Boy Scouts and Punch Bowls

Photo by Liam Dunaway, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

My mom was a contributing member of several “ladies clubs” when I was growing up. The altar guild, a homemakers club, and a monthly card group where they’d pass around a deck of cards in the box, drink Franzia, and just talk the whole time.

It was the women in these groups that would host receptions, showers, and various social niceties inherent in the fabric of small-town life. They molded those cream cheese mints shaped like roses and leaves dusted with sugar crystals, they made deviled eggs, and they served punch to honor people who were either getting married or getting buried.

I was a student of the hospitality habits of these women. Intriguing to me was that although almost anyone could be tasked with set-up, clean-up, or making deviled eggs and punch rings, not everyone owned an egg plate, and fewer owned an actual punch bowl.

The women who owned formal serving ware that including deviled egg plates and punch bowls were the kind of women who owned things that were not needed routinely. These items didn’t have many alternative uses and may have seemed like an unnecessary extravagance to young homemakers who prioritized  necessities like Tupperware over large and awkward-to-store serving pieces used for more formal gatherings less than a handful of times a year.

The way I saw it, as a little girl who mostly snuck cream cheese mints off the refreshment table and picked all the cashews out of the Planters Deluxe Mixed Nuts, owning items like egg plates and punchbowls indicated both the ability to own more than just necessary items, but also a willingness to serve.  To volunteer.  To make the things of life happen.  To do.

I suppose a good corollary in the lives and possessions of men would be owning a trailer. Punch bowls, like trailers, are big, awkward to store, and (aside from either being owned in the context of a profession) sporadically used.   But men that own them are a resource in a time of need.

The ability to position oneself within a peer group by being both capable and equipped is intoxicating:  to be the needed versus being in need. I prefer the independence (and privilege) of being needed.  I also view these positions as being accompanied by obligations:  making the punch for bridal showers and retirement receptions.  Helping to move a deer stand and drive the JV Volleyball team’s homecoming float.

Which isn’t to say that everyone always agrees with me (trailer owners should definitely set boundaries by reminding their friends to hire professional movers), or that I haven’t myself leveraged opportunities to have my needs met by those who I assumed may feel obligated to meet them.

Somewhere after my mint-and-nut stealing days at bridal showers and before I completed my own wedding registry which included both an egg plate and a punch bowl, I had the teenage displeasure of accompanying my family on a tent camping and canoe trip to Beaver Creek in Missouri.

I was young and naïve enough not to understand the sniggering jokes regarding “shooting the beaver,” but I was old enough to be a very real pain in my Dad’s neck. As punishment for being a melancholy non-contributor during the setting-up-camp portion of the trip, my dad sent me—with a five-gallon Coleman water carrier—to get water from a spigot that was at least a two-mile walk (in my stubborn mind) from our campsite.  My instructions were to fill the water “and don’t come back here without it!”

I was so mad!  I knew that huge jug of water was going to weigh close to 40 pounds. My dad was treating me like a beast of burden!  A mere dromedary!  Or a mouthy teenager begrudgingly on a camping trip.  Unbeknownst to me, but to my eventual benefit, the walk to the water spigot took me right past another campsite full of Boy Scouts.   I decided to chat them up.

After saying hello and visiting about our respective vacations, I lamented the errand I had been dispatched to complete.  I hadn’t ever met any real Boy Scouts before (we were a 4-H family), but surely Boy Scouts would rise to the occasion and help me figure out how to get this water back to camp?

My dad was drinking a beer when I returned triumphant:   Jason and J.P. had fashioned some ropes on the five-gallon container and carried it between them. I am sure I acted like the Queen of Sheba, and those two awkward boys probably believed themselves to be the strongest men alive carrying water in to camp.

As we were all camping several days, we got to know each other and ended up playing cards in the evenings. When we ran out of water, dad told me to “go round up your Boy Scouts and fill it up.”  I guess grown men enjoy the prospect of carrying awkward containers of water about as much as teenage girls.

Jason and J.P. and I traded addresses and wrote letters (it was the late 80s!) to each other for the next couple of years. I even have a photo one of them mailed me following a hiking trip to Boy Scout Camp in Philmont, New Mexico.  It still lives somewhere in a dusty basement shoebox.

Despite my lack of enthusiasm for that particular camping trip, as an adult, I cherish the memories.  We’ve committed to raising our own children with the privileges of experiences like campfires, food cooked outdoors, and falling asleep to the sounds of crickets and frogs.  There is tremendous value in the simplicity of being unplugged.

My husband and I take an annual camping trip with another family.  The kids know each other from school and swim team and the parents all get along. The weekend is generally a trip back in time:  tent camping and no electronics.  Swimming, fishing, kayaks, and card playing.

As we were setting up camp early this summer, the kids were getting snippy asking to go down to the lake and generally shirking their set-up duties.  The other mom and I had had enough of kids being underfoot so we sent the three oldest—her twin girls and my sixth grade boy—to go fetch water using three big camp jugs. They could each carry one, and it was only a short little walk a couple of campsites over.

As soon as the kids left on their water mission, my girlfriend revealed a box of wine. We set it up right next to where we were planning the beverage station to be and began filling our camping cups at-will.

I’m not normally a fan of wine from a box, but on a camping trip and in the silence that filled the void left in the absence of arguing middle schoolers: my friend was a genius.  Box wine is now permanently on the camping list.

We were enjoying the rustic rose when the kids eventually returned. The scene unfolded on me with all the force of wine-enhanced deja vu coupled with the nagging realization that I have fewer summers left with my kids than I’ve already had.

My oldest, the 6th grade Boy Scout, was pulling a wagon filled with three big jugs of water, and chatting and laughing with the 8th grade twin girls.  He was acting—casually—like the strongest man alive.

My Boy Scout:  Needed, equipped and capable.  Perhaps only reluctantly willing at the request of Mom but as he’s still only eleven, I have high hopes!

I was pondering the humor of the universe and thinking about both of those camping trips while I was preparing deviled eggs for the recent 4th of July picnic at church.  My son had  just returned from Boy Scout camp in West Virginia the week before, and news about a recent horrific Amtrack train crash in Missouri was on TV.

Passengers on the train had included two troops of Boy Scouts from Wisconsin returning from high adventure camp in Philmont, New Mexico.  To prepare for their back country experience, the Scouts had completed wilderness first aid training and CPR.  When the train derailed, the Scouts were credited in the evacuation and rendering of aid of other passengers on the train.  Their assistance saved lives.

One of the Wisconsin Scout’s mothers described feeling “Very proud of how some of our boys helped with some of the injured passengers and how they were willing to put themselves aside. That’s just what Boy Scouts do.”

Maybe it’s too simple, but I’m grateful to live in a world where there are people who just “do.”  Where there are people who own punch bowls to be used in the recognition of others even though they only come out of the box occasionally. Where there are people who feel called to make deviled eggs, because more people like eating them than enjoy making them. And where Boy Scouts will still jump up to do things like carry water for teenage girls and pull people from the wreckage of a train to administer first aid.

I looked up Jason and J.P. online after that train crash. The boys who’s thirty-some-year-old picture taken while hiking at Philmont still lives in my basement. I had not thought about them in years, and in the span of less than three weeks had recalled them twice.  They’d be close to fifty years old now.  I wonder if they’ve ever time traveled back to Beaver Creek, Missouri via watching their sons carry water or their daughters avoid the task all together.

Regardless, I bet they’re the kind of men who own trailers.