Papooses, Stiffed Again

One spring evening after my 11th birthday, I found myself on a bench in what was known in our neighborhood as the Scout House. It was a remodeled service station and home to Troop 420 of the Quivira Council of the Boy Scouts of America.

Joining me on this bench were two other boys, Emil and Jesse. Emil was a dweeby kid who played the violin and probably to this day suffers the injustices of being tagged with that name. Who names their kid Emil?

At 11, Jesse was already well down the path toward what was commonly referred to in that era as a juvenile delinquent. There we were, the dweeb, the criminal, and me. Three brand new Tenderfeet (Tenderfoots?) each with our own motivation for joining the Boy Scouts. Emil to escape the violin, Jesse to get back on the straight and narrow, and me, I just wanted to go camping.

A scant two months after signing up, our troop packed up for a week at the Quivira Scout Ranch in Chautauqua County. That first year, I had no clue what to expect but quickly caught on to a clear Native American theme. First year campers were “papooses” and told to bring along what amounted to a loincloth for some yet to be revealed rite of passage. “Yet to be revealed” would become a consistent thread.

Second year campers were “braves,” “warriors” the third year, you get the picture. In the Scout meetings leading to our summer camp, the older Scouts plied us with horror stories about papooses consuming “the black drink,” which turned out to be a steaming cauldron of whatever the older Scouts put in there. Use your imagination.

We sat in a circle in our loincloths and pounded the black drink down our throats. If we threw up, we got more. We dug our own latrines. The instruction from the older Scouts was “shit flows downhill.” Another consistent, overarching sentiment, I was to learn.

To be fair, there was some passing down of knowledge and wisdom. Sitting around the campfire one evening, our patrol leader taught us variations of four-letter words. Turns out even the bluest of words can be used as nouns, verbs, even adjectives.

We slept in two boy pup tents. My tentmate was a fat kid who tended to release what I perceived as inordinate quantities of intestinal gas. My half of the tent was pitched atop a protruding tree root. The older Scouts had air mattresses and even cots. Rank, it seemed, had its privileges. By the end of the week, I was miserable. An older Scout, who would have been 16 or 17, clearly sensed it. His name was Mark Mellor, and he basically adopted me for the last couple of days of scout camp.

One of the traditions at QSR was for third year Scouts to find a rock that weighed exactly 15 pounds. If it was heavier, you'd chisel it down, carve your initials in it, and carry it around the camp perimeter, symbolic of life's challenges. One of the ways Mark mentored was to show me exactly where he hid his third year rock.

“We have the same initials, so in your third year, come here, and carry my rock.” Not exactly playing by the rules, but his heart was in the right place. On the last day of camp, the older Scouts baked fruit cobblers in these big, heavy, cast iron Dutch ovens buried in the hot coals of a campfire they'd kept burning for days.

It soon became clear there wasn't enough to go around. Papooses, stiffed again. Mark sized up the situation, shared his cobbler with me, the dweeb, the criminal, and a handful of other poor, pitiable papooses.

Sometimes Boy Scouts are not always Boy Scouts, but when they are, you remember them for the rest of your life.

Mike Matson’s column appears every other weekend in The Mercury, and he hosts ‘Within Reason,’ weekdays at 9 a.m. on NewsRadio KMAN. Follow his writings at mikematson.com