Unfocused Meanderings - Distracting Myself

Was gonna get into a whole "thing" about the Obama/Pelosi/Reed/Waxman syndicate and its diktats

but there's nothing new to say. These people who will probably be the end of us have finally slipped into "boring".

We're so screwed. There's no battling boredom and apathy. Ask any German Jew in 1938. If it hadn't been for the PR bonanza of Japan leveling the World Trade Center bombing Pearl Harbor, we'd all be speaking German today, and Jews would be about as common as Hittites.

Less than 250 years after it all began, the repeated warnings of our founders have been totally forgotten. The hundreds of warnings, admonitions, and dire predictions are probably best summarized by Washington:

"Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."

The "Great Experiment" is over, and we are now just presiding over the funeral. As with the Germans back in the day, we're watching the smoke belch up out of the mysterious government works just over the horizon, and if we think about it at all, simply yammer government-approved platitudes and tell our vaguely concerned neighbor: "Well, there's something you don't see every day, but I'm sure they've got a handle on it."

Then we readjust our blinders and take up our grey loads and trudge into our NewSpeak world of Black=White/War=Peace/Slavery=Freedom.

No, there are no Jews going into the ovens this time, just our way of life, that's all - which, if possible, is even less concerning to the apathetic masses. They need something "solid," like Global Warming, or tuna-net dolphins, or equality for transsexual abortionists - or anything that can be summarized on a bumper sticker and requires no imagination, no education, and no grasp of complex concepts.

Too bad. There are no Hollywood-approved lapel ribbons or bloated, ridiculous Jerry Lewis telethons or self-important celebrity concerts for the dying idea that is us. As with most really good and important things in the world, it will disappear without notice, slipping away without making even a ripple.

So, with this depressing insight and surrounded by 1040s and 1099s and trying to figure out how to write a check big enough to "support the commonwealth" as one of my leftist talking heads would have it, and still have enough left over to eat next week, I - yes, apathetically - went hunting around the net for something to take my mind off of the fact that my generation is probably the last which could barely be even marginally identified as "American" by our forbears.

Specifically, I started putzing around with Google Earth.  Now, any of you who do not have Google Earth, which is a stand-alone program, should get it. Now.  Right now.  It's been around for a long time, and you should have it. It was developed out of the military's old "Keyhole" spy-satellite programs. You've all seen it, whether you have it or not, and it's a seriously cool chunk o' software.  Download the free version - you won't use all the things that even the free version does anyhow.

At any rate, I was amusing myself looking up my own address, hunting around old places I used to live, etc.

Amazing what you can find with this stuff.

And while I was hunting around, I hit the town I used to live in. Now, it turns out that even when you're as old as I am (which is to say, WAY fucking old), you can remember some really detailed stuff. When we lived in that town, I was young enough that I never had a driver's license, (which is not to say I never drove anything) yet I could find LOTS of stuff by just following Google Earth roads that looked right, that looked like the directions we used to go as seen from the back seat, and by looking up half-remembered place names.

One place I used to go EVERY SUMMER from 1962 thru 1966 was to a paramilitary Boy Scout camp located on Lower Saint Mary Lake, in Montana, up in Blackfoot country in the Rocky Mountains. The entire area is mountains and lakes and heavy tall pine forest. You could spit into Glacier National Park from there. It was called "Camp Napi", the "Napi" part being the jokester/prankster Blackfoot deity who supposedly hung out in those parts. These one-week expeditions were the highlight of summer - and some of the best times I ever had.

Our entire troop of three patrols ("Elk," "Wolf," and "Cobra") camped in an enormous Army surplus tent, probably designed for 16-20 men, and spent the entire week swimming, canoeing, hiking all over the Rockies, shooting, and doing "sneak and peek" missions against other troops also camped in the area.

Any modern sniper would recognize the camouflage, slow-motion low-crawl, and freezing in place techniques we were using back then. It was stalking (in the hunting sense,) with high honor going to those who got closest to the other camp without being caught as evidenced by witnesses or by bringing in some identifiable thing from the other troop's occupied area, and considerable shame to those who WERE caught, since the patrol leaders would have to go retrieve them when they were captured, usually trading back something that had been taken in a previous raid, or at least forfeiting considerable "face" as the Japanese would say.

Nothing was ever permanently kept longer than a day, and no one was ever hurt - or at least no more hurt than happens when one of their boys would send up a whoop when he spotted someone sneaking up and about 10 other boys landed on the stalker. The stalker would be kept in the middle of the camp, fed, given water, and generally treated well except for the unending razzing and derision heaped on him by everyone who walked past until his patrol leader came to bail him out.

There were enormous campfires attended by everyone at Napi, Order Of The Arrow tap-outs, secret ceremonies, rituals that I remember to this day - it was all very Tom Sawyer, if Tom had been in heavy pine forest instead of hanging out in caves in the Mississippi River bottoms. I dunno, maybe that stuff is universal and the setting doesn't matter all that much.

The camp closed in 1973, supposedly when the old Chief of the Blackfoot tribe died, and the new one couldn't or wouldn't come to terms with the Boy Scouts for the continued use of the place. Whether that's true or not, the bottom line is that the last Boy Scout was there over 35 years ago.

I was up in that area a couple of years ago and, after considerable difficulty, finally located the old road that went down to where the camp used to be.

Me And The Next Of Kin Head Into The Woods

And this is where Google Earth comes in.

Plug in the following coordinates:

48.817755° -113.429100°

to "go there". Or, if you really don't have and don't want Google Earth, just go to maps.google.com and copy/paste that line of numbers into the "Search Map" field.

Here's a picture of the place from the north (looking south) and what you're looking at:

It's now private property. Unbelievably, many of the old buildings are still there (camp HQ, mess hall, remains of the "Craft Shack" and one of the old hootches/bungalows out next to the entry road). From this view you can still see the old roadbed that ran south from HQ to the camping areas, gun range, archery range and whatnot. From ground level it's all grown in completely, a solid "hard" forest. The canoeing area was where the dock is now, north of the "point" sticking out into the lake.

The owner of the place says he used to be a Napi camper - we were even there during the same times for a couple of years in the 60's. I don't remember him, nor he me. He says he likes the quiet - other than the occasional old Boy Scout coming through (which he gets a couple of a year,) his main visitors are black bears and grizzly, which are something of a pain in the ass when they're not outright dangerous. Oddly, it had never occurred to me when I camping there that there were griz all over the place. I might have been a little more circumspect about our "running all over the forest" stuff.

No, I wouldn't have been.

You may notice a map notation that says "Where I KTF Out Of Myself." This was an area where one year some senior scouts had set up a variety of rope constructions in the trees - bridges, pullys, climbing gear, and whatnot - as a demonstration of rope skill. I noticed it unoccupied one day when I was walking past and so I went down into the (strictly forbidden) area and started fooling around with the stuff.

I haven't got time to go into it now, but it resulted in me literally knocking myself out cold as a wedge for some unknown period of time (which I know now meant I'd given myself a hell of a concussion.) When I came to, I went down to the lake and washed the blood out of my hair and off my face and out of my uniform shirt (it looked like I'd been butchering a hog) and then staggered back to our troop campsite.

Mention it to anyone? Are you kidding? I'd sooner have taken a beating. Aside from the "strictly forbidden" thing, the method I used to mash my brains to paste was nothing short of spaz-tasticly, humiliatingly stupid.

It's a wonder I didn't die of a brain bleed or something in my sleeping bag that night. They'd have NEVER figured that one out. I had a roaring headache for a couple of days, but then everything was fine.

The story's hysterical, or at least as hysterical as a 12-year-old's near-death experience gets, and I'll tell it to you another time. Maybe. But that's the map entry is; "KTF" means "Knocked The F**k" - thus "Where I Knocked The F**k Out Of Myself."

I'm actually glad the camp closed when it did. I'm sorry more kids didn't get to go there - but I would have been unutterably sad to find what it would have been turned into in this PC time. The raw forest would be littered with smooth paths and handicap ramps, there would be no guns, no arrows, no sneak and peek, no razzing and humiliating incompetent stalkers, no wrestling in the woods, no half-mile swims without life-jackets to earn the badge. Every second would have been regulated, and every new batch of campers would have to spend their first day in camp at an "awareness" session about being friendly to the earth, non-offensive to Napi's people, tolerant of the non-English-speaker who can't understand the camp stories, and where to report and which forms to fill out when their scoutmaster tries to fuck them.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

No, I'm glad it died as raw, primitive, and old-school as it lived, for all that I'm sorry it's gone.

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Oh, all this reminds me; I was awarded a merit badge today. Or, more accurately, I awarded one to myself. I haven't earned one of these things since back in the Camp Napi days. This is one of the new ones:

The "Inbox Zero," merit badge, awarded for the near impossible feat of keeping my inbox clean at least 71.4% of the time for a full 24 hours. In my case, I also got the "triple" service star, since I actually kept THREE SEPARATE ACCOUNTS clean.

OK, it isn't map reading, knot tying, or archery, or shooting, or squirrel cooking or whatever. But these "nerd" merit badges are just as tough to win. Ask any Boy Scout fresh back from a 50-mile hike through the Rockies.

Originally, I'd intended to come up with a redhead-related merit badge. Go ahead. Stick "merit badge" and "redhead" into your favorite image search engine.

Wow. They can get MERIT BADGES for that?

Anyhow, to stay more or less on topic and simultaneously reduce the gag reflex in my more sensitive readers, I decided to just include this one, which can be classified as "Boy Scout oriented." Well, she DOES appear to be out camping. Or something. And there ain't a Boy Scout I've ever met anywhere who wouldn't pitch a tent over her.

Barump-Ump.

In Our Next Episode: I attempt to write something with a central theme instead of just wandering around like a Boy Scout who's managed to bash his brains in. Oh, yeah, and remind me to tell you about "flashlight tits," too. It's another thing I learned in camp. (Flashlight in a dark room, aimed at an angle against the wall or tent ceiling makes a well-defined parabola of light with a bright central spot, and when you do two of them together, it looks like an enormous pair of tits made out of light. Hey, it was VERY funny stuff to a 12-year-old.)