the other mom were the quartermasters (cooks) that weekend. They were like Bobbie Flay and Rachel Ray working out of a minivan. They amazed me with their chuck wagon skills, and even the cubmaster bowed to their authority. When I asked them how they came to know so much about camping, they both replied, “We’ve been to training.”

Oh starry night, with a moonlit sky, take me away…Anonymous

Whether it was the camaraderie I felt with the other adults, the glow of the campfire’s last embers as they died away, or the billions of stars in the clean, crisp April night sky that won me over, I don’t remember. By the time my son became a Boy Scout, I was a camping and scouting devotee. I attended nearly every training class I could and in a short time I became an assistant scoutmaster. By the time Robert became an Eagle Scout, I was teaching camping skills to other adults.

I don’t regret one single hour of the thousands of hours I spent working with the scouts. There were signs that it was time to retire though. At a pack meeting one evening a tiny little Cub Scout looked at my graying hair and asked: “Are you the leader of all the Cub Scouts in the world?” I didn’t volunteer for that.

Donna