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.)

IN A CLEARING NEXT TO Little Back Creek, a streamlet that issues through the riverside half of the western Montana ranchette that Kitty and I call home, I piled brush around the bowed trunk of a massive cottonwood that had keeled over from old age. I built a nest inside this humpback from dead leaves and bunchgrass, and a fire ring outside it from river rocks. My cozy debris shelter would be the headquarters of my battle to prove to Kitty that I deserved the Camping, Cooking, and Nature merit badges. There would be no Gore-Tex tent for me, ma'am, no $300 sleeping systems or propane stoves. For two days I would eat trout from the river and morel mushrooms from the swamps washed down with tea brewed from chamomile I picked myself.

I intended to overachieve in these matters because my struggles with Scouting the past 11 months had surprised and humbled me. Yes, I had qualified fair and square for the dozen merit badges I had tackled so far, but in some cases just barely. Dog Care, for example, administered by our veterinarian. When I was asked to put our red heeler through his paces, Radish crawled under the horse trailer after I ordered him to stay, barked when I told him to sit, and peed on the vet's truck when I threw a stick for the beast to fetch.

Fewer than 4 percent of Scouts become Eagles. But these sets were designed to challenge the physical prowess of an adolescent. How hard could they be?

"I'm going to pass you," the vet said. "But only because you did good on the knowledge part. Maybe you should think about obedience school."

The pursuit of some other badges had been protracted sieges. My essays about the natural history of our ranchette and the role of forests in the economy ran several thousand words. I sent this complicated project to one of my Virtual Counselors, a forester who happens to be my brother-in-law, and who caretakes a private estate in New Hampshire. He picked it to pieces, scolding me for losing my objectivity about corporate loggers and their running-dog lackeys in the Forest Service. But in the end he gave me my badge.

It took me two warm-weather seasons to complete Lifesaving, partly because I'm a clumsy and inept swimmer who relies almost exclusively on the dog paddle and the backstroke, but mostly because whenever I dove into our lagoon, where I was practicing to save Kitty from "drowning," water shot up my nose. The Horsemanship badge was relatively easy because I've ridden my whole life, and it was Kitty who trained Timer, my mare. But the counselor was my sister-in-law, a barrel racer from Kansas whose rodeo triumphs are family legends. Wilting under her critical glare I blanked on the names of the muscles and bones of the equine hindquarters. Even though my riding test came during a winter freeze, when she finally let me off Timer I was bathed in a nervous sweat.

When it came time to take the test for the Firemanship badge, the counselor I wanted didn't want anything to do with me. Not only was he a real fireman, he'd been an Eagle himself, and was deeply suspicious of journalists because of widespread criticism of the BSA's stand on homosexuality.

"I'm not interested in that story," I tried to reassure him. "I'm only interested in me."

"Look," I pushed on, "why would I care? When I was a Scout there weren't any homosexuals."

After he turned me down I considered trying to recruit someone from our rural firehouse, but all those guys had been in the crew that had doused a blaze I had caused in our kitchen a year earlier by leaving a pan of cooking oil unattended on the stove. So in the end I had to turn to Kitty to stand in as my counselor.

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