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Outside Magazine February 2002
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Look Upon My Neckerchief and Know that I Am Eagle!
Only a few badges—Lifesaving, Dog Care, and the impossible Seven-Minute Mile among them—stood between this lapsed Scout and his boyhood dream of earning Scouting's highest honor

By Bill Vaughn

Hear Bill Vaughn read an excerpt from this article on National Public Radio's Living on Earth

THIS IS THE WAY WE DIE. Middle-aged men with martini bellies shoveling snow off a rink, or charging the net, or sprinting around some steamy track in July, trying to prove something. The bloated heart seizes, the stressed vessel explodes, and suddenly we're pitched into the abyss, face flat against the ice, the clay, the cinders.

As I lurched into the final lap, the temperature pushing 95, it felt like some street-corner thug was thumping my solar plexus with his knuckles. You gotta problem, Peter Pan? You wanna cha-cha? But this yelling wasn't coming from some unknown bully, it was coming from the bully I had married, my wife, Kitty. "Run faster!" she shouted as she ran behind me, checking her stopwatch, totally not winded. "What's wrong with you?"

With 100 yards left to go, the pain in my chest moved an octave higher, and my hamstrings began to screech. It was Independence Day, the final day I had allowed myself to attempt a seven-minute mile and reach out at last to grab my dream—the Eagle badge, the highest rank a Boy Scout can earn. If I could somehow stumble across the finish line, at least I could bite the dust in the service of a cause. I could picture it, the heroic plaque bearing my name at the national headquarters of the Boy Scouts of America in Irving, Texas. This Bird Soared, it would say, Better Late Than Never. A year earlier, when I happened upon a copy of what had been the most influential book of my boyhood, misfiled on a shelf of used novels in one of those dusty bookstores that smells of cats, I got the sort of spiritual jolt Christians must experience when they see the Shroud of Turin. Ah, there he was again, unremembered for 40 years: Norman Rockwell's red-haired, freckle-faced geek in gaiters and a full field uniform, striding across a piney ridge, grinning that infectious grin, one hand raised in good cheer, the other one clutching the 1959 edition of The Boy Scout Handbook.

Rockwell's portrait of Howdy Doody in khaki would be the first of the many delicious mysteries Scouting would throw my way. In the painting, the Handbook that Howdy Doody is clutching bears a painting of Howdy clutching a Handbook, which also bears a picture of Howdy clutching a Handbook...and so on. I squandered many hours with a magnifying glass and a microscope probing this hall of mirrors to see if it was infinite, one of the reasons my progress through Scouting's ranks was retarded.

And while other Scouts were rising from Tenderfoot to First Class and Star and Life, or even to the coveted Eagle, I got bogged down in such arcane fixations as the Ner Tamid, a blue-and-white ribbon suspending in bronze the Ark and Eternal Light of the Jewish faith. Not only was I not Jewish, I believed that the "rabbi" you were supposed to consult in pursuit of this beautiful and mysterious religious icon was actually a hutch of rabbits you worshiped, a sort of 4-H project with spiritual overtones.

But for me, then a skinny and vastly ignorant 11-year-old growing up in the boondocks of central Montana, the most intriguing passage in the handbook was titled "From Boy to Man." Although unencumbered by any explanation of reproduction, here was the first mention I'd ever seen of a phenomenon called nocturnal emissions. It came with an ominous warning, however, resonant of The Mummy's Curse: "There are boys who do not let nature have its own way with them but cause emissions themselves. This may do no physical harm, but may cause them to worry." Worry about what, I wondered. And how could you cause such emissions yourself, whatever "emissions" were? Most important, why would you want to?

By the end of my Scouting days at age 13, I managed to advance only to First Class, earning a paltry five merit badges along the way, 16 short of the 21 mandatory and optional badges required for Eagles. Now, standing in the bookstore thumbing through this scuffed and dog-eared handbook, which had belonged to some careless runt named Steve, I inhaled deeply its faint perfume of pine smoke and mildew, and there lifted from my spirit a great rancid aura of regret. I suddenly knew what I wanted. I wanted to finish my career as a Boy Scout. I wanted to be an Eagle.


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Contributing editor Bill Vaughn's essay, "Skating Home Backward," which first appeared in Outside, is in The Best American Magazine Writing 2001.