Well, I was laying in bed reading "Last Flight of Liberator 41-1133" when the phone rang about midnight. It was my nephew who I am going on a Cub father and son campout with him and his two sons next weekend. His two boys just can't wait, couldn't sleep, so they packed up along with his wife and daughter and headed for Galveston in a BIG RV that he rents out to do one last day at the beach.
He needed some Internet info, so he called me at midnight, so I'm up so I might as well leave you with a post about philosophy.
In William Cass book he brings out the fact of lifes experiences leading up to events as making those events wook better and easier. Scoting was a big part of the story but not all of it.
Well, so it is with Scouting. It's the experiences.
Like Sheehan, All I ever wanted to be in life was a Boy Socut. I still find that true to this day and I've made a pretty good one. I can and often do build a fire by rubbing two sticks together or with flint and steel and ALWAYS carry my pocketknife with me, among other things.
I can just about draw from memory any shelter Dan Beard ever sketched for a book. That's my kind of Scouting.
Well, thinking of what was said about backpacking in Colorado for a lot less than Philmont got me to thinking.
Yes, that's true, but it's not Scouting.
Scouting is what makes a man from a boy and it's Scouting that they need to make the transition from one to the another..
Transition school is what made those pilots in "Last Flight" multi engine bomber pilots from just ordinary pilots.
Philmont is what transitions all the people who go there wheterh it be a visitor a trekker or at the training center. My wife was a different person after just eating in the dining hall on a summertime visit and is DEFINATELY a different person after our AA this last month. She has transitioned.
My nephew camping in a large RV won't make his sons campers this weekend, but next weekend when we sleep in my Timberline and the two of them get to share a bag of PhilFood lunch, THAT along with the activities of the day and the the miriad other Scouting experiences WILL MAKE them Scouts. They will transition.
It's the same thing at Philmont. A Scout will get a lot more out of it when they remember how tough it was to clean the burned food from the pot rather than using the turkey bags as "disposable pot diapers". Cleaning the tent another will use will be a lot more meaningful to him than pizza at Simple Simons in the long run. Maybe not in the short of it, but in the long run YES!
It's the Scouting program that makes the difference and if you circumvent that it does no good at all.
Believe you me, I enjoyed the Grays pancake breakfast at AA, but the only thing it was missing was a can of Spam.
At Philmont in 1959, I had fresh made pancakes for breakfast cooked on an upturned lid of a cast iron dutch oven. I also cooked Span on that same dutch oven lid. The memory of that breakfast 48 years ago is still with me. It was THAT good!
When we were at Miranda, I was looking at the wood fired water heater. It's a factory model. I used home made wood fired water heaters at Philmopnt in 1959 for a hot shower and believe you me if I could have gotten water to run through the heater at Miranda last month during AA, I'd have had another hot shower!
Some of my best Scouting memories are at Philmont in 1959 when six of us stood around in a circle holding out our ponchos over the seventh Scout who was on the ground lighting a fire in the POURING rain at Beaubien. We got it going and we cooked our meal for supper on that fire and it was good. And yes the smoke burned our eyes.
The experience was even better.
Those skills are still with me to this day because our leaders DID NOT contrive an easier way for us to do things back then.
I don't want to sound like I'm against the PhilProgram in place today because I am not, but there was some values in some of the things we did back in the good old days that have been lost over time. ONe of them is our leaders back then made us do it thje old fashioned way, we earned it. Today, some leaders do all they can to make it wasier for the Scouts. That's wrong!
The advent of the backpacking stove changed a lot of things and I'll go so far as to say that had they not been in use at Philmont from the 70's through today that there would not be all the fire fuel laying around waiting to torch the place ala Yellowstone.
Part of the 2007 camping program at Philmont was to MAKE CAMPFIRES and to use up some of that fuel.
That's straight from Mark Anderson, director of program. A direct quote is "we got to burn a lot of forrest fuel this summer and we encouraged it".
While dropping his name let me say that the program at Philmont today is a great program for 20,000+ Scouts. That's a lot of Scouts getting a lot of experience. It's different than in 59, but so is the world these Scouts live in. Some things are the same but a lot is different.
Please advisors, don't take away ingenuity from the Scouts on their treks. That's the thing they will need to be a success in todays world. Let them solve the problems as they come up instead of canning their activities and making them little robots.
Surprise and anticipation of the unknmown are two of the things Philont has to offer your Scouts, don't rob them of that.
I shared the trail at AA with a man who went to Philmont in 1957. Having gone in 1959, I asked him what he remembered most. It was the fire building and cooking meals but other than that he cannot recall much of it or what camps they visited. I don't want this to sound like I'm bragging but the reason he can't is he took no photographs and did not take notes or mark up a map.
I was fortunate to have a Scoutmaster that encouraged photography if only from a simple Kodak box camera. He encougraged us to keep a diary and to write notes on our maps.
I did all three and the trip is as livid today as it was the day I was there because I have had those notes adn photos to relive the adventure.
If you do the same thing, it will benefit yoru Scouts a lot more than turkey bags will.
And while I'm on this soap box of mine, if you happen to kike up Trail Peak and visit the B-24 wreck site, don't show them how to pee off an airplane wing at 10,000 feet. That makes me sick to my stomach every time I hear it. Show them where an Eagle Scout as pilot and Star Scout as anotehr pilot along with five otehrs gave their lives while training to defend our country in the costliest war in terms of lives lost that America has ever known.
Pay tribute to those men who died there. Show reverence for what they gave and their families lost.
Have a nice weekend.
John LeBlanc
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Received on Sat Oct 13 01:46:14 2007
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