Camping With Women, Chapter 3

There was so much hazing and bullying in Robert’s first Boy Scout troop that he began to think if he was going to live to make Eagle Scout, he’d better find another troop. He chose a troop in Southlake, Texas—Forbes magazine’s 2008 richest community in the nation. The boys in the Southlake troop could have paid bullies to do their hazing for them. I always half expected sherpas to show up when we went camping so the boys wouldn’t have to carry their own backpacks. There was no such thing as hazing in the Southlake troop. If a boy misbehaved on a campout, his parents were expected to jump in their Hummer and collect their son and take him home.

Nights in Green Canvas: Joan

The new troop was a good one with good kids; Robert could now focus more on advancement and less on avoiding injury. I signed up for the troop committee once again, and after more leadership training, the troop appointed me assistant scoutmaster. Then it was off to Wood Badge, an advanced Boy Scout adult leadership training program.

There were about fifty of us in my Wood Badge class, and our first meeting was held in a classroom at Scout headquarters. I was chatting with the person on my right when a very short, very round woman wearing over-sized glasses slid into the seat on my left. Her head appeared to be attached directly to her torso, giving her the appearance of a chickadee with long, straight blond hair. Her name was Joan, and when I turned to say hello, she snapped at me for taking too long to greet her. “It’s a big class,” I thought to myself. “I probably won’t have too much contact with her.”

Mi casa es su casa.

Upon arrival at Sid Richardson Scout Ranch, where the rest of our course took place, we were divided into teams of six, called “patrols.” (Cub Scouts have dens; Boy Scouts have patrols.) Joan and I were, of course, assigned to the same patrol. The four men on our team seemed like great guys, and I vowed to make the best of it and have fun in the training program.

Our patrol was assigned a campsite in the woods, with tent positions marked by wooden platforms resembling shipping palettes. These served as the floors of our green canvas homes-away-from-home. Each tent and its poles and ropes were in a pile near a palette, and the six of us worked as a team to erect our three tents. Seeking to break the ice with Joan, I tried to engage her in small talk while we worked. It worried me that my snoring might make things even less hospitable between us, so I asked her if she by chance snored also; she said “yes.” In a sudden impulse, I gave her a big hug, causing her to stiffen like a clothing store mannequin. “OK,” I thought. “Not a hugger.”

“It’s close to midnight and something evil’s lurking in the dark.” Michael Jackson

After dinner, classes, and a patrol meeting, it was finally bedtime, or rather “cot-time,” and I drifted into a deep, exhausted sleep. Around 3:00 AM, I was startled awake. There was an animal, apparently right outside the tent, and it sounded big, loud, and very angry. I lay paralyzed on my cot, my heart pounding. I didn’t think it could be a bear in that part of Texas, but I knew it might be a cougar or a coyote. I listened for a few moments to the snarling beast until I realized it was Joan. I don’t know if she was snoring or dreaming, but she roared, growled, and snarled in her sleep.

I never did get back to sleep that night. Just before dawn I got up to put the coffee on the camp stove and use the latrine. I returned to the tent where Joan was up and getting dressed in the dark. I waited outside the tent to allow her time to finish dressing and reentered the tent when she left for the latrine.

The tent reeked. “Whew!” I thought to myself. “Some poor creature must be dead under the tent floor. It must have gone bad rather quickly or we would have smelled it when we set up the tent.” I directed my flashlight around the tent floor to see if I could discover where the poor rotting creature had died. The smell was emanating from a very used women’s hygiene pad lying on Joan’s cot. I didn’t sleep the next four nights either.

“Not gonna do it.” George H.W. Bush

On the last night of our last weekend of training, the course required that each patrol backpack into and sleep out in the woods as a final team test. At our patrol’s planning meeting Joan announced she didn’t want the additional weight of a tent in her backpack, and asked me to share my barely-big-enough-for-me solo tent with her. I know the Scout Law states a Scout should be friendly, courteous, kind, and helpful, but the idea of snuggling into a little three-by-six-foot nylon cocoon with her still gives me nightmares. I took Nancy Reagan’s advice and just said “no.”

Donna

Next: The Control Freak