When fall hits, and the smells of wood smoke, dead leaves, and chilling air assail my nostrils, my brain hearkens back to the days of my youth.

I remember with reverence, and perhaps a little awe, that time of my life when I belonged to a crypto-fascist regime, wore a uniform and mystifying badges with pride, muttered secret oaths and swore dark allegiances, and took part in some of the most heinous crimes you could commit with a lighter and a can of Deep Woods Off. I remember my days as a Boy Scout.

Now mind you, the Boy Scouts are not evil by any means. My troop had a reputation for keeping out of trouble, helping with many civic projects, and generally being very clean.

But there was a darker side. A side that would send Baden Powell spinning like a top in his grave. You see, along with teaching us important things like how to drag drowning swimmers out of the water, and the perfect way to fold that little kerchief they made us wear, they also taught us how to terrorize every living thing under the sun.

First it began with the knives. In the Boy Scouts there was a special card that you needed to possess before they would let you near anything sharp. It was called a Toten Chit for some strange reason. I think perhaps the easily-corruptible name served to distract us young boys from the realization that we were being given a license to hold lethal weapons.

Before you could get your Toten Chit, you had to learn certain things about knives and axes. These lessons were in loose seminar format, and went much like this:

11:30 am -- "Your Knife and You: How not to touch the sharp end."

11:31 am -- "Hey, Stop Spurting Blood On Me: How to bandage yourself after you've touched the sharp end."

After learning which parts of the knives not to touch we went on to axes and saws. Axes are very different from knives in that they are much heavier and enjoy being propelled with great strength through the air. Saws have many teeth to them and our leaders taught us that, in general, you should stop moving them back and forth when you hit bone.

I won't even go into the chain saws.

What our leaders tried to instill in us was a respect for the blades and nature, and a sense of responsibility. What they did was give us free reign to slice, cut, chop, or saw through any and every living thing in the forest, and a vague awareness of exactly how much havok we could wreak.

One of the first things they told us when we got the Toten Chit was that we were never to cut down live trees, only the dead ones. So, of course, the first thing we decided to attack with our newly-licensed axes and saws were live trees. It was an honest mistake. They were Tamarack, and they looked dead. But this was merely first blood in our reign of woodsy terror.

The other great weapon they gave us as Boy Scouts was Boy Scout Water. Boy Scout Water isn't actually water at all, it's white gas. White gas is, of course, extremely flammable. It powers everything from lanterns to camp stoves. It also fueled some pretty dangerous ideas in our young minds.

We were very clever. We reasoned that as long as we had Boy Scout water, we never had to use kindling. We poured it onto logs with abandon and watched the flames shoot into the air as we threw the lit match into the firepit from the safety of our tents. How could we be expected to start a fire the tedious old way of gathering tiny bits of lichen and twigs, moving up to kindling, then throwing on small sticks, then throwing on large pieces of wood, all the while blowing on our rapidly dying spark to gently to fan the hoped-for flames, when we could just dump a bunch of white gas on some logs and throw a match within ten feet of the firepit? With our fire-starting technique, asbestos would have been in some deep trouble. The only thing we would have liked better would have been napalm.

Of course, this was only our first stage on the journey into the world of fire. After starting the campfire, we would move on to stranger and stranger experiments.

First among these was the plastic bag wrapped around a stick. When you lit it on fire, it sent molten hot droplets of plastic flaming to the ground with a distinctive ZIPP ZIPP sound. Of course, as with all the best experiments, there was some danger involved. If you let a drop fall on your hand, it was rumored to be able to burn its way through to the bone like a drop of Alien blood. But we were pioneers, we thought, we had to do these things, despite the risk of life and limb.

The next experiment involved those little cardboard juice containers with the straw. When you finished drinking one, if you set the carton in the fire, it would soon send boiling juice remains bubbling up out of the carton right before the carton disappeared in burst of tropical fruit juice flame.

The third experiment involved a can of Deep Woods Off. It went like this. Find an insect, preferably a large one. Find a fire. Make a trail of Deep Woods Off from insect to fire. Cackle with booyish glee as the insect burst into flame. Or alternately, just hold a lighter in front of the stream, and you've got a nifty little flame thrower. These were good for hours of incendiary amusement.

Yeah, Beavis and Butthead may have done it on national tv, but the Boy Scouts did it first in the woods.

Copyright © 1994 by Robert T. Bakie