Cub Scouts

I learned a variety of lessons from my time in the Cub scouts. You already know that none of these lessons have anything to do with Survivor Man skills. In high school I nearly burned our family’s house to the ground on Christmas day by starting a fire in the fireplace and forgetting to open the flue. I am basically unable to operate a screwdriver. How about knot tying? Negative. I tie my shoes with bunny ear loops like a kindergartner.

One lesson that the Scouts did teach me is the value of technology. I learned this lesson by participating in the Pinewood Derby. If you don’t know, the Pinewood Derby is contest where Cub Scouts race wooden cars the size of a TV remote down a sloped track of about 50 feet. In my first Pinewood Derby I bought a little wooden car at Hobby Lobby, covered it with yellow and blue tempera paint, and waddled naively to the Farmington Elementary gymnasium for the race.

On the entry form, I should have listed my name as Seth Carnahanski. My cutesy-tootsy blue and yellow tempera block of wood was crushed like a Polish horse in the face of the German blitzkrieg. Shame and the passage of time cloud my memory, but I don’t think that my car even made it to the finish line. My competitors had glossy paint jobs, flame decals, and a firm understanding of the concept of gravity. They weighted down their cars to the contest limit in order to make them move faster down the track. This strategy had not occurred to me.

The second lesson that I learned from the Scouts is that adults do not unconditionally love and respect every single child on the face of the earth. Up to that point, I thought that disagreements and dislike magically disappeared when you turned 18 and that maturity compelled adults to get along with everybody, especially kids. Then I observed Scout Master KC try to tame a particularly shit-headed member of Troop 362.

That’s right, KC was the den leader for my second grade cub scout experience. Miraculously, no fatalities, losses of limb, or even property damage occurred under his watch. This is probably because the den was mostly composed of pretty calm kids. One boy named Eric, however, needs to donate his brain to science. He was insane with ADHD. I wish I could go back in time and watch KC try to tame this stallion. At the time, all I could tell was that KC did not like this kid. What were the clues that alerted my eight year old radar? Maybe it was when KC tied Eric to a tree. KC claims that this was to keep him from running away into the woods while we were camping. Or perhaps it was when we lined up along my fence to play dodgeball before every meeting, and I watched KC tattoo the child-demon with multiple well-placed fastballs. Or maybe it was when KC took the troop to a fire ant farm, buried Eric up to the neck in sand, and coated his head in honey.*

* One of these is untrue.