Theater of Wild by Bryanjack

The year before I graduated university, I spent six weeks working as an assistant aquatics director at a Boy Scout Summer Camp in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains, in Arkansas. An internship component of an academic scholarship I had won the previous year, I spent that summer sleeping in a canvas tent under the watchful eye of the Airforce National Guard, who used to use our pool and lakes as laser-target practice for their C-130 bombers, and living immersed in the particular strain of Americana that spends its weekends and vacations marching to chanted troop slogans, saluting the flag and praying before meals.

I had been a transplanted Canadian in the south for three years, running on a track and field scholarship at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and had made a place for myself among the urban college scenes of Little Rock and Fayetteville, acquainted myself with Memphis, New Orleanes, and the dirty-vegas facsimile of Tunica, Mississippi. But this was my first prolonged excursion into the wilds outside of town, and after four years in Little Rock, quickly became what I still consider my southern home (I returned to the camp as Aquatics Director the following two summers).

The friends I made in those woods, and the things that the Quawpaw scouting community taught me about myself and the world and my fellow man were a culmination of my university education, and a perfect synthesis of my British Columbian and southern roots, where we would be swimming lengths before dawn in the mist of the pool, and watching heat lighting accompanied by the buzz of cicadas. It is all much more than I can hope to capture in words: a densely peopled time in my life that left such deep marks upon my heart and mind that without any deliberate effort the characters from these stories continue to create my daily life and living.

We’ve talked a lot in TALONS the last few weeks (or I have at least) about the Precious, an unspeakable love and adoration the classroom community passes in held hands and knowing glances, in laughter and tears, a bond and affinity that stems from a flowering seam of wilderness and wild that the Gus Blass Scout Reservation helped light in me those many years ago now, and which I will never forget.