True Tales Of Being A Shitty Boy Scout
Image from archive.org
Okay you are way better off listening to the audio version from the Awkward Years in Hazleton. It's a lot funnier, but I've included a text version (that is kind of different, since I wrote it a while ago) for people who don't wanna listen to it.
https://soundcloud.com/yeselliott/awkward-years
I was a boy scout once, and I was really fucking bad at most of it.
It all started with the first camping trip on went on with them, It was a “polar bear” camping experience and that means it’s done in the dead of winter. For some reason I decided the best thing to do for this event was to buy a giant fucking box of slim jims and eat the whole thing within the space of an hour. Needles to say this was a trip to snow vomit city, and I painted the snow brown waiting for my sister and grandfather to come pick me up.
Another wintery nightmare I experienced with the scouts was the one time I went skiing. I stuck to the kiddie slopes, but I still fell on my ass a whole lot. The falling wasn’t too bad, I mean I was a skater and fell all the time, so that wasn’t that big of a deal. The part of skiing that killed me was I having real shitty gloves, so my fingers ended up getting all numb. I found myself having to pee really bad, but I couldn’t get my zipper down with my numb hands and I totally pissed my pants, luckily for me I had snow pants on so no one could tell, but I knew by the wet crotch I had to deal with all day. It really is amazing how short of a time pee actual stays warm in the cold, and how much wet snow pants feel like a full length diaper.
It’s not like I was much better off in the summer. At our week long summer camp (Camp Acahela) The dude I shared a tent with and I decided to spray the walls of our tent with bug spray, because we hated fucking mosquitos. I guess this does something to the waterproofing of a tent because ours started leaking like a cheap condom when the rainstorm started. We quickly packed our stuff to move to another tent, but the only one we could find was rather far away from our old tent and the rest of our troop. We ran up a hill in the pouring rain and as I opened the flap of my new tent I saw a dark shape flying straight at my head, now I’m not sure if it hit me or not, but when I came to a second later I knew I was on the ground and a bat was flying away from me. That was just a start of our nightmare as there was a bear or some other kind of grunting animal that loved to hang out near our tent at night, I can’t be sure of exactly what it was since I would hide in my sleeping bag all night thinking it wouldn’t eat what it can’t see. My tent mate and I shared a lot of tears that week, I wonder where he is today and if he ever got better at camping.
Once we took a trip to norfolk VA to see the naval base and hang out at the beach. I picked up two 20 piece chicken McNuggets on the way there and continued to eat them for a whole week. My mom hid money in my soap to make sure I showered (I wasn’t a hippie, but Young Elliott wasn’t comfortable being naked around other dudes [or anyone really] yet, oh how this would change in a few years) that I found about mid way through the week. A friend and I managed to get lost, and missed the bus back to our campground, luckily for us our naval guide found us and after he tried to pick up two potentially under age girls (I’m pretty sure he at least got numbers, I probably should have paid more attention to his technique) we made the 11 mile walk back to our campground.
In fairness to myself, I was okay at some things, I could paint the fuck out of a building, I was pretty good at community service type things and could urban hike like a motherfucker, but I guess when it comes to outdoorsy stuff I’m a total failure. Still I’m glad I was a boy scout, I had fun, even if it always ended poorly.