Scouts See Nature’s Unnatural Order

Adozen Boy Scouts recently traveled to the high country north of Los Angeles for their first camp-out.

The Frontier Patrol went to discover the natural order of things: to learn the secret ways of the coyote and horned toad, to walk moccasin paths, and to achieve inner peace so perfect that they wouldn’t mind the odor of campground outhouses.

Instead, their hiking boots blundered into the Heart of Darkness, American-style, weather from a nuclear winter, laughing satanists, survivalists, gunslingers and other escapees from a Bob Dylan song.

As they say in these tales, it all started out fine. Dave the scoutmaster led a caravan of cars up a National Forest road in eastern Ventura County to the top of a mountain rising 8,000 feet into skies once patrolled by the California condor.

The wind whispered in the ponderosa pines and tickled the chaparral that coated the old mountain like barnacles. Already, the natural order of things seemed to be coming into sharper focus.

“Oh look,” chirped one scout delightedly, “there’s snow.”

Then the sun sank and the wind stopped whispering and started howling. Suddenly, it seemed clear that the reason there was still snow on the ground was that the Frontier Patrol had passed through some sort of climatological wormhole that connected the Southern California Savannah to a Himalayan highland.

Everyone knows those highlands are breeding grounds of the abominable snowman, whose eerie calls echo when he is searching for an abominable wife. No sooner were the scouts bedded down than a wail began up the mountain. The pitch was roughly equivalent to the Beach Boys’ keening, “and we’ll have fun, fun, fun till her daddy takes the T-Bird awayyyy.” “Is that a bear?” one scout asked tremulously. His father, an assistant scout leader--well, in point of fact, me--assured him that he was safe. I told him I scared off a bear once in Yosemite, which was even true, though that ice-chest raiding mammal was so tame that he probably gave guided tours during the daytime.

“Wull, then, how come you couldn’t start the campfire? You promised we could cook marshmallows.”

Deflated, I didn’t bother to argue that an arsonist couldn’t have ignited a fire that night. I got up to investigate the noise. About 100 yards away, two young women and a man were sprawled on the bed of a pickup shrieking with laughter and playing what looked like patty-cake, while a radio blared. The cans of beer they were holding interfered and kept spilling on them. They didn’t even notice.

After absorbing this a moment, I asked if they would quiet down. The Frontier Patrol, I said politely, was trying to discover the natural order of things, the coyote, the horned toad, and the rest of it.

They were not offended. “That’s funny,” guffawed the young man. “You come up here to get away from noise and we come up here so we can make all the noise we want without people asking us to be quiet.”

After agreeing that, yes, that was pretty funny, I departed.

Back in camp, the other adults decided that these dim creatures were nothing less than satanists performing some evil ritual. “Did you see any blood?” one asked.

I disagreed, but then maybe they had a point. What else but Satan’s hot breath could be keeping them warm in this unearthly tempest?

The scouts slept fitfully and the next morning everyone had redder eyes than the “satanists,” everyone that is except the scoutmaster, who spent the night in his car. Someone grumbled that he should be tied up and left for the coyote and the horned toad, but he was now the only one who could think clearly enough to decide what to do next: retreat to a lower elevation.

We camped across from a survivalist boot camp at the foot of a small hill. The Trapper didn’t have much to say. He let his slingshot do the talkin’ for him. Standing on a rise, he let fly one marble after another at a target 50 feet away.

It may not have been William Bonney entertaining “fair Mexican maidens” with his deadly Colts, but all eyes were on him when he strode shirtless into the brush with a departing grunt. Soon he was back, carrying a dead jack rabbit.

The scouts watched him skin the animal with a rusty knife. This was better than an R-rated movie on cable because the blood was real. The only thing better would have been watching him eat his catch. But the moon was lifting its pale head so the scouts said good night. The Trapper nodded and mumbled. The Frontier Patrol unrolled its sleeping bags expecting to sleep the enveloping sleep of cute, dead rodents. The crackling fire died, a night bird called, a coyote answered. Then the boom boxes came out. It must have been mating season, for as soon as one began its call, another answered.

A couple of weeks later the scouts returned to the same area. The reasoning went--and, of course, this is exactly what got Czar Nicholas in trouble after barely surviving the 1905 revolution--hey, everything that could have gone wrong already did.

This time the scouts would surely learn the language of the coyote, the horned toad, and all the other creatures that Carlos Castaneda used to talk to before someone said he made it all up. We were wrong.

When the sun set, the boom boxes began their mating ritual. The biggest bulls seemed to be in a sector where a large group of young men had squatted down with several cases of beer. Earlier, they had been seen inviting girls into their tents to pick ticks off of them. Now it was time to party.

The scoutmaster advised against asking them to be quiet. He had seen one of the young men pull a sawed-off shotgun from his sleeping bag earlier.

What seemed like eons later, the party-goers ran out of beer or insect repellent and retired.

Then a loud argument erupted from an adjacent camp shared by a couple of friendly guys who had been teaching the scouts to dive off rocks into a deep pond.

“I’m going to kill you,” one friend now advised the other. “I’m going to make you bleed in places you didn’t think you had blood.”

The Frontier Patrol never found out who bled the most. They left the next morning to rent a National Geographic special from the video store. Perhaps the outdoors is one of those things best appreciated on television, where they can edit out all the nasty stuff.