Live Oak Blues What happens.

As I’ve recounted here, the Boy Scouts in the mid-1970s was not Norman Rockwell, at least not for me–a frightened, buck-toothed kid with a smart mouth and nothing to back it up. My first camping trip involved an initiation of sorts: a tent by myself that I was “advised” to pitch in a puddle of freezing water. This setup had the tacit blessing of the Scoutmaster, who hated long hair on boys even more than he did having to spend the weekend camping in cold weather with two bum knees. I managed to avoid exposure, but had concluded at some point during that long night that the Boy Scouts were not for me.

When my dad came to pick me up at the end of this ordeal, the Scoutmaster hobbled over to him with a smile I had not seen the entire weekend. As I sank into the passenger seat of my dad’s ’66 red VW bug, he and the Scoutmaster wandered off out of earshot and into a inexplicably lengthy conversation. All my dad said when he got back to the car was “I guess I’m the new Assistant Scoutmaster.”

My father’s tenure began with an event that would have far-reaching consequences for both of us: the acquisition of and merger with Troop 262: Tidewater Virginia’s answer to the Bowery Boys. From the “Black Sheep Patrol,” as they called themselves, I came to hear about such life hacks as how to smuggle wine in a Boy Scout canteen, how to jimmy a sliding glass door with a straight-slot screwdriver, and how newspaper works in a pinch when you run out of rolling papers. I feared for my father’s well-being.

I needn’t have worried. One hour into his first camping trip with us, he left to go check out the canal that bordered the campsite. Fifteen minutes later, he strode back toward us with what looked like a thick, brown belt dangling from his left hand. “Hey,” he barked and waited until we all faced him. “This is a water moccasin,” he said as it writhed wildly against his forearm. He then took a hatchet, pinned the snake to a tree stump, and whacked its head clean off.

After the snake’s body stopped whipping in the sand at our feet, he grabbed it again and then skinned and gutted it with same pocketknife I’d seen him clean his pipe with a hundred times before. When he was finished, he threw it on the fire, never once looking at us, even though we were all staring at him. No one said a word during the ten minutes it took to roast the water moccasin.

I have no memory of what it tasted like, or if I even ate my piece of it. But from that moment on, the troop never regarded my father with anything less than complete reverence. Even though I would never become a member of the Black Sheep Patrol (no matter how much I tried to aspire to their level of delinquency), he would remain their undisputed king.