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Klondike Ho!

When I was a lad, the scouts regularly hosted Klondike Derbies. It was mostly a sled and a bunch of boys you needed, along with some bloody miserable weather, and once the sleds were built they usually used them year on year, so easy peasy, right?

My parents assumed we would be sleeping in cabins, apparently, so I got to use my regular summer sleeping bag; turns out that wasn’t the case. I lie in the bag shivering so much my tent mate kept waking up, so I sat out by the fire and tried to keep warm. it was better than freezing to death. I had the same rig as many of my scoutmates, a scout shirt and jeans, cut down long underwear from Dad, a sweatshirt, and a parka. Army parkas were all the rage at the time so I could at least stay warm in that, but it was not my most pleasant evening spent scouting. Our scoutmaster kept checking on me to make sure I wasn’t on fire, and I think he pitied me because he offered to let me bunk in the scoutmaster’s heated camper, but I was stubborn then as I am now, though the warmth of the propane heater beckoned.

I sat, instead, by the fire, the light sleeping bag piled up under me and draped over my back as I tried not to set my nylon parka on fire. I must have dozed because I remember waking to the smell of bacon.

The scoutmaster was coolking bacon in a big iron pan, and when he saw me open my eyes he started shouting.

“Who was supposed to be on fire watch?” knew he wasn’t yelling at me because I had been there tending the fire all night. He went around rattling snow off all the tents and yelling until two kids emerged still half in their sleeping bags. “You guys fell down on the job. I suppose you were nice and comfy and decided to just stay in the sack rather than feeding the fire” A scout fire, for those of you who have never seen one, is eight or ten small logs maybe four to five inches in diameter, each with one end in the fire, like a big asterisk. As the fire dies you just kick the ends of the logs in till they burn some more. Takes little to tend, but you can’t do it from a sleeping bag in a tent. And you can start with logs five feet long if you like. The other kids grumpily rubbed their eyes in the brutal morning cold and he said “If it hadn’t been for Og here you’d have been eating raw eggs this morning. Now sound reveille and roll your asses out of the sacks and break camp” They all packed and were required to wait until I finished eating before they were allowed to cook their breakfasts. I knew it wasn’t going to make me popular but it helped redeem the cold night, and breakfast in the wild had never been so tasty.

Later the scoutmaster saw to it that I got to be a lead dog. I couldn’t run very fast, and at first I felt as if I was being punished, but soon I realized I was the warmest guy there- I was able to strip down to a toque and sweatshirt and made fun of the musher and the wounded scout who were freezing their asses off.

Midmorning we were turned loose and allowed free time- the rest of the group still a little miffed at me, I headed off alone denying them the chance to shun me. This was a state fish and game area, and it was post hunting season, so everything was locked down, including the shitters. And buy, did I have to- bad. But my TP roll was in the pack, and the pack was in the camper, several miles away.

This was a time when families like ours didn’t use paper towels, but I had some I had snagged from a service station, the kind that folded. I took my arms out of the sleeves of my parka, shrugged out of my coveralls, pulled them and my longhandled underwear and my drawers up between my knees so I wouldn’t shit on them, and squatted down next to a berm in a stubblefield. With the coat flapping around, I probably looked like an olive drab penguin trying to hatch the worlds most foul smelling egg.

I finished my business, wiped my backside with the scratchy brown service station paper towel. The stuff was so crude I swear it had slivers in it, but it got the job almost done. I really needed another swipe, but I was out of paper.

Of course I had a hankie, everyone carried one at that time, and scouts most of all. I used it to wipe my glasses, but I never would blow my nose in it. It just wasn’t done. You might need to hand it to a damsel in distress, mightn’t you? And what damsel wants to cry into a rag full of magic nose goblins?

Anyway, it was all I had left, so I used it. I had five of them, Christmas presents, my sister gave them to me with my initials crudely embroidered in the corner. I felt bad about it but I cut the corner with the embroidery off and put it in my shirt pocket, then finished my business.

I stumbled onto that piece of handkerchief saturday, easily forty years gone by, man and boy.

It made me think of how cold I was then, and how cold now. A couple of kids got very minor cases of frostbite and one kid set his sleeping bag on fire. I nearly ended up with frostbite on my fingers. I had sorels even then, so my toes stayed toasty warm, but the fingers hurt for a couple days afterwards.

Running the snowblower yesterday and last night and today, I felt that tiny twinge of pain and remembered pulling that sled all those years ago and the kids who got frostbite because they didn’t have or wouldn’t wear their gloves or mitts. And I remember how lucky I am, to have a warm home, a roof over my head, a snowblower, with my driveway! and a nice warm fireplace to sit around. Nothing makes you appreciate the humblest shelter and the simplest of central heating systems like a brutal cold winter night.

Meeemreeeeez.

Thirty years ago, I was sixteen years old. To rid themselves of the onerous burden of dealing with an annoying teenager, my parents would often send me off to be with the grandparents for extended periods.
My grandmother made me bib overalls. Out of 28 ounce denim. To give you some idea what that’s like, regular jeans are made out of 12 or 14 ounce denim. Wearing grandmas bibs was like wearing an iron truss. Until you’d worn them in a bit, you couldn’t sit down without a blacksmith, and the chafing was nothing but horrid. I learned to wear two pairs of underdrawers in the summer to prevent the family jewels from turning into mashed potatos.

Anyway, that summer I was finally big enough to plaw, and plow I did, all damned day, for weeks. I plowed with the ol man’s ford 8N, and in gramma’s garden, one of the horses. We were also allowed to keep our 22’s with us, to shoot what squirrels we could find, rabbits, the occasional fox or other varmint, and crows were always fair game.

The old man had a still. He was a cheap bastard, and gas had gone up to over a quarter. So he made shine, not necesarily to drink but to run in the tractor. See, the hogs still ate the mash after it had been fermented out, and they loved it, or seemed to. They also seemed to fat up faster. And the old man got the additional benefit of several hundred gallons of alcohol a year. Which ran in the tractor and in the farm truck. Now, if there should happen to be a petcock in the fuel line, and if a guy should happen to stop and lean on the old man’s truck and sit a gallon milk bottle on the ground, and open that petcock, talk to the old man for a couple minutes, then close the petcock, grab his bottle, and walk away, now that couldn’t do much harm, could it? The old man himself never touched the stuff.

Anyway, the point of that story was to tell you this one.
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Crapblogging anniversary.

Thirty five years ago this weekend, I was, as I was every labor day weekend, at my uncle calvin’s farm, participating in the annual Family reunion.

For many years, the reunion had been in the local city park, but this year we had neglected to reserve it, so we did the next best, which was to come to Calvin’s place and party it up.

Now, Calvin had one indoor john. Way in the back of the property, there was an outdoor three-holer. I had used an outdoor john, though these were crude, so rather than pinching my asscheeks together, I waddled off to the three holer.

Brushing aside the spiders, spiderwebs, and a blue tick hound, I sat down to do my business. I had been eating corn on the cob, watermelon, green apples, southern fried chicken, and gobs of other reunion-style food. I was ready. The force fair lifted me off the seat, and to this day, I am convinced that under the correct circumstances (say, the arrival of a bear in a three holer) I could take off and hover to safety on a concentrated jetstream of my own feces. I had been holding it for a while, too, and that exacerbated the effect.

Anyway, as I sat there reading the old Sears Roebuck and piles of telephone books, (wondering why there would be telephone books in an outhouse) I noticed, there was no asswipe.

I looked and looked

I never bothered to look into the hole, so as to see the other leaves of telephone book, otherwise I’d have a clue as to their purpose. As it was, I was short. I had just released a Brown Katrina, to steal from Vman. I needed to wipe.

Several more minutes of frantic searching revealed not so much as a tissue. I yelled some but nobody came, and those who might have heard were plenty liquored up.

So i did the only thing I could think of. I slipped out of my tenner shoes, slid my pants and underwear down, and wiped with my BVD’s. I put the jeans back on and my tenners, and went out to where there was breathable air.

Now, I’m faced with a dillema. I have finished my business, but now I have a handful of shit covered underwear. What to do; how to hide the evidence. In the outhouse? no. Garbage? no. In a fit of frustration I let them fly, and the wind caught them and they hung up in the branches of an ancient oak. Fine, I thought, stay there.

I walk back up to the house, where the line for the indoor crapper is still plenty long, and sit down next to mom and dad in the backyard.

“Got something you want to tell me, boy?” dad says.
Sensing trouble,I resorted to normal kid tactics “Should I have something I want to tell you?” I don’t know why I didn”t end up a lawyer. Dad lifts his arm with deliberation, and points south. There, in the ancient oak, in plain view of the whole Og Clan, my underwear fluttered gently in the breeze, shitstain prominent as the rising sun in the old Nip flag. Silence was the only option, at this point, and I tried to mentally calculate the extra pain I would incur with only my worn jeans between me and dad’s razore strop. “Boy, the catalogs and phone books are there to wipe your ass with, didn’t you know that?”

Well, once in a while, you have to be a source of laughter for 143 people.

35 years ago this weekend, man and boy. No catalogs for me, having graduated to powder puff.

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