Scouting was another in a long procession of great escapes from the hub-bub of home life that I engineered rather than a burning passion for outdoors-man-ship and male bonding. Still, I learned lots during the years I was active and somehow accumulated a sash-full of merit badges along the way. Some of those merit badges taught me skills I still employ today – cooking, for example, is one of my great passions as an adult although I’ve scrupulously avoided recreating any of the mess-kit menus that I had to learn. Others are skills long and gleefully abandoned; “camping” for me these days is staying at a budget hotel rather than sleeping on some rocky plot in the woods. And even though I managed to get a merit badge in knot tying, I still can’t tie a bowline to save my life.
The best thing about participating in Boy Scouts was that it brought together boys who normally wouldn’t have interacted with one another. Hampton was – and is to this day – a small town and certainly everyone knew of each other but the usual cliques would form or geography would interfere or some other division would serve to keep us apart. Scouting, though, created an environment where we shared a common bond and, at times, learned to rely on one another. That we would occasionally torment one or another of the troop members by tying them to a tree – or worse – was simply a measure of our boyish bonding rather than a Lord of the Flies proof-statement.
Our troop would meet in the evenings at the firehouse, a shortish walk from our home on Main Street. The firehouse served as a de facto community center and gathering place for the men in town but there was always a moment when no one was in the big bays where the firetrucks were parked. That was my opportunity to sneak away from the Boy Scout meeting to buy a pack of cigarettes out of the vending machine. My mother’s coin collection suffered from that enterprise — something I’m ashamed of today — although I guess I could blame my parents for smoking Parliament cigarettes, a brand so unappealing that I’d only steal them in desperation.
Aside from the permanent imprint that our winter camping left on my psyche, or the fact that I still wince when I drive past the June Norcross Webster Scout Reservation in Ashford, my favorite memory of scouting was the night of the skunk. I was walking home after the meeting concluded one cool and starry Spring evening. Dark had settled in and a chorus of night sounds surrounded me as I started my walk home. I wasn’t too far into my journey when the smell of a freshly squished skunk permeated the night air. As I approached the carcass in the road, I saw several baby skunks circling their newly deceased mom as they tried to sort out what had happened. Despite the awful smell, the babies looked so lost and so absolutely adorable that I picked one up and brought it home with me curled-up in my jacket.
Nature’s bounty has spawned so many creative defenses – the thorn of a rose, the venom of a snakebite, the kick of a kangaroo – but the spray of a skunk has to be the most persuasive of them all. My young kit, as baby skunks are serendipitously called, hadn’t developed the ability to protect itself yet but both of us carried mom’s departing scent with us. By the time I got home, I no longer could smell it on me but, by golly, my dad sure could. I didn’t have one foot through the doorway when he shooed me out of the house, proclaiming that there was no way on God’s green earth that the baby skunk was spending one more moment on our property. I was dispatched to the far reaches of our lot to free the baby skunk and then invited to spend the night in the wood shed so that I didn’t foul the air in our house. I was crestfallen that my rescue plan had been blunted and that I’d been banished from my home.
These days, I tend to favor my father’s disdain for the hideous smell cast by a passing skunk but the memory of cuddling an innocent – and unscented – baby wafts over me yet. I’m still waiting, however, for a merit badge commemorating my rescue.
Kit Crowne
Kit Crowne frequently amuses us with his tales of growing up in Hampton, which he contributes to “Hampton Remembers the 2nd Half of the 20th Century”, and has granted us permission to publish some of these stories on our pages. We are grateful for these and all of your recollections – please send them along.