Jason Joyce.
Joe Steen was a psychiatrist who wore a pointy goatee and horn-rimmed sunglasses with red lenses. He smoked a pipe, which he always seemed to have a hard time keeping lit, and he would fuss with it even as he recited Edgar Allan Poe stories from memory or kicked a kid’s ass in chess. After my dad and some teachers, Steen was the adult male with whom I spent the most time as a teenager.
He was the scoutmaster of Boy Scouts Troop 290, sponsored by the Glen Lake Optimist Club in Minnetonka, a western suburb of Minneapolis. His laissez-faire approach to running a Boy Scout troop — and the lack of discipline exhibited by some of my peers — bugged some of the troop’s dads, who were Scouts when many troops were led by disciplinarian World War II vets and the boys were expected to arrive at meetings with a crease in their pants and a shine on their shoes.
One of Steen’s favorite sayings guided a significant chunk of my youth: “Never do for a boy what a boy can do for himself.”
We had more than 75 Scouts divided among six patrols and our campsites were sprawling compared to most of those of other troops. And our spirit reflected Steen’s hands-off philosophy. While other troops might march to activities in orderly lines, complete with a “left-right” military cadence, we rambled along in a big blob, chanting “Ooh! Ungawa! Two-Ninety’s got the source of powa!”
Come dinner time at a typical 290 campout, the chaperoning dads gathered under an expertly lashed tarp to dine on a meal cooked by the high-school-aged leaders of the troop while the patrols of younger boys were left to fend for ourselves with chewy spaghetti noodles and scorched toast (under- or over-flavored with an ancient shaker of garlic salt found in the recesses of a supply box). Some parents thought a little parental guidance would be helpful in such situations, but Steen countered that cold cereal ensured nobody would starve.
He was committed to the outdoors aspect of Scouting, and the free-range common sense education that came with it. Our troop scheduled at least one weekend of camping each month. That meant some storybook afternoons spent playing Capture the Flag against a backdrop of autumn colors or racing canoes on a sparkling lake.
It could also mean huddling in the sleet around a dying fire, frying bologna on a rusty griddle, and testing the water-resistant abilities of a plastic giveaway Minnesota Vikings rain poncho.
Each year, between Christmas and New Year’s Day, we climbed on a school bus and, while yell-singing classics like the Smothers Brothers’ “My Old Man,” rode to a lodge in the woods near Amery, Wisconsin, for a week of cross-country skiing, epic games of Risk, snowball fights and some actual education in knots, first-aid and other Scout skills.
Showing leadership on trips like this could lead to being called aside by some older Scouts for a simple but solemn ceremony where Steen would produce a patch bearing the Scottish red lion logo and explain that the words stitched on it, “Sum Paratus,” meant “I am prepared” in Latin. This honor was unique to our troop and we ate it up.
One year, a small group of us spent nearly a full day of winter camp out on the frozen river building a quinzee, a shelter constructed by shoveling snow into a big pile, letting it settle, and then hollowing it out. The plan was to spend the night in it. What we didn’t anticipate was that other guys in the troop, envious of our accomplishment, would crowd into the shelter just as late-afternoon temperatures spiked. Some decided to use its remote location as cover so they could smoke their contraband menthol cigarettes.
By the time we adjourned to the quinzee after dinner, it was a stinky, slushy mess inside. And the integrity of the walls was diminished by some ill-advised windows carved out by younger boys. Our 1984 sleeping bags were no match for the moisture and draft and by midnight, a debate over whether we should abandon the shelter and head inside or stick it out until dawn was on. Chattering teeth punctuated some of the arguments.
I know exactly what time we gave up — 1:30 a.m. — because one of the boys was wearing a digital watch he got for Christmas and he pushed the button to illuminate it every five minutes. We sheepishly gathered our sleeping bags and in the moonlight made our way back to the warm, dry, menthol-free lodge.
After breakfast the next morning, Steen asked how our night had gone. We grumbled about abandoning the quinzee and, while packing tobacco into his pipe, he replied that we had made the right choice. I’ll always remember this part because we repeated it for years: “Frostbite is rarely the optimal outcome.”
It was adventures like that, fueled by the “never do for a boy” motto, that made 290 attractive to a wide range of teenage personalities. While other kids spent winter break driving their parents crazy, we were avoiding hypothermia.
This trip happened when I was in eighth grade, and Scouting wasn’t something you mentioned much at school, especially around girls. It was nerdy. One of my peers loved to argue the relative merits of the different Doctors Who. But 290 also had the top athlete in our class. He had shoulder-length, curly blonde hair, a denim-heavy wardrobe, and a girlfriend three years older than we were who picked him up from school in her car.
The three of us were linked by the whole quinzee affair: the idea to build it, try to sleep in it, and finally abandon it. Despite it all being a kind of debacle, we did demonstrate enough common sense and humility to make a wise decision in the end. On the last night of winter camp, we were handed red lion patches.
Sum Paratus.
Jason Joyce is publisher of Isthmus and still has trouble tying a bowline.
