The Accidental Scout (2024)
The Folly & Beauty of Being a Misinformed Cub Scout Den Leader
A block of wood is set before me. Plain. Small. No accoutrements. It’s made of something carvable - just harder than balsa. Seven inches long, almost two inches wide and about an inch and a quarter tall. It should by no means be threatening. It’s just wood. Five-year-old Charlie looks up at me with wonder and a mandate: make it the fastest one. In other words, turn this inanimate plank into a very fast race car - faster than any of the other boys - engineered with more intelligence than any of their fathers. Charlie is the reason I do any of this. To see the appreciation in those little wet eyes if the car crosses the finish line first. All I can think is - how the hell did I get myself in this situation?
Let me begin by stating that I was, in no way, built to be a Cub Scout Den Leader. My life up to that point did not prepare me one iota for the myriad of skills I would need to not only master but be able to vibrantly perpetuate into the hearts and minds of fifteen five-year-olds. I am on the autism spectrum, which means there were some interests I was naturally drawn to as a child and I became quite talented in them. But, if I was not drawn to the skill in and of myself, then someone had to introduce it to me - teach it to me - and very little to none of this happened in my childhood. I was not pulled gently aside and walked through the processes of tying my shoes, riding a bike, avoiding frothy-mouthed dogs, mowing the lawn. I did learn them - but I learned them through disappointing others who assumed everyone just knows how to do such things.
I was ill-prepared for the juggling of parents, for the need to be - not merely acceptable - but bonkers dynamite at skills I would never otherwise use. I became (and remained for five years) a Cub Scout Den Leader for two reasons: I loved my Charlie - and no other Dad would do it. It was destined for chaos and pain from the get-go.
Now, I was already a leader of a creative team. CEO of my own company, and working with sixteen of the most genius creatives I’ve ever known - but this, I could do - because it was my excelled language of choice. I had all the confidence and capability in the world leading other adults, but transform those adults into five -year-olds and challenge the man to wrangle them to birdwatch and identify leaves? A man crumbles. He crumbles hard. The key, of course, is to never let the kids see you crumble.
They don’t tell you when you volunteer to be a Den Leader that you will be required to abjectly excel in camping, race car building, cake baking, public speaking, toddler wrangling, scheduling, food preparation, first aide, counseling, and making fire in a wet field. That if you don’t win every contest you attempt, you will be seen as an utter failure by your den and vicariously your own son.
They also didn’t mention it was going to be a 20-hour a week commitment for five years. But, that’s okay, because one would be repaid in shrugs, rolled eyes, and the pleading to stay home next week to watch Ben 10. Plus, the wardrobe.
The first time you go, your wife makes it subtle. It’s only an information meeting. We’re just going to feel it out, she’ll say - but while you are listening to a checklist of one-twentieth of the jobs you’ll actually be required to do. “A lot of you dads are probably concerned with whether or not we will be achieving the Environmental Science badge and I assure you, it is THE priority.) Big fat huh? You are thinking to yourself “nice but no way” while she is in the back signing away your next five years.
We owe this to our kids.
How? How do we owe our kids this? We were not given this. You and I did not have fathers who gave us any attention, so why are we signing up to commit to give our kids and other people’s kids more attention than anyone has been given in the history of giving attention? My father held a newspaper up between he and I our entire relationship. Why are we signing me up to teach things that no one has ever taught me? Why are we signing me up to lead the charge to succeed at things at which I have proven to be terrible? I will be required to teach these boys how to secure knots. I can’t secure anything! I fell out of the back of a moving car at the age of four and landed on my lips, all because I didn’t pull the door enough to latch it. Does that sound like a man who is destined to secure anything?
In order to ensnare me, my wife and her accomplice Shelley cheated. They waited until my emotions and senses were completely under the spell of the end of the year Bridging Ceremony where the boys moved up to the next Scouting level. It was filled with pathos and patriotism and s’mores and boys expressing love for the leadership and I crumbled. Plus, our little guy Charlie and Shelley’s youngest Will were both going to be in the youngest troop and in need of a Den Leader. Pwease, they cried. Pwease - and they knew I knew they could pronounce the word correctly. I caved. And I’d never even been spelunking.
Another detail they don’t unpack at the onset is that you won’t only have Charlies and Wills. Charlies and Wills are amazing, but you will also get kids like Grant who, though a charming young man, was destined for greatness and success, which meant as a five-year-old, he was obnoxious, disruptive, and cocky as hell about it. I considered tying all six required Cub Scout knots around his lips. Love that kid. Kidding, not kidding.
For those unaware, the Cub Scouts originated in the United Kingdom in 1916 to provide a program for boys who were too young to be in the Boy Scouts. They earn badges throughout the year for accomplishments in a myriad of skills. Each year of their five years, the accomplishments get more complicated and challenging. There is also a lot of camping. Even the title said to young ones: You are not accomplished enough yet to be called a Boy. You are, instead, a cave-dweller. The primary differences were that, being from the United Kingdom, the young ones had manners - and being from 1916, the boys had the slightest ability to shut the hell up.
The Cub Scouts have a ritual for everything. In fact, one could argue that the primary reason to enroll your boys into Cub Scouts is so they discover and embrace order. The ability to quickly quiet oneself and focus. The ways to courteously treat elders, the manner in which to respectfully unfold, raise, lower, and fold an American flag. Discretion. Kindness. Self-control. However, these teachings only stick if the boy’s home life is not abject chaos.
As the leader, when you need the boys to calm down and be quiet, you hold up two fingers, much like a peace sign or scissors to beat paper. What happens next is supposed to be procedural. Every child who sees the fingers stands at attention and raises his own two fingers as well, in silence. This works two-percent of the time, hence the number of fingers. Where I grew up, two fingers meant “If these two count down to one, you’re going to saw off a branch of that dogwood tree and I am going to use it to bludgeon your ass into oblivion.” Oh how frequently my ass was bludgeoned to oblivion. Did it shape me into a better man? Unsure. It definitely gave me a misshapen ass.
We also taught (learned) a number of valuable life lessons as adages. Catchy slogans that reminded the boys how to behave. Whenever we would camp, we would declare: “Remember - leave no trace.” Leave no trace is a much stronger phrase than “Clean up after yourself” because Leave no trace insinuates deep respect. Not only should we clean up after ourselves - we should respect wildlife and the world and environment so much that we live in such a way that you could not even detect we were there. We didn’t break off living tree limbs or stomp on bushes. Our presence within wildlife was not a disruption. It was harmonious. We MORE than did no harm. We aimed to BTYFI (pronounced “beautify”), which means to leave the world Better Than You Found It. That’s what it means to leave no trace - a concept the boys truly aimed to grasp. Adults should do the same. Most of the fathers couldn’t say that honestly about their morning bathroom visit, much less the great outdoors.
So, yes - for five years, I found myself the Den Leader of my son Charlie’s Cub Scout Den. In retrospect, it was a beautiful time of learning and bonding with my little guy - but it was stressful while it was happening, because I simply did not know any of the detail I was in charge of teaching them - and it seemed like all the other fathers were completely in-the-know. No one ever taught me. Not one lick of it. I found myself studying the Cub Scout Leaders’ Journal all week long, just to seem like I knew what I was doing. I was stressed out of my mind.
Of course, if I could have just embraced my lack of knowledge, I would have realized sooner that I was gathering all sorts of new experiences and information about very important things that would impact my writing and everyday life: botany and astronomy, citizenship, conservation, engineering and technology - but above all, the heightened politics of popcorn sales.
The primary way a Scout funded his year was by going door to door and to nearby offices to sell popcorn. Pardon me, I said that wrong. The primary way a Scout funded his year was by the DADS fiery competition between one another going door to door and to nearby offices to sell popcorn. This was a time filled with excitement, because the boy could win cash, bicycles, trips - all sorts of delicious and top shelf prizes - just by selling THOUSANDS of orders of popcorn. Or, in our case, twenty-nine.
Of course, popcorn sales were not the only competitive element to Cub Scouts. It seemed like every time you turned around, there was another opportunity to either shine or look like a lump of coal next to the alpha dads.
You know the alpha dads. They are the fathers who should volunteer to be Den Leaders because they already know how to do absolutely everything we are going to teach - but instead, they volunteer for nothing. And thank God they don’t - because the alpha dads, though highly knowledgable, are turds. Their fathers were deeply engaged with them as young men, so they learned how to camp, accurately tie both a clove hitch and a bowline, SCUBA dive, filet a tiger, and enforce prima nocta. They are returning their own Daddy’s generosity by sitting in the back of the room during their kid’s Cub Scout session, taking meetings on their Blackberry while secretly wondering how you beat Level 11-4 on “Angry Birds” (don’t use the green guy as a boomerang). They own massive Range Rovers and their hobbies include hunting, insulting those who show emotion, and storming the Capitol on January 6th. They last about two weeks, disappear, and only reappear on the competitive weekends.
I should be thanking God that these dads disappear from the volunteer pool because they aren’t the healthiest of leaders. When they raise their voice across the room to call out to another dad, their own son winces. At least two alpha dads come to me each year before the first meeting to warn me to expect very little from their son, who doesn’t amount to much at home. They hope I will be the sort of Den Leader who uses a pairing of discipline and disappointment to whip their boy into shape. I tell each of these fathers that all sons are capable of great things if their father is flexible to discover what those great things might be. Perhaps the dad in question needs to stop waiting for the son to figure him out, and instead needs to get down on the floor and invest some love and kindness into figuring his son out. The alpha dads disdain this suggestion with a grunt and move along. Most of these alpha dads will go on to accomplish great things in business while their sons will go on to do the opposite of whatever thing their Dad did. We call this earning the “Die Alone” badge.
The alpha dads wash out after the second week and disappear until you’re left with the tried and true: a dozen fathers who will stick with this through all five years. Half of them having been scouts - but in a very different program, and half of them - like me - without the foggiest clue how to do this. It was a great group of Dads, and we made significant progress helping those fifteen boys develop - until competitive weekends.
First, is the Dad & Lad Cake Bake, a title Aaron Sorkin would hate (two different rhyming schemes? Unnecessary). This was precisely what it sounds like. The dad and the scout would bake a cake ALONE and enter it into several competitive categories. The only major rule was that no women were to help whatsoever. The Scouts are nothing if not disarmingly sexist. The first year I baked a cake with my son, we were pretty damn proud of the vast camping expanse we built on a quadruple-sized sheet cake. Graham-cracker tents, pretzel trees. An icing of blue and white wintery landscape. It was gorgeous and working well with the year’s theme, which was “camping.” I thought we would do pretty well. Until we arrived.
Holy shit.
The Dad & Lad Cake Bake was, as it turned out, an engineering task - with cakes the size of entire tables or nearly a story tall. The theme is “camping,” so one family baked a grizzly bear to scale. I looked at our little landscape. It might as well have been a pamphlet advertising the competition. There were volcano cakes as big as the stage, sky scraping buildings (camping?), the bust of an old man titled “Grandpa camping” and, of course, an enormous misshapen pile of brownie clumps (Moose poop). It was delicious.
The most obvious downside to this sort of competition is that it was clearly not so much Dad and Lad as it was Sit down, Lad and watch Dad build this. Many cakes were more obviously made by shared attention, with many details and bobbles embedded into the cake. The problem with these complicated and beautiful cakes is that the more ornate they are, the more you really don’t want to take a bite. Not because of the details, but because of the filthy little hands that placed them there. There were the cakes that looked tremendous, but you knew from all the fingerprints were going to taste like carpenter caulk and snot.
There were prizes for “Best tasting,” “Tallest,” “Largest,” “Most related to theme,” “Most original,” and “Clearly Baked by a Boy.” We won none of these in five years with five cakes.
“Best tasting” would often just go to a bowl of sugar.
Once the cake bake was over in the fall, the focus shifted to badges and autumn camping.
In addition to Charlie and Will, I had the opportunity to lead some pretty incredible boys over those years. Ben and his cousin Tyler who were doing their best to continue a long legacy of family scouting. Noah, who had all sisters and was very new to this sort of activity. Two different Calebs who were just trying to figure out who they were and what they might be good at. I will never forget the first time Caleb with the glasses shot an arrow directly into the target. The look on his face - that expression of “I’m good at something - it is POSSIBLE!” may have been enough for all five years worth of work.
There was JD, so small, so ignored by the other boys. Always using Gorilla glue instead of Elmer’s. I find myself hovering over his shoulder telling him what an extraordinary job he is doing with his crafts. Some would say he isn’t. But he is. I mean, it’s crafts - you're either trying or you’re goofing off and this kid is trying. The more imaginative, the more you succeed - so who’s to say? As I give him a few pointers and praise his work, his profound teary smile sticks with me - stronger than Gorilla glue.
There are two Zachs with two very different fathers. The blonde one, whose father leans in and teaches, but then leans back for Zach to have space to figure it out for himself. Beautiful. He’s there for every camping trip. Every volunteer anything. But something different happens when dark-haired Zach’s father leans in harshly. Dark-haired Zach, quiet and doing his best to disappear amid the other boys, shrinks when his father leans in. I’m unsure what to do about this. Dark-haired Zach freezes, so I announce that I will bring dark-haired Zach up as the example in the project. He and I walk it through step-by-step in front of everyone, successfully to completion, achieving applause from the entire room and the first innocent and broad smile I’ve ever seen from dark-haired Zach. I am hoping his father will have seen an example of a different, softer way to speak the boy’s language. But, the father is the only one not applauding, not smiling.
There are Malcolm, David, Ryan, and Nick. These are my four All-Americans. The kind of boys to whom almost everything comes easy, yet they are easy-going, fun-loving, and encouraging to everyone else. Malcolm made me laugh the most, usually without trying. I will never forget on the day my boys all graduated to Boy Scouts, the last time they would ever see me, as I walked away to my car, Malcolm said to Nick, “You know, he’s the head writer for VeggieTales.” In the distance, I heard Nick shriek, “What?! WHAT?!” as if he had just wasted five years of missed opportunity.
In year four (of five), enough of the Dads are seeing so much progress in their son (and light at the end of the tunnel) that I’m able to convince them to sign up to teach a patch. Most are actually pretty good at it. One is aggravated and short. He’s the one who needs a different kind of patch. He comes to me later, “I’m just not cut out for this kind of thing.” I stare in silence for a moment. It’s been three years. He should know better, “Then, grab some scissors, buddy.”
Eventually, February rolls around - and with it - the Pinewood Derby. This is THE event of the year, when each Scout is equipped with single said piece of wood and required to charge, shape, smooth, hone, paint, and equip it to not only race - but race the fastest.
Dad - I want to build the fastest car this year, Charlie would always say, That sounds like a goal, but really it’s more like a Christmas wish, because what he really wants is to play with his buddy Zachary (an older Scout - not blonde or dark-haired Zach) while I build the fastest car. I tried freaking everything: weighing it down with coins. Sleek and thin. My friend Steve has all the tools, so we work in his garage. Steve also has an internal car-making gear that automatically makes the fastest cars. No stress. Every time, “Steve - how on earth do you make every car that fast?!” Steve’s answer, “I dunno. I just try stuff.”
The awards for the Pinewood Derby are “Fastest car,” “Best paint job,” “Most original,” and “Car Most Obviously Built By a Boy.” We came in last every race, every year, but after I spent 20 hours trying to build the perfect racer, I did win one award the final year: “Car Most Obviously Built By a Boy.”
However, there was one thing that I could do - and I could do well. Camping. A night out in the wilderness sitting around a fire, making the boys laugh, and then sharing a tent with my little Charlie, who felt like the King of the World. I always felt like Charlie rolled-his eyes that he had to be in a troop that his Dad led - but deep down, it was a source of pride.
A few months after the five years were finished, I was talking about the joys of scouting to my parents over dinner and Dad threw out this whopper, “You don’t have to tell me. I was a Cub Scout and a Boy Scout all through my youth. Best time of my life.”
I almost choked on my spaghetti.
Now, you have to understand, my Dad never enrolled me in anything. Never brought any program of any kind to my attention. And enrolling himself in something with me so that we would be guaranteed time together? An absolute nonstarter. I wouldn’t dare even ask. I assumed this was because Dad wasn’t aware of any such father-son program. That his father had ignored him so he didn’t know any better. Or, at least - if he knew about it, he had a terrible experience and didn’t want to thrust the same upon me.
I stared, “You knew about scouting? You had been in scouting - with YOUR DAD? Why didn’t you put me in scouting?”
“I don’t know. Too much work,” he threw the comment away, “You wouldn’t have liked it.”
And this is when it dawned on me why fathers sign up to be Cub Scout den leaders. It’s not because they feel like it is a perfect fit. It’s not because they feel prepared. It’s because they want to bond with their children and they want to make their children’s lives just a little better. I imagine if I had weighed it against their personalities, I may also have assumed that my children would not be interested. But, I didn’t do that. We just signed them up anyway and allowed them to discover the skills, fun, tools, and friendships that come with growing up a Scout. Vicariously, I got to learn all of that as well.
Those fifteen boys have gone on to all sorts of different futures - some beautiful and some very, very hard. One of the boy’s mothers had to up and move him away from the father for safety - I probably don’t need to tell you which one. Others have gone on to graduate college and launch careers. One is now a Legal Intern at the U. S. Chamber of Commerce. That would be cocky-as-hell Grant. Many excelled in athletics. Some moved overseas. A few had personal crises, but have found themselves surrounded by love. Tyler is a master Cellist. One is married and in full-time ministry. That would be my own boy, Charlie.
I don’t regret a single minute, a single moment I invested into those five years of helping my son develop and grow. We didn’t win any races. We didn’t bake any champion cakes. We didn’t sell the most popcorn. The only thing I truly excelled at in the Cub Scouts were looking silly and making the boys laugh. Well, that isn’t true. I also excelled at BEING THERE - remaining committed to see it through, regardless of how much I felt like I did not know. And in the end, isn’t that what matters most with our sons? Not that we prove to them that we know everything better - but that we are willing to get down on the floor with them, figure out what they don’t know - and learn it together if necessary. I haven’t always been the perfect father - but I am confident of one thing: I put in the hours of love and attention - and at every turn, I did my best to leave my precious son - better than I found him.
Next: “30: A LOVE STORY” (2024) A brand new long-form essay by Mark Steele. Exclusively written for the Mark Steele Archive.