I’m sure many of you at some point in your early life participated in that proto-military survivalist organization, that relic from the Cold War paranoia that teaches young boys to always “be prepared”. You know the one – the Boy Scouts of America. While I was only in the BSA until about age 10 and was technically only a Cub Scout (I stopped drinking the Kool-Aid when I saw just how “cool” Boy Scouts could be), there were quite a few excursions that made being a Cub Scout worthwhile.
Back then, a friend of mind owned a piece of property out by a lake in the middle of Washington. Now before you get any ideas of fancy lake houses and bottomless glasses of Chardonnay for the adults, this place was decidedly more rural. This was the kind of lake where you went fishin’ with a cooler full of Budweiser and a handful of Slim Jims for bait. In other words it was the perfect place for a pack of sugar fueled boys to wreak mayhem and destruction on Mother Nature.
The first day went by in a blur of escalating dares – “I dare you to jump over that giant gap” “I bet you can’t stuff 40 goldfish crackers in your mouth” “I bet I can pee further off the dock” – you get the idea. As night started to fall, campfires were lit, s’mores were readied and the time honored tradition of cheesy ghost stories around the crackling fire began. There were about six different families there, but the dads had the lion’s share of the campfire stage, each trying to do their best to spook the boys with stories of escaped convicts with bloody hook hands or lumbering creatures that gnawed on little boys’ bone marrow. It might have been the sugar, it might have been the campfire stories, but that night was definitely a restless one for the Cub Scouts of Troop 256.
Around 3am I woke up to a strange sound outside my tent. Of course, everyone’s first instinct was “bear,” but something was off. I looked over and my dad was still asleep. Maybe it was that hook-handed convict sneaking into camp, lurking and plotting to skewer some unsuspecting Cub Scouts into well-seasoned shishkabobs. That bloodthirsty Sasquatch story was even more believable when there were no lights on. My tiny ten year old brain said that this wasn’t a bear – there was no sniffing, no random growls, no missing picnic baskets. Just some under-the-breath mutterings and frustrated tent zipper sounds, the scraping of a boat being push off into the lake and then – nothing.
Apparently, whereas I had been desensitized to my dad’s ursine feats of snoring by years of exposure, the rest of the campers had not been appropriately forewarned. While there was freakish similarities between my dad’s severe sleep apnea and the roars of the common black bear, no one was prepared for just how much those sounds would carry over the lake. By 3am, the dads had had it. They were desperate to get some sleep, any sleep, and they would go to any lengths to get it. So, logically, they took to the waters. Pushing the rickety boats onto icy cold lake, these dads would rather face the frigid waters and almost certain death than to suffer through another hour of the snoring serenade.
When they came ashore the next morning, they were understandably grumpy. However, despite their lack of sleep, or perhaps because of it, they did manage to catch enough fish for everyone to have an amazing Pacific Northwest breakfast of grilled lake trout. My dad was appropriately unapologetic – after all, bears don’t say sorry for terrorizing Boy Scouts, especially when they are rewarded with trout – but for the rest of the camping trip, the campfire stories always ended with someone getting eaten, mauled or snored at by a hungry bear.
