At Camp Tuff Moses

When I was eleven years old, in the summer of 1954, I spent a week at Camp Tuff Moses, a Boy Scout camp deep in New Mexico's Gila National Forest. Our leaders made sure that we wrote home.

The postal card I sent to my parents probably did not assure my parents that I was safe. However, it most assuredly pointed out that my teachers had their work cut out for them. I will help you read it. It says:

Dear Mom & Dad

I have been having a wonderful time. Sunday nite we had a counsul fire. There are several snakes here Ernest [and] I have caught 3 of them.

Much Love

Robert

My message was not entirely truthful: in fact, I was really homesick at times, and I remember an older boy, Lee Snyder, taking me almost literally under his wing. He invited me to sleep with him in his tent, and I went to sleep with his arm around my shoulder. It is all too easy in these cynical days for the reader to assume sordid intentions on Lee's part, but I can assure you that his motives were only those of a "big brother" concerned for a younger boy in his care.

I learned a lot that week: I leaned never again to agree to a snipe hunt. I learned that water snakes, when caught, might disgustingly regurgitate tadpoles they have eaten. I learned that Taps played on a real bugle at sunset is a moving experience. And I learned that Boy Scout camp is not necessarily safe: a tent belonging to a leader caught fire and burned, giving me my only experience in a bucket brigade. The tent and its contents were destroyed, but at least the fire did not spread to the tinder-dry ponderosa pine forest that surrounded our camp.