I Am a Fearless Cub Scout Leader!

As usual, the scouts and I performed a valuable community service by walking through the forest preserve and pouting to the point where a helicopter could land on our upper lips.

I enjoy scouting. I like sleeping on the cold hard ground during a rainstorm then driving home for three hours smelling like a dead weasel slow roasted over a tire fire. I like eating hot dogs cooked to a delicious full bodied carbon. I like gnats. Under my eyelids.

And I truly appreciate the civic lesson embodied in the Scout credo. There really isn't another organization for kids that actually rewards them for selflessly assisting the community. Bravo. But whoever said scouts is a youth organization was misguided and high on bug juice. Scouts is a brilliant method for ensnaring the skills and resources of local adults through the apparent involvement of their children. Scouts is a ball and chain. You get your kid involved in scouts because YOU were a scout and by god if you had to hike three miles through a muddy ravine to camp in a slough full of badger vomit your kid's gonna do it too.

Take today. We assembled the scouts to walk through the local forest preserve to clean up litter. This is selfless and noble and I felt like a titanic citizen, like I was cast in bronze. I could barely walk straight cause I had my chest stuck out so far. For like eight seconds. Then I looked around and realized the scouts were all throwing empty Pabst cans into the river. They spent the entire hike endeavoring to fall off the steep muddy sides of the DesPlaines, cut themselves on broken glass no doubt previously dipped in the festering open wounds of homeless CDC escapees, and stab each other with the pointy ends of sticks pulled out of cold fires that looked suspiciously sacrificial. As the scouts rocketed down the leafy deer trails in the woods, leaping nimbly over the discarded cigar tubes and McDonald's wrappers, they passed by countless scenes as wild and rare as anything on the nature channel: Enormous hardwood fungi big as dinner plates; wild asparagus shooting up out of the ground like, um, asparagus; deer nibbling at the remains of a Taco Belle Grande. Real nature.

I saw these things because unlike the feral howler monkeys we were leading on this selfless act of delittering the forest, I was actually picking up garbage. Me and all the adults. The parents. And it occurred to me that the people who convince the scouts to do this kind of thing are brilliant social engineers. They ask how big the troop is, multiply by two, and get a solid number of adult volunteers. If the kids actually do anything, it's a bonus.

The kids only real brush with condensed littering occurred when we stumbled on a hobo camp. No hobos, alas, cause we'd dearly love to have interviewed them and shared their homely dinner of hot beans and chicken wings with a nice steaming cup of black coffee, all cooked over a small fire in a paint bucket. Ah, to listen to them regal us with stories of riding the rails and then teach us the secret hobo signs and maybe part with a song backed up by a cigar box banjo. But they weren't there. Which is good. Because the meth addled freaks who had made this camp had consumed something like eight cases of Ice Blue and had tied something to a tree with an old lamp cord and some wall wiring. Oh and we found a cat skull. Maybe not hobos so much as psychos.

As we shuffled through the underbrush we came on another encampment, a circular fence of fallen limbs all wrangled together around an old fire. We found a lot of pills and a lot of hair dye so this must've been a travelling goth encampment. After we circled around through the forest, we passed by it again (after we'd removed the dope) and it was already filling up with a bunch of youth meddling with a keg. Ah. Nature. Walden would be proud.

It occurred to me as were were leading these pink cheeked elven kids through the dark forest that the dark forest of Chicago was not a whole lot different from the dark forests of any medieval locale. Ours is filled with drunken louts, lost youth, and secret gypsy encampments of people that probably don't exactly hold to the Scout motto much. This idea was driven home by the man we ran into up on a grassy plateau. He had an enormous welt on his head and we thought maybe he had passed on to that great summer camp in the sky when he heaved a deep snotty snorp and we realized that he'd merely passed out there in his little house BUILT ENTIRLEY OUT OF EMPTY BEER CASES. Two of our scouts, wanting to share their nascent sheer with this colorful local, began to jump up and down at the edge of the clearing singing merrily: HOBO! HOBO! Until he woke up and lumbered their way.

We eventually finished up, stowed our bags of trash, old tents, rotted lawn chairs and assortment of empty beer cans--a job well done. I for one biked home satisfied and relieved that we hadn't had to explain any caches of needles nor a single spent condom.