Ten Things That Annoyed Me About Being a Cub Scout
I felt peer-pressured into joining. I didn’t want to miss out on what everyone else was doing, even if it was sort of annoying.
Cub Scouts are all boys. I always preferred to hang out with girls, so that was strike one.
Weird animal symbology. My “Wolf Pack” was Den 4, about a dozen of my grade’s most obnoxious boys. But before we could be Wolves, we had to be Bobcats, and then we graduated to being Bears. (At some schools, you could also be Tiger Cubs, but not at Holy Rosary School—you went straight from zero to Bobcat.) Then we became Webelos, whatever the hell a “Webelo” is. Then, and only then, were you prepared to become a full-fledged Boy Scout. All of this came with mock bridge crossings, graduation ceremonies, and crap like that. They might have considered making us do a walkabout, but they probably knew I would have kept walking.
Resentful parent leaders. Cub Scouts in Duluth were highly gender-stratified: the pack administration was made up exclusively of dads, but the smaller den meetings were all run by moms, none of whom were really excited to spend their afternoons In the Company of Wolves. One actually abandoned us in the church basement after calling us “a bunch of little shits.” By the time we became Webelos we had a dad leader, but he was no better; he later spent time in the St. Louis County Jail for embezzling money from the school district.
Cub Scout camp. I spent a week one summer at Cub Scout day camp: it was the first of my camp experiences, and when my mom tried to send me to YMCA day camp the following week I begged to be taken out after only a day, having reached my lifetime limit of day-camp tolerance. Here’s what I remember about Cub Scout camp: making wallets, shooting arrows, singing the song about running from a bear, and INFINITE BOREDOM.
Evening meetings. How would you like being dragged after a long work day to a boring meeting in some random school gym with a hundred ten-year-old boys? Yeah, that’s how I felt about it. That was supposed to be TV time, not pledge-allegiance time!
Homework. Seriously. Cub Scouting was full of homework: making shit, practicing shit, memorizing shit. I already had more than enough of that via school.
I could never ever win anything. Never ever ever. My dad is not and has never been what you’d call “handy in the woodshop,” so I was on my own for assembling balsawood cars and rocket ships. Meanwhile, other boys would show up with lacquered dream machines that their dads had poured molten pewter into the bellies of. How was that even allowed, and how did their dads have access to molten pewter?! When they announced a “creativity competition,” I thought I finally had a chance at winning something. They gave each boy a piece of wood, four nails, some bottle caps, and other doodads, asking us to make something “creative” with the supplies. I pounded the nails in backwards to make a pointy-armed monster, for which I got no prizes. (A frickin’ sailboat won. WTF.) I set the losing monster high atop my bookshelf; it later fell down and hit me in the face, tearing a gash in my upper lip. I screamed and begged my mom not to make me get stitches, so I still have a scar. No merit badges for that episode.
I was never fit enough. “Come on, Jason, all you need to do is jump from this line to that one. Seriously? That’s as far as you can jump, really? You do realize this will make you the only boy in the den who doesn’t get the physical fitness badge…hey now, don’t cry! Are you sure you can’t jump that far? How ’bout you try again. It’s not far! Keep trying! Aw, crap.”
The big prize for four years of Cub Scouting was a father-son canoe trip. A trip to the Boundary Waters would have been my initiation into full-fledged Boy Scouting. Unable to even imagine my dad and me successfully portaging a canoe, I said sayonara to scouting once and for all.
Photo by Steve B (Creative Commons)
