Fieldcraft for Boys: Lies and Hazards
Orienting to the Lie of the Land: It’s Just Not Going To Be That Bad.
“It’s Just Not Going To Be That Bad” is the Rocky Mountain equivalent of a Norwegian telling you that you’re “just gonna be going for a walk.”
I learned the hard way as a child that both are lies.
It’s a trap— you’re not going on an easy stroll! This will be hiking and scrambling over serious terrain,for many more miles and way more hours than you’d planned.
I hope you’re wearing some wool layers and good boots, cuz you’re fucked.
You’re gonna sprain some shit or fall off a mountain, and it gets cold waiting for the SAR folks to get to you. And the whole time you’re waiting, the lying Nordmann is going to be repeating some bullshit about “no bad weather; just bad clothing” in that sing-song way they have,cuz apparently that’s helpful.
The lesson I have learned is to find a poser wearing a clean unpilled Patagonia fleece jacket to get outdoorsy with. If they have a dog that has its own clean outerwear, that’s even better!
Enjoy the easy stroll. No ER bill (or worse).
Fuck those skookum Norskies and and their “walks”.
My advice: if your hiking partner shows up at the trailhead wearing a heavy wool Islender sweater- save yourself! Quickly acquire some vague but ominous symptomology and skedaddle.
Waterborne Operations for Boys: Clothing and other Environmental Hazards
When we were kids we wore cutoff jeans for all manner of outdoor recreational operations. They were cheap, tough wearing and easy to come by.
Spring and summer adventuring always included swimming, so we would forego the wearing of the ubiquitous white briefs of the era.
The danger was that blue jeans zipper.
With amazing regularity a fella would catch the skin of their penis in the steel zipper causing great pain and often permanent scarring of the member.
Once a creek explorer caught so much penis skin in the zipper that he could not self-extricate because of the terrible pain. A fellow adventurer had to grab waistband and zipper pull and extract the damaged penis from the trap.
Even in the hyperkinetic chaotic world of boys—
how could you be in a such a hurry to get to the next stupid thing that you would zip your penis into your pants?
Our preferred footwear for all manner of adventuring was the fake Chuck Taylors that our parents would acquire from Target. They were cheaply made and by mid-summer they would reek of boy feet and mold from being wet all the time.
We tried not to go barefoot for fear of glass, nails, and bullhead spines.
The shoes had such thin soles that a large Bullhead catfish spine or other object would often penetrate the sole anyway. Painful cleaning of the puncture wound and a Tetanus shot would be coming unless you managed to hide your wound from your parents. The twitchy limp usually gave away the wounded boy.
We would also wear those tennies as camp shoes, so we didn’t have to wear our hiking boots(fake Red Wing moc toe work boots)in the evenings.
We always cooked and dicked-around in open campfires and one fall “camp—o-ree” we decided that we should all brand the outsoles of our tennies on the steel fire grate to demonstrate our woodsie bon a fides. Most everyone in our troop did brand their outsoles— the thinness of those tennies made this quite a sporty, if not outright dangerous right of passage.
The melted rubber did seem to enhance the shoe’s traction (but did not make you run any faster like new shoes did).
