King of the Mild Frontier: An Ill-Advised Autobiography Page 12

  Our patrol leader, Gary Hirai, was as competent as they come. It was his job to select which scouts would compete in which challenges. He was doing his best to match scouts with their strengths, and at each station he would look at me in a way I would learn later to recognize from coaches when they were deciding not to put me into a game. Look, consider, turn to another scout/athlete, fire a “maybe next time” glance, wink, and go on. Gary did that until there were no more next times. The last station was the rifle shoot, and all our other scouts had participated. We had earned more gold nuggets than any other patrol in the camp and had to earn only three more for our troop to win the summer. All I had to do was not screw up.

  The rifle shoot station overlooked the lake. One staff member manned a clay pigeon launcher several feet away. The participant was handed a bolt-action .22-caliber rifle; he was to insert a bullet into the chamber, signal the staff member to launch the clay pigeon, then attempt to shoot it as it sailed over the lake. We were told that it is nearly impossible to hit a clay pigeon with a .22, that the exercise was about gun safety, really. I was relieved. I had proven on several occasions during the week at the rifle range that I couldn’t hit the ground with a bullet, much less a moving target. But I knew gun safety from back in the days when my father wouldn’t let John or me have a BB gun. This was in the bag. Gary stood behind me as the staff member set the launcher, calmly repeating those gun-safety rules. I listened and nodded, recognizing each one. This was akin to being given the last shot in a basketball game or being chosen as pinch hitter in the bottom of the ninth. And for once I was up to it.

  The staff member charged with running the station, Marty Thorn (Fartin’ Martin Thorn, the other staff members called him), handed me the rifle, then the bullet, and nodded. I pointed the barrel of the rifle at the sand, locked the shell into the chamber, nodded toward the launcher, and called, “Pull!” The clay pigeon shot out across the water like a nuclear Frisbee and I took aim, giving it lead, watching, squeezing the trigger….

  Click! The bullet didn’t fire. I swung the barrel around until it leveled on that spot directly between Fartin’ Martin Thorn’s eyes and said, “What’s the matter with this thing? It won’t shoot.”

  The only thing faster than the speed with which that rifle was knocked out of my hands was the speed with which our patrol lost every one of our gold nuggets. They took nuggets away from us for next year. They took nuggets away from future patrols who might harbor later generations of Crutchers.

  The craggy-faced Davy Crockett I longed to be was not to come out of Camp Billy Rice.

  But according to Chuck Spence, every boy deserved at least one second chance. Toward the end of the summer he called to invite my brother and me to hike with him and the Bilbaos and Hirais up to Shirts Lake on West Mountain, looming behind our high valley town. It was a five-mile trek, straight up the mountain. We would be there a week, fish for our food, hike to the tallest peaks, find out what planet Earth was about at its most graceful. My mother said she was sure my brother would go but didn’t know if I was up to it. Ha! No wonder people thought I was a momma’s boy. My momma had no idea of the depths of my resolve to become a modern-day Jeremiah Johnson. I could scale West Mountain blindfolded with one arm tied to the opposite leg.

  The Hirais and Bilbaos were born to take on this kind of challenge. They were natural athletes and outdoorsmen, could catch a rainbow trout in a mud puddle. From a DNA point of view my brother was probably a step down from them, but only a step, and he was tenacious and a fast learner.

  I started walking daily. I filled my Boy Scout pack sack with cookies and candy bars and hiked the three blocks to work at the service station each day. I filled it with Coke and root beer and Orange Crush while at the station and walked the same distance back home. I ate and drank everything I carried to build my strength.

  Turns out, three blocks twice a day toting a backpack filled with junk food does not Edmund Hillary make. This was the Fourth of July bike race all over again. A hundred yards into the hike I was fifty yards behind, and the only thing that burned more than my legs and lungs was my desire to go home. Hirais and Bilbaos sat on large rocks, patiently waiting for me to catch up. My brother was begging Chuck to keep some sense of respect for the Crutcher name and take me back. Chuck sternly but quietly ordered me to keep up, but these guys had actual muscles in their legs and were anxious to get to the top and start fishing. Maybe I should ride on the packhorse, I offered. The packhorse was at maximum capacity, Chuck said. Which thing would I like him to take off for me to ride? Seeing the expression on his face as I named the first three things, I realized that, like my parents, Chuck Spence sometimes asked questions to which he didn’t want an answer.

  After the third or fourth time I trailed back out of sight in the trees, Chuck ordered me to walk in front of everyone. Peer pressure. No one was allowed to pass me on the trail, but they were allowed to say anything in the way of encouragement, either positive or negative. They wanted to know if my feet hurt. They wanted to know if I could walk any slower. They wanted to know where I got the coonskin cap.

  When we finally reached Shirts Lake (so named because, viewed from the peaks above, it resembled a shirttail), I wanted to eat and take a nap, and when I opened my pack to pop a couple of the twelve root beers I’d packed and crack open a package of chocolate-covered graham crackers, I was nearly beaten to death. Did I know how much twelve bottles of root beer weighed? And if I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to bring them, why did I wrap them individually so they wouldn’t clank together? Good questions, again no answer required.

  The rainbow trout in Shirts Lake were known to jump out of the lake into your pockets. You could walk across Shirts Lake on the backs of rainbow trout, they were so plentiful. They were so crowded they’d gut themselves if you’d promise to take them out and eat them. A half hour into our first fishing session, the Bilbaos, the Hirais, and my brother all had their limits. I had zero fish. As crowded as they were, as overpopulated as was their homeland, not one was willing to suffer the humiliation of being caught by a whiny dweeb in a coonskin cap with root beer on his breath who couldn’t get his hook in the water because it became hopelessly entangled in the bushes behind him. My temper caused me to jerk on the pole with all my might while loudly assailing the nature of Nature at the top of my lungs, leaving hook, line, and sinkers dangling from the bush. That same temper forced me to kick my creel into the water, losing all my extra equipment and bait.

  The guys went back to camp to clean the fish and prepare the fire for lunch. Part of the frontier theme of this outing was to live off the land and water, so I stayed on the shore, casting the line Chuck Spence had disgustedly untangled for me. Still no fish ventured toward my hook.

  Finally Chuck came back down to where I was fishing. “I’ll be dogged,” he said. “I’ve never seen anyone fish this lake as long as you have without even a bite. What are you using for bait?”

  “Brrres,” I mumbled.

  “You should be using salmon eggs. Burrs?”

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  “I’ve never heard of that. Reel ’er in. Let me see.”

  “It’s okay. I think I just got a bite.”

  “Reel ’er in.”

  I reeled her in, bringing my bait into sight. Three green berries.

  “What the hell are those?”

  “Brrres,” I mumbled again.

  “Berries,” he said. “Where did you get them?”

  I pointed to a bush behind us. “Off that salmon-egg bush,” I said.

  Chuck Spence was a man of great patience. He and my father were friends. His wife and my mother were friends. We had all been known to have Thanksgiving dinners together. It would not have been advisable for him to do what his expression told me he wanted to do. “I’ll make you a deal,” he said, his voice pinched. “Lose the coonskin cap, and I’ll catch your meals for you.” He went on to suspend all frontiersman requisites for me, in order that the rest o
f our group could enjoy their camping trip.

  That night a huge grizzly bear mauled me in my sleeping bag. He lumbered right into the camp and picked me out like some kind of human candy bar. When he was finished, I was breathing through the sucking holes in my chest. I’d been huddled at the bottom of my bag, and initially when I felt his claws, I tried to scream, but no sounds would come out. No sound at all. At least in the dream. In reality, I screamed loud enough to send the packhorse fleeing back down the mountain.

  I slept next to Chuck for the rest of the night, and the next day when he hiked back down the mountain to retrieve the horse, he took me with him and came back with only the horse. There would be no heroic Field and Stream stories passing through the Spence household to the ears of the fine pianist Paula Whitson, the coonskin cap was history, and my craggy face continued to be wasted on the body of a total wimp.

  It turned out, as I discovered later, that Chuck Spence had been a soft kid himself, and he believed any kid could be hardened into a marine with patience and understanding. So just before Thanksgiving, he included me when he announced that the entire scout troop would be going on a winter overnight during the week between Christmas and New Year’s. At the meeting he listed the winter gear required, then took us through the scout survival manual paragraph by paragraph. His most oft-uttered statement was, “Are you listening, Chris?”

  Many bad decisions are made sitting in the privacy of one’s bedroom with one’s friends, allowing an imaginary world where dweebs rule to stand in for the real one. With the help of Jackie Craig and Spencer Hayes, who played Dewey and Louie to my Huey, I decided the Bilbaos and Hirais and John Crutchers of the world had nothing on me when it came to survival in the wild. In the face of all I knew about myself, in the face of the fact that we couldn’t tie one square knot between us, in the face of the fact that we stood to actually freeze to death, we decided to be camp partners with one another and show nature and the rest of Troop 235 a thing or two.

  “This isn’t a good idea,” Chuck said, telegraphing “Don’t you remember West Mountain?” directly at me. “You guys should spread yourselves out with the more experienced campers.”

  “We’ve really been studying this survival book,” I said, “and we’re doing great in the rehearsals.”

  “The rehearsals have all been here in the Legion Hall,” Chuck said. “It’s sixty-eight degrees. There is no wind. There is no snow. There is no bitter cold.”

  “Yeah, but we’re really getting it down.”

  Though I’m sure he didn’t know the term, Chuck Spence liked karma. He was willing to let a lesson present itself and present itself and present itself until it was finally learned.

  As I’ve stated, Cascade, Idaho, sits in a long valley in the Rocky Mountain range, nearly a mile above sea level. I have pictures of my six-foot, five-inch father standing atop the tank of his thousand-gallon gas delivery truck with one arm stretched as high as he can reach, and his fingers are still a good three feet below the top of the snowbank behind him. I used to walk the five blocks to school (oh-oh, here it comes…) in weather so cold you had to stop in three stores to steal candy—I mean, to keep from getting frostbite.

  The Hirais and their cousin Ron Nakatani, who would lend his name to one of my favorite Ironman characters, formed one group. The Bilbaos and my brother and a couple of older kids formed another. Two other groups of kids who hunted and fished with their fathers in all weather over long weekends pooled their survival resources. Jackie Craig and Spencer Hayes and I needed no help from any of these dudes who thought they were so cool. I had a brand-new Boy Scout camp cook kit and a knife with scissors and saw blades and cutting edges and a leather punch and a fork and spoon. I had new boots. I had new mittens. All I lacked was a coonskin cap. I almost froze solid.

  We parked the vans and walked maybe a half mile to the camping site. The temperature was above zero, and a light snow fell. The other campers immediately gathered wood and started fires, then built lean-tos to shelter themselves from the weather. They gathered more wood and put down tarps. Within an hour some of them were actually ice fishing.

  Smokey the Bear had nothing to fear from Jackie and Spencer and me. We went through our six books of matches unable even to set fire to the newspapers we put under the wood we were too lazy to cut down to tinder and kindling. The lean-to structures built by the other groups might as well have been Egyptian pyramids for all the likelihood of our being able to construct one. An hour and a half into the experience, we were grousing at one another and shivering like wet puppies, unwilling to ask for help. We put one tarp down, our sleeping bags on top of that, another over the bags, crawled into the bags fully dressed at three o’clock in the afternoon, and went to bed.

  Chuck Spence looked on in mild amusement. At dinnertime the Bilbaos and Hirais brought us cooked food, but we told them we’d already eaten.

  The elements were kind for that time of year. The temperature never dipped below ten degrees, little wind blew, and only a skiff of snow fell. We awoke in the morning to a bright, crisp winter wonderland. Blue sky backed snow white trees in picture-postcard splendor. Gray smoke snaked skyward from four campfires, and the smell of sausage and pancakes wafted to us, shivering in the bottoms of our bags. Chuck Spence came by and shook us. Let’s do it, guys. Get up and make a campfire. We’re leaving in just a few hours. Let’s have one success before you go home.

  We counted to three about eight times before finally jumping up and cramming our feet into freezing boots, the only article of clothing that hadn’t gone into the sleeping bags with us. Spencer got another book of matches from Chuck, and we agreed to follow the manual exactly and get a GODDAMN FIRE GOING this time. With numb fingers we chopped the kindling. A little moss from a nearby tree, then tinder, the kindling, some smaller sticks placed into a perfect tepee. I hadn’t been this cold since my Christmas-tree-hunting expedition in grade school, but finally the fire crackled. Jackie dug sausages and bacon out of his pack, I pulled out the camp cook kit, and Spencer kept adding wood to the fire.

  “You guys want to build that fire on more solid ground,” Chuck said as he inspected our handiwork. “This snow has to be five feet deep; your fire will sink.” He was right, it was already sinking, but we were freezing to death and none of us was about to go through the process of building another one. “And it’s not the smartest thing to build your fire under a tree,” he said. Jesus, Chuck, give us a break. It’s the middle of winter, we could barely light our own tinder. We sure as hell weren’t worried about catching a tree on fire. And even if we set the entire forest ablaze, at least we’d be warm.

  The camp cook kit was rendered useless as the fire sank out of reach into the snow, and we began dropping sticks in to keep it going. Spencer got out his fishing pole, put a sausage on the hook, and dropped it down. The smell! The sizzling! Within moments the three of us stood over the heated hole, our fishing poles baited with sausages as if we were fishing for coyote pups. Get out your Polaroid, Chuck Spence. This should go into the manual under Boy Scout resourcefulness.

  Spencer reeled in his first sausage; almost done…a few seconds more. He dropped it back. A slight rustling above us, a soft sliding sound, and the fire was gone! The heat of our fire had warmed the tree branches above us; the snow slid off and our fire disappeared as if by Mandrake the Magician. We stood with our fishing lines vanishing into the snow as if it were a lake, all traces of warmth or food a bitter illusion, looked at one another in horror, squinted our eyes, peeled back our lips, and transformed ourselves into a perfect trio of bawlbabies.

  When Chuck Spence delivered me home that afternoon, he asked my mother if she remembered how much she’d wanted her second child to be a girl. My mother said yes. Chuck Spence said, “He is.”

  My brother asked—no, begged—that I be given back to my biological parents.

  On a warm, melting day about a week into April, the town doctor drove into my dad’s service station. I was on the island before he c
ould pull to a stop and gave him service so super he’d remember it today, were he living. He handed me his credit card and said, “I’ve been noticing you’re having a little trouble with your complexion.”

  “I haven’t touched it!” I yelled.

  He smiled and opened his glove compartment, removing a paper bag filled with prescription soap and an ointment. “Wash with this three times a day,” he said. “It won’t get rid of them completely, but it will cut them down. And by the way, that’s not how you get them. You’re going into adolescence and your skin is oily and about all you can do is keep your face clean and it will pass.”

  “You mean…”

  “And guess what,” he said, handing me the certificate lying on his front seat. “You just caught yourself a Mystery Motorist.”

  A Requiem for Rosa Campbell

  12

  DINNERTIME IN THE CRUTCHER HOUSEHOLD was a finishing school for diners. My dad knew more rules for getting food around the table and into your mouth than there are cars on an L.A. freeway. “Kids,” he was fond of saying, “eating is not a pretty thing. It’s our job to make it as civilized an activity as possible.” I remember being anxious about turning five, the age at which you were no longer allowed to eat green peas with a spoon. It would extend dinnertime by twenty maddening minutes.

  After Glen died, my dad worked twelve to fifteen hours a day at the service station, or delivering gas and stove oil and diesel to smaller retailers and to farms and mining and logging operations around the county, so dinnertime was the only time of day we were all together. It always played to mixed reviews for me because, though I looked forward to seeing him, if you were in trouble, that’s when it got talked about; and there were always the rules. He called them table manners, but to me they were rules.