you do with Lorelei?”
“I had fun,” I said. “I like her.”
Jack continued to talk about Betty-Anne and her assets. I tuned him out, thinking about what Lorelei had said about me making a better friend than a boyfriend. I didn’t fully comprehend what she meant, but it made some things a lot clearer for me. Maybe the girls who fell for me did so not for any definable reason, but because they felt comfortable around me. Where Jack had looks and personality, perhaps I had something less tangible but equally powerful.
Maybe, I thought, that’s why Jack, too, continued to befriend me. Was it really possible that with all the attention heaped upon him by so many people, what he really sought was someone who saw beyond his looks and charm to the person underneath? It was an intoxicating thought, and thinking that it might be true filled me with more joy than holding the hand of Lorelei, or any other girl, ever could.
CHAPTER 6
Now that I’ve almost certainly passed the halfway point in my climb up the mountain of this life and am coasting down the other side with a tailwind at my back, I sometimes wish I could slow time to a crawl. I think this is why many of us, as we age, require fewer and fewer hours of sleep. It’s not that our bodies have become more efficient; it’s that we’re afraid we’ll miss something by wasting precious hours in slumber when we could be eating ice cream, reading Shakespeare, or scanning the night sky for falling stars. How many times have I wished for just two or three more hours in a day, not in which to accomplish a task, but simply to enjoy being?
Contrast this to the teenage years, when time can’t possibly move quickly enough and every second seems to arrive more slowly than the last in the plodding journey toward adulthood. Those days are all rushing and hurrying, leaping from one adventure to another, storing up experience and memories enough to last the rest of our lives. Like bees, we dart and gather, pausing only long enough to take from life whatever we can carry. Only later do we realize that we can’t remember what color the flowers were, or how they smelled.
Many things happened in 1965. Malcolm X was assassinated just as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement he championed took center stage in American life. Lost in Space premiered on CBS and Quaker Oats introduced Quisp cereal to grocery shelves. In Detroit, 82-year-old Alice Herz poured a container of lighter fluid over her head and lit a match, immolating herself as a protest against the escalating violence in Vietnam. Willie Mays hit home run number 512, breaking the National League record, and the Rolling Stones released “Satisfaction.”
For Jack and me, none of these was the major event of the year. That honor belonged to our two-week stay on Treasure Island. For several years we had been part of local Boy Scout troop 49, meeting once a week after school and learning the basics of camping, knot tying, and other skills that would come in handy should we ever find ourselves lost in the woods and needing to construct temporary shelter and a fire. We went primarily because we liked collecting merit badges, and together and separately we’d managed to amass a number of them.
That summer we were going for the rank of Second Class. We’d reached Tenderfoot the summer before, and were anxious to be rid of that embarrassing designation. In order to reach our goal, we had to, among other requirements, plan and execute a 10-mile hike, display proficiency in swimming, identify ten examples of local wildlife, outline the procedure for removing a foreign object from the eye, and, to quote the handbook, “demonstrate Scout spirit by living the Scout Oath and Scout Law in everyday life.” Should we accomplish all of these things, we would be allowed to attend the annual Pennsylvania troop gathering at Treasure Island, held the week following our birthdays.
Inspired by the idea of two weeks away from our parents, we completed our tasks in record time, earning our Second Class patches and our places on the trip. And so a few days after turning 15, Jack and I found ourselves loading ourselves and our gear onto a bus with thirty-two other scouts and heading for the Avalon of local scouting.
Treasure Island is legendary in scout circles. Open as a camp since 1913, it sits in the middle of the Delaware river, connected to its sister island, Marshall, by a small footbridge which, because Treasure Island is part of New Jersey and Marshall Island belongs to Pennsylvania, is considered the smallest interstate bridge in the United States. While this is undoubtedly fascinating, of more interest to we scouts was the knowledge that the Unami Indians had once called the island home, and that arrowheads were still sometimes found there.
There were twelve campsites scattered around Treasure Island, named after animals or important figures from scout history, and which site your troop was assigned to was considered an unofficial measure of your rank in the scout hierarchy. Wolf and Eagle sites were the most prized, for obvious reasons, and those such as Baden-Powell (named for the founder of the British Boy Scout Association) and Edson (after the co-founder of the elite scout program the Order of the Arrow) were acceptable if unexciting, while the hardly-intimidating Beaver and Bok were not high on most scouts’ list of desirable locations. For those of us from Pennsylvania, the greatest calamity was to be assigned to the site called Jersey.
When our group learned that we would be camping at Nip site, we were relieved. Although its name was hardly inspiring, its location at the southeast end of the island, close to the Unami ceremonial grounds, gave it a certain cachet among the other campers. Slightly removed from the center of camp life, it also afforded a little more privacy, and its proximity to the Jersey camp (which that year was indeed populated by scouts from nearby Frenchtown) assured us of some memorable nighttime raids.
Jack and I quickly set up our tent and rolled out our sleeping bags. Housekeeping thus accomplished, we joined our troop mates for the walk to the clearing at the island’s center. There, gathered around the flag pole, we were welcomed to Treasure Island, informed of the rules of our island society, and given the day’s schedule, which began with a mandatory health check and swim test and finished with a campfire.
The daily routine of a scout camp is interesting only to those who are in the midst of it, and so I will pass briefly over the mess hall meals, survival skills practices, archery competitions, leather craft classes, and canoe races. In these things our Treasure Island experience was no different from that of scouts throughout history. Where Jack and I diverged from our fellow scouts was in what occurred on the night of Saturday, August 21.
We were at the end of a perfect first week. The weather, sunny and clear, had turned our skins a golden brown. We’d racked up three new merit badges each, and Jack had led our troop to a Capture the Flag win over the previous year’s champions, Troop 137 from Erie. Already there was talk of nominating him to the Order of the Arrow once he earned his First Class rank. This distinction, the only one in scouting voted on by one’s peers, was bestowed upon only the most popular and accomplished campers. Jack, as a first-time visitor to Treasure Island, should have been far down the list of potential candidates. The fact that his name was mentioned for inclusion by both campers and scout leaders was further proof of his natural ability to outshine everyone around him.
With still another week to go, we were at the pinnacle of happiness. That night, we sat beside one another at the all-camp bonfire, lustily singing the words to the camp song. Although I’ve been able to forget many things in the intervening years, the words to that ode to Treasure Island have remained stuck in my memory, and only partially because they were sung to the tune of the familiar and oft-used “Annie Lisle.”
“By the river that surrounds thee, rolling mile on mile, ’neath the stars that shine above thee, dear ole’ Treasure Isle. We who know thy woodland treasures pause in thought awhile, calling back to mind thy pleasures, dear ole’ Treasure Isle.”
It goes on in a similar vein for another two verses, charming in its imagery and hideous in its outdated and ungrammatical wording. But we noticed none of that then, lost as we were in the camaraderie created when 150 boys are brought together for a shared experience. Like participants at a revival, we were filled with the spirit of the Boy Scouts, lifted high on a wave of brotherhood and pride. At that moment we were invincible, unafraid of darkness, rain, or snakebite. We were prepared for any emergency, sure that our scout resolve could handle anything. Had our scoutmasters asked us to launch an offensive