It had been six long months of wonderful Zoom meetings, but with nary a scout outing until this past weekend. The moratorium is ended! The troop improvised a brilliant Covid-buster program comprised of a family scout outing to Willow Springs Lake. Twenty two hardy individuals, including eleven scouts drove up and cooked as family units, while executing an excellent socially-distanced event high in the pines on the edge of the magnificent Mogollon Rim. At least one scout was on his first outing, and when asked how his night had been, informed that he ‘slept like heck.’ Further investigation determined that his brother had left his tent ‘accidentally unzipped, and a bunch of bugs including a wolf spider came to visit, leading to a middle of the night tent abandonment to sleep with his brother. A mom spent her first night ever in a tent, and while hearing every single noise, and sleeping a total of two or three hours, had an absolutely wonderful weekend. A dad invested in a tent built especially for the bed of his pickup truck, and had a ball building a cozy cave high off the ground. Which served him well, as a night visitor surprised another of our daring adult leaders, who had decided to sleep out on the ground under the stars. Hearing sniffing at his feet at four in the morning, he cautiously turned on his headlamp, and in the surrounding blackness saw a bright white stripe floating next to his sleeping bag. Moving veeerrry slowly he extricated himself safely out of his bag, and into his car, as the curious skunk wandered off to find more interesting smells. The next night marked the return of Pepe Le Pew, as a trash bag containing food scraps was left carelessly behind a scout’s tent, and was taken to task by the industrious skunk. The highlight of the day at the lake had to revolve around crawdads. Informed that they were an invasive species, the great hunt to irradicate them from Willow Springs Lake began. Scores of crayfish were cornered, captured, and engaged in crawdad races, crawdad wrestling matches, crawdad wars, and finally ended up in a massive crawdad mash down beyond the dam. Back at camp, after some late afternoon advancement, there was a rousing game of hammock football, followed by hide and go seek in the pitch dark, capped off by a loud Uno game and a traditional time of laughter and s’mores around the campfire. This reporter’s favorite moment was the following exchange between two young men with sticks thrust over the fire: ‘Where’s the chocolate bar?’ ‘It’s hidden in this ginormous marshmallow’ ‘Wow!. We are just non-stop genius!’ But, as usual, there were a zillion others – from the last boy licking the parchment paper of the dutch oven coffee cake, to the view from my ‘kitchen counter’ set right on the edge of the rim, to the sight of Mr. Benyi’s Prius gliding safely over rocks a third the size of his entire car, to smelling the smells of multiple creative dinners in flight, to again seeing a bunch of boys in the wilderness, sans screens, and having the time of their lives just being creative and enjoying each other. How soon ‘til we go again next month?
