Winter Camp

From Menletter February 2009

By Tim Baehr

Fox and Geese

All afternoon we played Fox and Geese, tramping paths in the snow and chasing each other around. Our scoutmaster and a few dads stood around, smoking and talking. As an early dusk settled we all went inside the cabin - 12-year-olds and on our first winter campout, along with some older scouts, scout leaders, and a few dads.

We were soaked to the skin and shivering. One of the dads built a huge fire in the stone fireplace that loomed over one end of the cabin. Some of us gratefully backed up to it, glad for the warmth.

Suddenly were all yelling and dancing around, peeling off our steaming Wranglers and Levi's. The fire had set the water in our jeans to boil. We hung the hot pants from the mantelpiece, and the room looked like we were expecting a visit from a very confused Santa Claus.

As the rest of the cabin warmed up, we moved to the other end for a dinner of canned chili and buttered bread. Then it was time for Initiation. We put our now-dry pants back on and gathered around the fire.

Initiation

One of the older scouts inverted a big rubber boot over his head like a crown. He also held a hiking stick as his staff of authority. Initiation was touted as a grueling ordeal of hazing, so our anticipation was high in the darkened room.

One by one, we newer scouts were brought before him and his council to answer questions about scout lore, and then repeating loudly the name of the three official Troop Spirit: OHWA-TAGOO-SIAM. I caused some consternation and mirth with a minor addition: OHWA-TAGOO-and-SIAM.

Night and Day

The fire began to die, we began to yawn, and soon we were headed for the metal double bunks with the squeaky springs. First, however, I had the job of emptying the bucket that served as a toilet. The path downhill to the outhouse was snow-covered, and I trudged as slowly as I could to avoid spilling on myself.

My brother and I didn't have sleeping bags; our mother had pinned together a couple of blankets for each of us as a primitive bedroll. I didn't bother to undress: I was too tired, and I suspected I'd need all my clothes to keep warm. Even so, I spent most of the night awake and shivering, listening to the heavy breathing of the more comfortable boys.

About 3:00 a.m., just as I finally dozed off, there was a loud squeak and a crash. Johnny, a rotund butterball of a boy, had shifted his bulk once too many times and had fallen from the upper bunk, through the springs, and onto the boy below. Shouting, confusion, and laughter broke out for the next fifteen minutes.

About 7:30 an older boy got the fire going, and we all sat blearily at the picnic tables near the kitchen area at the far end from the fireplace. It was still so cold that the pancakes and sausage were frigid by the time they got to the table. My brother cooked one pancake so long that it rolled the length of the table on its edge. At least the hot chocolate stayed warm.

When we got home, I stumbled out of the car and headed for the living room. I could hear our dad telling our mom about the weekend as I lay down on the couch to watch the Sunday afternoon movie on TV. The voices, the TV, and the sound of the furnace sounded suddenly very loud just before I fell into a delicious sleep.

Chilled and soaked, almost boiled like a lobster, scared and embarrassed by the initiation, nearly slopped on by a bucket of human waste, up all night shivering, eating cold breakfast, arriving home exhausted.

And I remember it, 53 years later, as one of the best weekends of my life.

Idealism

Seems kinda counter-intuitive, at least from an adult point of view. But I was a kid, and I hadn't developed many ideas about what life and life's adventures should be like. Notice the words "ideas" and "should." I think that our day-to-day disappointments and dissatisfaction don't come from actual events but from our expectations. We're idealists about the way things should be, about the way we should be.

Not that I, as a twelve-year-old, met the trials of the weekend with mindless equanimity. Cold is cold. Scared is scared. Exhausted is exhausted. I was unhappy, maybe even miserable, at times. But I also had a lot of fun, and since I had no expectations, the things that weren't warm and safe and clean were just a part of the adventure. There were no thoughts of "Why is this happening to me?" or "This shouldn't be happening." With that kind of natural, childish openness, disappointment was not an option. How many of us, as adults, have had a whole weekend ruined by just one thing going wrong?

Unpacking Our Bags

Robert Bly, in his Little Book On the Human Shadow, see us, when we're born, as radiating our innocence and enthusiasm in all directions. As we absorb society's rules and regulations, as we take on the mantle and burdens of adulthood, we stuff a lot of our radiance and our "shoulds" and "should nots" into a psychic bag that we drag behind us. As we get older, the bag gets longer, and sometime in middle age we find that the bag has become so heavy we can no longer move forward in life. Unpacking that bag is a difficult task. We have to take the bad stuff out of the bag and see it as part of who we are: make friends with it, and with ourselves. If we succeed, we can become more like . . . children.

In Matthew 18:3, Jesus says ". . . unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." He wasn't, I think, counseling his disciples to become naive or simple-minded. His followers had been speculating about which of them would be greatest in the coming kingdom, which they felt was imminent. He was talking about humility and expectations.

Zen teachers like Shunryu Suzuki have a similar point of view in the concept of "beginner's mind." They suggest that we approach life with the openness and humility of a beginner, without expectations or preconceptions or clinging attachments to outcomes.

Bly acknowledges that unpacking the psychic bag is difficult as we rediscover our radiance. Jesus talks about becoming like a child - not a child but like a child. Suzuki wants us to have a beginner's humility and acceptance of the adventure in our experiences. In all cases, our expectations, our attachments, our desires are set aside in a spirit of discovery.

This spirit can be easy to come by at a men's retreat or in a men's group. One of my ongoing challenges has been to bring that spirit of discovery and adventure, unattached to expectations, into facing the trials, failures, and victories of everyday life. Like a twelve-year-old at winter camp. We can be cold, hungry, poor, sick, hurt, tired, bored, uncomfortable - and their opposites (while we worry about inevitably losing the good stuff). We can't deny the realities of life. But we can deny the expectations, our attachment to the "shoulds," that turn even the good stuff into endless suffering.