For a few months, he was a Tenderfoot. After that, he became Second Class. For a year, however, nothing about his uniform changed because he could not swim.
Worse, he was terrified of heights. Though he hiked as quickly and tirelessly as his father, he only could on trails that didn’t run along the edge of hills where he slowed the other boys by inching along like the disabled. One night, in a played-out strip mine abandoned before he was born, his father led the troop up a trail that peaked along the crest of what had been found worthless and left behind. That path soon narrowed, the hillside falling away so steeply in the dark, he crept and cowered and finally knelt to grip the ground with his hands, certain that otherwise he would plummet into the acid pool below. When nothing his father said could make him stand, an assistant who was another boy’s father led him down like a suicide, taking a low route through a stretch of stunted scrub trees until they spotted the troop that had, by then, descended behind his father.
That summer, at week-long Boy Scout camp, it was easy to walk away from the swaying bridge of ropes, the archery field, and the secret language of pathfinding. He was happy to be alone and unable to distinguish directions from arrangements of twigs and stones. But at night, he lay awake for hours, uncomfortable in a lean-to with two boys from his troop he barely spoke to. Each night, those boys, a year older and with enough merit badges to be labeled “Star,” asked him if he’d kissed a girl. When he said, “No,” they asked him which girls he dreamed about seeing naked, which of their bodies he imagined using for pleasure. When he did not answer, they laughed as if his silence meant something more than inexperience.
His father, for that week, slept nearby in a cabin with the other Scoutmasters, but the boy vowed never to tell him how happy he was to be alone as soon as possible each morning. To wander off and be nowhere close to where he was supposed to learn a survival skill and earn a merit badge. To be far from where he was expected to nearly shake with excitement when, after five minutes of instruction, he was handed a rifle to load and fire at a distant target.
Alone, he rehearsed his favorite things as if they were the lyrics of a ponderous, solemn song–isolation and imagining, puzzles and games. Out of the range of voices and vision, he solved for the solution of one endless week by emptying each day, minute by minute, like a parade-route bag of confetti. He found a place to sit and read The Time Machine, one of the books he’d packed among his socks and underwear.
Late on the last afternoon of that week, after he finished the book and imagined himself far enough in the future that everyone, including the Morlocks and Eloi, was gone, he walked slowly along a creek until it widened and plunged over a waterfall. Two days before, he’d seen how high that waterfall was from below. He’d read the names of girls painted on or even carved into the cliff, some of them with a date so long ago underneath that the girl would be as old as his mother.
Now, thinking he heard his father’s voice from below, he ducked and crept on his hands and knees until, near the cliff’s edge, he lay prone and squirmed forward to where he was close enough to see down. Pressing himself flat on the moss-covered ground, he saw his father kneeling, back turned, among twelve boys from another troop. He watched until he understood that his father was showing those boys a few arrowheads left behind by a long-ago Pennsylvania Native-American tribe.
Just below him, out of reach, were the names of those girls. He remembered it was Nancy who had the long-ago-date underneath her, and he pictured a Boy Scout, twenty-five years ago, who believed that risking himself by using small hand-holds to climb the slick face might make her more willing to be undressed and touched. His father, intent upon his demonstration, didn’t seem to notice him. He never looked up while all of those unfamiliar boys pawed at the soil as if it concealed something so exciting they couldn’t stop until they found it.
