News of my life

I impersonated a firefighter last night.

I was walking out to my Jeep to take a ride home to visit my dear family when I spotted out cat Vader up in the neighbor's tree. He was trying to get down, but kept chickening-out and pulling himself back up, leaving him stuck 12 feet up in the air. On the ground beneath him was a loud dog making it very clear how hungry it was.

I went over to our neighbor's front door and knocked. I let them know about Vader and that I was going to get a ladder to get his sorry butt down. It's not nice to climb your neighbor's trees without permission.

I got the ladder out of the garage and set it up. I climbed up so I was at Vader's eye level, and started petting him to try to calm him down. He didn't calm down. He freaked.

He started hissing at me and that damned dog and digging his claws into the tree, and my hands as well. After a long period of coaxing I got him to let go of the tree and come down, all the while hissing at the worthless hound that wouldn't shut up.

I did the cat a favor, and he cut my hand open, thus is the way of cat ownership. But I didn't get mad. I got even. I took him inside and handed him to my 4-year-old cousin who promptly took him to her room to maybe put a dress on him, complete with bonnet, perhaps. I don't really know what she did to him, because I left for Council Grove right after.

Today was also an interesting experience. I went out to where my Boy Scout Troop was camping this morning and helped them learn to use a compass and their own "pace" to travel distances on foot and find things.

What I did was: pick a direction, such as 320 degrees (northwest), and told the kids to measure it with their compasses. I then gave them a distance, like 600 feet, and had them pace it off. They'd measured their paces before so they just took the distance, divided it by 100 feet, multiplied that times their pace (like 30 paces for 100 feet) and then started walking.

It sounds less difficult when you do it, trust me. The hard part is making sure your compass is giving you an accurate reading.

When they started, each kid would pick a different direction and they'd all wind up in a wide swath in the middle of a pasture, none of them on-target. However, as the day went on, they learned to do it right and got pretty darned accurate. The triumph of the day was when they all wound up within 15 feet of their target destination several times after walking upwards of 500 feet.

This particular campsite is in the middle of a pasture that used to be someone's back and front yard. I first went there a decade ago. There's an old house, a couple machine sheds and an abandoned chicken coop. When I first went there, everything seemed to be in pretty good shape.

We weren't allowed in the house because it was old and they feared it might collapse or something, but they let us chill out on the porch. Today, the house was still standing, but the porch had collapsed. Also, several machine sheds had been ripped to shreds, as if they'd fallen prey to a tornado.

But the Chickenhouse still stood, although it hasn't held chickens in quite some time. I hadn't been there in four years at least, so I had to duck to avoid the low rafters that had never bothered me before. It was where we slept and cooked our meals, and it was still in good shape.

It was a serious trip down memory lane for me, a Boy Scout-turned-Assistant Scoutmaster, to pass on to them all those lessons I'd learned at their age. But there was another thing I passed on to them as well, an inheritance from my youth, if you will.

While out hiking, I took the kids by the old campfire ring me and another scout made a good eight-nine years ago with stones for the actual fireplace and large logs all around to create a walking path, enclose the "arena" and provide seating off the ground.

Most of the original logs we laid were still there, albeit suffering from a nasty case of rot. Eight years of rain and weather ain't easy on dead wood. The log we'd carved our names into was still there, but our initials were unreadable. I could only tell where we'd carved them by the soft marks left on its surface.

The boys were all amazed at the fire-ring, built before they'd known what scouting was. I told them how me and the other Scout would always repair any damage made in our absence every time we came back. It gave us a sense of ownership, to maintain this arena of ghost stories and over-used campfire skits.

I told them that if they wanted to, they could help fix it up and keep the tradition going. They wanted to, all right.

They snapped into action, even after more than a mile of arduous hiking, and grabbed logs and rocks from all around and in 15 minutes the place was as good as new. I told them that since they helped with its upkeap, the firering now belonged to them, too, and they all carved their initials into the large logs brought in to replace the seats.

And it's true, that firering now belongs to those young scouts. After the hiking, the learning and the hard work, they earned it. Now I can't wait till things aren't so dry out so I can teach them some pyrotechnically-enhanced ghost stories on some cold Saturday night.