If someone wasn't willing to be the Yankee there wasn't going to be a war. Since my father was a Canadian, I felt it was only logical that I volunteer for the blue uniform of the Union Army. After the battle lines were drawn across the playground, I watched the Rebel Army head across the baseball diamond and over to the fence where the sugarcane field began.
I waited by the monkey bars and advanced by degrees when my opponents' attention was distracted from my position. There were two of them and they were my best friends, Brian and Bobby. The recess was short so we had to escalate from the strategic deliberation stage to the actual conflict rather rapidly.
In the heat of battle, at a point where it was impossible to tell who was advancing and who was in retreat, Bobby and I rolled across the sunbaked clay locked in a mutual flying tackle. He had long since abandoned the labour of loading his Springfield and I had jettisoned my Enfield in order to give quicker chase.
Right after a breakaway and subsequent tackle the bell rang for us to return to our grade five class. Bobby kept rubbing his shoulder so much that the teacher asked him about it. He said it was just a scratch and she carried on the lessons. About forty minutes later, Bobby raised his good arm and asked to see the school nurse.
He came back awhile later all wrapped up in white linen across his chest and one of his arms in a sling. His collar bone had been broken clean in two during our combat. I had never seen a boy bear the pain of injury more bravely. Before the proper taping up of the break, Bobby showed me and Brian the angry red lumps under his shirt. I felt awful bad about having been the author of it and I felt mighty proud of the noble way Bobby continued our friendship after my apologies were extended.
Attending Bobby's birthday party some time later, I was made aware that his older brother had not and would not forgive me nor forget which side I had taken in the battle. I tried to explain that we had wanted to play Civil War, not WW II and to find a guy to be a Yankee in Baton Rouge, Louisiana was next to impossible. After explaining to him that I was many generations a Texan on my mother's side, he relented enough to maintain cordiality for the rest of the party.
The three of us boys were Indian Guides, Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts and football players for the Melrose Bulldogs. I was third string but I never missed a practice nor a game. I only took the field once when our half-back broke his arm and the coach had absolutely no other choice. I caught a button-hook pass and advanced our yardage. I still remember the rush of validation that gave me. Brian's father had taught me the old button-hook.. My dad didn't do ball sports. He'd been a good right-winger as a hockey player in Toronto and he could swim like a fish.
Tuesday nights were Scout nights and I am still partial to that day of the week. We were in the Istrouma Council and our group accounted for the better part of the Panther Patrol in Troop Six. When it came time for knot tying, my father who had been in the Canadian Merchant Navy, came up big for me and Brian.
He went to a drugstore and bought a two big poster-boards and some nice white rope. While we sat transfixed on the living room floor he tied sheep-shanks, camel hitches, clove hitches, hangman's nooses, pipe-hitches, monkey's fists, dog's-cocks, straight splices, bowlines, mooring eyes, reef bends, lariats, slip knots, shamrocks and sheet bends; one for each of us. He took some twine and whipped the ends of one of the pieces to boot. The whole process took about ten minutes and while we stapled them onto our boards, he spliced up a dog leash with the left overs. I'd never seen him do so much as change a light bulb and that was the day I realized that he knew a lot more than he was showing me.
In the summer of 1968, Troop Six shipped off on a yellow school bus for a camping trip to the Ozarks. We drove up through Vicksburg, Mississippi and stopped at the Strategic Air Command Base in Little Rock, Arkansas.
On the way we sang, “We gonna march to Sel-ma, Sel-ma, Sel-ma. We gonna march to Sel-ma, Sel-ma, Al-a-bam-a” to commemorate the Freedom March to Montgomery that had occurred three years prior. We slept on the SAC Base gym floor and were up and away early next morning.
I remember the Air Force breakfast food wasn't half as good as the red beans, rice, fat-back and cornbread that we got at Melrose Elementary. We reached Buffalo River in Northern Arkansas that afternoon. The Eagle Scouts and the Scout Masters told us that we had to pitch our tents before we could go exploring. They were big canvas four-man tents and we cussed our way through this heinous task. Brian, Bobby and I shared a tent and I cannot today recall the name of the fourth boy.
We heard some whooping from the riverside and ran over to investigate. There was a rope swing hanging from a tree on the bluff! Several guys had already warmed it up. We had recently had a visitor at our school by the name of Johnny Weissmuller, aka Tarzan and we were all dying to do some serious vine swinging. Most of us had autographed black and white pictures of him flying through the canopy.
I was about third in line and when my turn came up, I took a running start. The bluff was about ten feet high. The river at this point was banked with fine yellow sand and overgrown with blackberries. Out I swung and just as I was smack over the brambles and halfway through my Tarzan yell, my hands lost their purchase on the greasy rope. I had just enough altitude to turn once in the air on the way down.
My reflex was to thrust out my right arm to break my fall. I broke my wrist and got a mouthful of blackberries and sand. We had been camping less than an hour and there were two weeks to go. The break was a hairline fracture and Bobby helped me wrap it in a neckerchief to kill the swelling. By nightfall, I had it in a sling because the pain was distracting me from the first night's game of Capture the Flag. That was a fun game for a boy in the daytime but at night in strange woods it was exquisite.
The days were full of Merit Badge quests. The nights were full of firelight and the long talk of boyhood dreams. We practised fire building, lashing sticks, cooking with tin-foil, First Aid and a few other skills with no problems. The problem was trying to get the Eagle Scouts to come out of their tents to instruct us. They were all busy smooching with their girlfriends day and night. Those guys had to score your work and bestow your badges.
One night while discussing how to deal with the girl problem, the topic of the origin of babies naturally came up in our tent. All I remember was that Bobby flat refused to believe what I told my three companions. The others had open minds but reserved final judgment until further investigations. Our debate on was suddenly interrupted by a guy in the next tent who had caught a Blue Racer!
Back home everyone collected baseball cards, seashells, butterflies, comic books and such but most of our group collected snakes, turtles and lizards. It was well known among the fellows that a healthy Blue Racer was the fastest snake there was. We had all caught enough corn snakes, king snakes, grass snakes, pine snakes and garter snakes until they held relatively low esteem in our eyes.
This Racer was a noble snake and I immediately bought it for fifty cents when I learned it was up for sale. I got a cardboard box and gently put all three feet of the sleek indigo creature inside and closed the top tight. The next morning, Bobby, who alone was uneasy about sharing the tent with a reptile, went to check on it and had to tell me the sad news that it had escaped during the night. I was heartbroken knowing I could have won a lot of races back home with that beauty. Prettiest snake I've seen down to this day.
I decided to try out for a Wild Foods Merit Badge. First I studied up the black and white line drawings in the Boy Scout Manual which all looked alike except for a few of the water-coloured depictions. Then I went hunting for the vittles. I came back laden with the bounty of God's green earth about two hours later. I had some sarsaparilla, some Polk salad, some black berries, some dandelions, some wild onions and some sassafras.
I prepared a grand salad and went to one of the Eagle Scout tents to fetch a boss to grade my work and mark my card. He was a nice fellow and after I assured him that the greens were washed and cleaned properly he agreed to come over to our fire and try them out. I knew I had that badge in the bag because I had provided more than was required.
The Eagle Scout walked up and started poking around the bowl of greens with his fingers like he was counting the different ingredients. He munched a couple of berries and chewed a few onions. Suddenly he flung the bowl and contents to the ground and said something I'd only heard my father say and then only when he was real mad.
As we all watched in horror, angry red welts boiled up along the back of his hand, across his wrist and up his arm. According to him, my sassafras was really poison sumac. I had fortunately proven to be immune to it but learned that there was no Merit Badge for that ability just before the poor fellow disappeared to get medical treatment. I decided not to mess with food anymore as it was obviously too risky.
The next Merit Badge I had my sights set on was Orienteering. Me, Brian, Bobby and our other tent-mate were to go together over a predetermined course set up and marked on a topographic map. We had a proper compass and would have our map endorsed as we reached each objective way station. I took point so I could redeem myself from the wild foods debacle.
The first two or three way points were easy. The ground we were walking on had echoed with gunfire only one hundred years before. Sometimes when crossing farmer's fields we would search for flint arrowheads, belt buckles, buttons or Minié balls from the Civil War.
Late in the day we were meandering West down the Buffalo River on the South side and working our way back to camp. I remember wanting to hug the river rather than avoid all the oxbows by walking on the flat ground farther south of the water. My way had us a good fifty to one hundred feet above the river on a crumbly pine strewn canyon of sorts. There was some dissension among the men and some theories of us being lost.
I stayed stubborn but committed to see my boys home safe. We were not really on the trail but I figured the river itself was a pretty good trail. The way got narrower and we had to go single file. In retrospect of nearly fifty years gone, it is my considered opinion that I was instinctively following a game trail. Twilight came with yet a long way to go and were getting mighty hungry and thirsty.
The way forward was terrifically slow due to the steep drop-off and crumbly nature of the cliff. Suddenly, the unthinkable happened. Bobby had taken point and as the rest of us watched in frozen despair, he slipped off the overhanging cliff that we had been negotiating. Just like that. A puff of dust and a rolling pine cone were all that betrayed that he had ever existed. We couldn't process the grief and anguish immediately, such was the magnitude of the shock. We stood with our mouths hanging open in silent screams.
Then his laughter floated up between the sound of the wind and the crickets. We couldn't see him but we damn sure could hear him. I have no words today for the feeling of joy and relief that surged inside of me and my brothers in khaki. Perhaps it was like taking a massive swig of the best home-made root beer you ever tasted and then blowing it out your nose because someone made you laugh.
“Y'all, I found the REAL trail. Really. It's wide and it's dead easy.”
We wanted to believe him and were thankful to God he was alive but it was difficult to imagine that there could be a trail down there. Our position was on a deer wide scratch on a smooth bell-shaped piece of soft sandstone. Due to the curvature of this stone out over the river it was impossible to see what Bobby was talking about. We could see the river however. It was very far down there.
We listened to Bobby's instructions, gathered our courage and acted on literal blind faith. We were told to sit down and slide off the rock one at a time exactly on the spot where he had gone over. We had to spread our legs wide apart because about five feet down we would encounter a pine tree positioned perfectly to arrest our further progress into the abyss by acting as a horseshoe stake, as it were. It grew just at the edge of the trail on the water side. We were admonished to hold our hands out to grab that pine to keep from crushing our family jewels.
We each took our turn and followed Bobby's instructions to the letter. The trail was wide as a road. We gained back our lost time and as we crossed the last field before reaching camp we heard a chirping sound. Upon investigation we discovered a whole nest of baby cotton-tails. We scooped them up in a tee-shirt and marched into camp. We got our Orienteering Merit Badges and one of the Eagle Scouts gave the bunnies over to the care of his beautiful girlfriend. She fed them from an eyedropper and took them back home to Baton Rouge on the bus with us.
I moved away to Canada that Winter of 69. I never joined any group after the Panther Patrol, except a two year stint on the Board of Radio Lillooet CHLS 100.5 FM. I caught up with Brian in 2007 in Texas at another friend's house.
When he walked into the room my wife said, “He looks just like you.”
We had the same beards, the same pattern baldness, both of us carried knives, still played guitars and we both wore jeans. His wife was equally amazed. Over the years we had spoken only once on the phone and seen each other only once back in 1970 for a day or two. He turned out to make his living being a Biology Professor and he still liked to catch snakes.
Back in time on the Buffalo River I learned to lead and I learned to follow. Life and circumstances constantly present us with both rôles and it is wisdom to realize that they are in reality, the same. I tasted the joy of true comradeship and we all felt that little tap on the back from the Creator just letting us know that we were playing in His house. I also learned that you can't keep a Blue Racer in a cardboard box.
fin