Look Upon My Neckerchief and Know that I Am Eagle! (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine February 2002

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Look Upon My Neckerchief and Know that I Am Eagle! (Cont.)

I DROPPED BY THE office of a poker buddy, a crime attorney we call Loophole, who donates his spare time to a Missoula troop that meets at St. Francis Xavier Church. I was looking for a scoutmaster who would sponsor my rise to the top.

"You want to get involved again, and that's great," he said. "So why don't you just sign up to be a volunteer?"

"Yeah, I probably will," I lied. "But I want to do this first. So I have more, you know, standing?"

Loophole leaned back in his executive leather chair and arranged his features into the poker face that made him such a shark at our weekly games.

"No can do."

"What do you mean?"

"There's a rule. If you don't get the Eagle by your 18th birthday you can't ever get it."

Since Loophole is a lawyer, I didn't believe him. So I wrote a letter to the Boy Scouts of America. The response was a note from John P. Dalrymple, the director of the National Eagle Scout Association at the time, who confirmed that unbending policy. "We receive a number of requests each year from adults who would like to go back and complete the requirements," he wrote. "Most had attained the rank of Life Scout and only needed one or two merit badges."

I decided to forge ahead without the blessings of the BSA. Because I would lack official endorsement, I couldn't even pursue the Eagle as a Lone Scout, a program for kids living in backwaters like mine. I'd have to do my work as a Virtual Scout. I would enlist Virtual Counselors to oversee my efforts and sign my own forms when I met the requirements. Since I planned to follow the Scouting guidelines used in my day, I returned to that smelly bookstore to search for merit-badge pamphlets from the early 1960s.

While chasing down this vintage literature, I learned that shifting demographics have forced Scouting, like all American institutions, to adapt. When the BSA began losing membership in the 1970s its leaders realized that they needed to cast a wider net, to the burgeoning horde of urban boys whose opportunities to experience the outdoors were limited, for instance. The heart of Scouting is still swimming, fitness, camping, and hiking—the whole summer-camp routine, albeit these days it's a good deal less demanding of brawn than of brain. To become an Eagle now you must count among your 21 merit badges Communications, Emergency Preparedness, and Environmental Science. No longer are badges offered for Cotton Farming, Small Grains, or Beekeeping, but you can earn optional badges in Cinematography, Crime Prevention, or Truck Transportation. There's one for Disabilities Awareness. And one for Genealogy, a nod to the Mormons, who command such a central role in Scouting today that their threat to withdraw 400,000 Scouts from the movement may have been a deciding factor in the Supreme Court's decision to uphold the BSA's ban on homosexual leaders.

I set about recruiting my Virtual Counselors, and I pleaded with Kitty to serve as my Virtual Scoutmaster.

Her eyes narrowed. "What's in it for me?"

After a good deal of whining, I finally swung the deal by agreeing to a deadline: If I didn't earn the 16 merit badges I still needed in one year, by the end of business on July 4, I'd give up. I wasn't worried. True, fewer than 4 percent of all Scouts ever become Eagles. But these tests were designed to challenge the intellectual and physical prowess of an adolescent. How hard could they be?

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