Marketplace of Ideas Blog

I am being reimmersed in the Boy Scout experience the next few days.

Tonight, weather permitting, area Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts will get to camp on the Fox Cities Stadium outfield after the Timber Rattlers’ game. (There are enough promotions tonight for an entire month of home games, including the 15th birthday of Fang the mascot.) If weather does not permit, we’ll be camping on the field next Friday night.

My Scouting experience included nothing like this; I had become an Eagle Scout and left Scouting by the time the Madison Muskies baseball team came into existence, and I don’t recall the Muskies offering any such experience anyway. (The Muskies’ less-than-subpar stadium was owned by the City of Madison, and in those days there were few tents designed without stakes.)

Then, on Sunday, rain or shine, my oldest son and I are going for three days at Camp Rokilio, the Cub Scout camp near Kiel. Last year another father came up with the theory, which seems plausible, that the entire camp is a fiendish plot — it’s not a Cub Scout camp, it’s Fat Farm for Dads, with 100-yard swims, paddleboating all over Cedar Lake, the climb up from the waterfront, etc. Our wives seem ignorant of this subterfuge, which sounds like plausible deniability to me.

This all came to my mind earlier this month when I suddenly realized on Independence Day that that day was the 30th anniversary of our Boy Scout troop’s departure from Madison to the Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. I mentioned that to my father, and he emailed back photos he took in July 1979 of the dozen or so of us, who hiked up and down the New Mexico mountains (the miles we hiked increase as the years go by, of course), seeing regularly scheduled daily rains on one side of the mountains and no rain at all on the opposite side, and doing things one doesn’t usually get the opportunity to do in Wisconsin.

(That was a trip with an interesting start. We left Madison early July 4, and as we went southwest it got hotter. We rolled into Manhattan, Kan., for dinner that first night, in the dark. The fact it was at dark at 6 p.m. on Independence Day indicates the Armageddon-like storm that met us in Manhattan, which seemed to be a problem since we were supposed to camp at a campground near Fort Riley, Kan., that night. But while we were eating dinner at a Pizza Hut, a man came up to us, all wearing Boy Scout uniforms, and struck up a conversation with the adult leaders. He was a Scoutmaster himself, and he ended up offering his basement to us to stay that evening, with the home movies he took of his troop’s Philmont trip a couple of years earlier. The magnitude of this good turn became apparent the next morning, when we drove past the campground we were supposed to stay at the previous evening, and it was flooded.)

The 1979 photos blow your mind 30 years later. Most of us appeared to not have been fed for several months. (The quality of the freeze-dried food on our trip notwithstanding, my parents can testify as to my eating ability in, well, my entire life.) My father and our Scoutmaster were about my age now. I recall wearing boots made of some plastic- or vinyl-like substance (my parents didn’t want to invest in leather boots because they weren’t certain my feet had stopped growing), and the boots’ break-in by slightly melting during a pre-Philmont camping trip campfire.

Unlike much of this summer, the weather forecast appears ideal for three days of swimming (assuming I survive Sunday’s 100-yard swimming test, and if I don’t, thanks for reading), paddleboat recreations of the Battle of Midway, archery and BB gun shooting, dodgeball and various other outdoor activities geared for Cub Scouts ages 7 to 9 or so. (We’re in the Kohler Castle this year, after having been in the space station two years ago and the train station last year.)

Experiences like the Timber Rattlers game and Camp Rokilio are efforts to, in chronological order, get boys to join the Cub Scouts, which in turn is more likely to get them to advance to Boy Scouting, which in turn is how one becomes an Eagle Scout. One of the coolest things about the first night of Camp Rokilio is the introduction of the Eagle Scouts — counselors, Cub Scout Pack leaders and other fathers — among the group, which seems like a larger percentage of us than the nationally quoted 2 percent of all Scouts.

This, however, is probably a self-selecting group; if you were a Boy Scout and it was a positive experience (independent of how good you were in such Scouting skills as fire-starting or knot-tying), and you have sons, your sons are likely to at least start in Scouting. (One of my Scoutmasters was a Lone Scout, essentially a one-Scout Scout troop. Both of his sons were in Scouting, and both got their Eagle Scout awards.)

As far as skill development, Scouting is kind of a series of pass–fail classes designed to stretch Scouts, particularly in, but not limited to, outdoors experiences and skills. I am not sure how I got all the knots (and there are a lot of them) required to advance to Eagle Scout, because I can tie very few of them today. I can canoe and row a boat, but not in a very straight line; I look like an America’s Cup boat tacking and zigzagging all over the water. (On the other hand, add lightning, as once occurred during a Scout canoe trip of mine, and I can break water speed records.) After getting Red Cross-certified in CPR and first aid for the first time preparatory to my First Aid merit badge, I got recertified two years ago, which seems important to me. And like much of life, what you have to do to get to the accomplishment may be more important than the accomplishment itself.

As I wrote here a year ago, Boy and Cub Scouts are part of a group that desperately needs role models, particularly male role models, regardless of the kind of home they come from. Scout leaders, most of whom are the fathers of other Scouts, show Scouts that what their parents talk about — do your work and do it well, be trustworthy, go to church, live up to your commitments, etc. — isn’t just parents’ attempts to disprove the phrase “you’re not the boss of me” — that is how mature adults should live their lives. Scouting teaches values that are timeless rather than trendy.

It’s not cool to be a Scout, and it’s not cool to live your life as a Scout; it’s just the right thing to do. Society, including business, should be encouraging organizations that encourage being trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. What reader of Marketplace wouldn’t welcome an employee who lived his or her life according to those 12 tenets? This country doesn’t need more celebrities (see Jackson, Michael); it needs more people who try to live their lives according to those 12 parts of the Scout Law.