The 1963 Boy Scout Handbook that my father gave me at age nine led me to believe that I would venture into the woods with like-minded seekers to stand awestruck beneath towering redwoods1 and then we’d carry that humility back to lives of service to humanity.2
When I joined the Scouts a few years later, I seemed to be the only one hoping for a sublime experience in the woods. Everyone else was there mostly to burn things and flirt with fascism, including my father who was the Assistant Scoutmaster.
What I didn’t know then was that my true Scoutmaster had died twenty-two years before I was born: British writer, outdoorsman, dairy farmer, Theosophist, occultist, radio broadcaster, and perceptive oddball Algernon Blackwood.
Blackwood (1869 – 1951) wrote and performed ghost stories often set in the wilderness where his “lonely but fundamentally optimistic protagonists”3 encountered escalating signs that they were not alone (or often welcome) amongst the ageless sentinels of nature.
Ghost story scholar Jack Sullivan called him a “combination of mystic and outdoorsman,” which strikes me as a far better Scoutmaster for a campfire than some middle-aged guy spouting off from a lawn chair about how the Russians are going to invade.
I mean, how’s this for a Scout Law?
My fundamental interest, I suppose, is signs and proofs of other powers that lie hidden in us all; the extension, in other words, of human faculty.
Is that too much to ask from a camping trip, that I experience the subtle vibrations of the universe in my bones, hints of some deep and ancient intelligence of which I am but a fleeting expression?
Spoiler alert: yes.
My Scout career had plenty of weirdness4, but all too little of the numinous, which wasn’t for lack of searching. I was prone to wandering away from campsites looking for burial mounds or a pirate’s cabin, neither of which seemed implausible in feral Florida.
The closest I came (and it wasn’t very close) was during one of my three summers at Camp Flying Eagle. For a week, we took “classes” for merit badges, slept in old military tents or rotting cabins that were worse, ate from dented aluminum utensils in a big mess hall, and tromped around on trails through the scrabble pines and primordial palmetto bushes. I didn’t really mind any of that because obviously there could be something wondrous and strange around any corner.
My favorite part of the camp was near the area called Marie Selby (named for a Sarasota philanthropist), situated amid the taller and shadier oaks at what was then a far edge of the property. I’d strike out from the cabins and wander through the cypress swamp, a marshy patch of knobby tree roots (“knees”) jutting from the muck.
I remember being mildly nervous each time I went out. In Florida, it’s common to see alligators lurking in any sizeable body of water, and venomous cottonmouths could easily be slithering camouflaged by the ooze. I saw no need to startle them, so I walked as the handbook suggested by stepping on my heel first and then letting my foot roll forward silently to the toe
Once when I ventured farther than usual from camp, I came upon a path of springy wooden planks built across the stumps and cypress knees. I followed them carefully through the swamp for a surprisingly long way as the cicadas droned around me from all directions, sometimes surging as though they were closing in.
I zigged and zagged my way to the terminus of the path, an enormous oak or cypress stump about the size of a Volkswagen and covered in lichen and moss. It reminded me of Yoda’s house on Dagobah, and of course, I circled it looking for an obvious entrance.
There wasn’t one, at least not that presented itself to me.
What struck me as I stood there looking around was that this was not an obvious destination. There was no place to sit (nor much of one to stand), and there wasn’t any placard identifying some natural object like elsewhere in camp. Someone had dragged salvaged lumber out into the swamp, strategically placed them on the most stable spots, and then stopped at a giant stump5.
It wasn’t a noise that jolted me into action or anything I could see, just a sudden Blackwood-ian realization that I was standing in a spot where normal logic didn’t apply. Someone built this for hidden reasons, and I assumed they couldn’t be good.6
In a surprising display of balance, I hurried back across the boards with some of them cracking beneath me—not quite a run but certainly not a stroll. Did the cicadas stop their chatter to watch me go? I don’t remember, but it would have been the least they could do.
That’s it. That was essentially my only remotely sublime Boy Scouting experience. It would have been nice to consult with Scoutmaster Blackwood that night around the campfire, comparing notes of our psychic impressions, but we probably just went to the mess hall to eat watery spaghetti.
I never found a body in the woods or discovered mysterious coquina megaliths, but I’ve had a few experiences of awe and wonder since. When I haven’t, I’ve filled the gap the same way Algernon Blackwood did, by writing stories. I haven’t come close to his masterpieces of natural horror “The Willows” or “The Wendigo,” but I did create a troop of Wonder Scouts led by Charles Fort (“We Were Wonder Scouts”) and wrote a couple of books about a troop in Innsmouth.
As a small gift to you for this Halloween season, I’ve read a portion of Blackwood’s famous story “The Willows.” Download it and play it while getting ready for trick-or-treaters or stoking some embers in your backyard firepit.
- Not available in Florida. Your mileage may vary. ↩︎
- In my defense for this deranged impression, the text and illustrations in the handbook (not to mention the Norman Rockwell cover) somewhat oversold the link between Nature and…human nature. ↩︎
- Jack Sullivan’s wonderful phrase. ↩︎
- Pulling a kid from a creek full of thrashing gar, for instance, or falling down a mound of fill dirt to get a concussion on a rock. ↩︎
- Later to appear in my story “Acres of Perhaps.” ↩︎
- The most logical reason, that it was built by a weirdo like me, didn’t register. I was the kind of kid who still looked in the woods for evidence of gnomes and Bigfoot. ↩︎
