Unfortunately for me and my world, the Annual Texas Boy Scout Jamboree lasted for the very two days which happened to coincide with the first local TV showing of the classic Ray Harryhausen sci-fi movie "20 Million Miles to Earth", which I had never seen. It wasn't a contest - I liked wrasslin', s'mores and campfires as much as the next guy but they couldn't rub two sticks at Harryhausen the Magnificent.

After a week of relentless pleading, begging and nagging proved useless I switched to fake illness, which turned out to be even less sucessful. As the time drew nigh I called in all cards and resorted to righteous indignation, the desperate final ammunition of the near-adolescent: "How could you even think that your very own child is a liar?" All to no avail. My parents - liberal, conscionable souls that they were - would not even consider allowing me to miss such a vibrant, instructive and character-building experience so that I could "waste my time in front of some ole TV set" (quote, mom).

Actually, I'd been to the Jamboree the year before and really enjoyed it - two days and one night of raucous fun hanging with the guys, identifying leaves and birds and telling monkey-paw stories around the campfire, all capped by the big afternoon rally on Sunday that reached near-Nazi levels of virtuous and patriotic frenzy. "Brave, clean and reverent" my ass; you emerged from the Jamboree cowed by ex-Marine Scoutmasters, filthy with red Texas dust and ornery as a rebel soldier the day after Appomattox. Even so, each day that passed felt like a new boulder piled upon my back. I grew more and more desperate yet there was no escape; the first thing I had ever really wanted and truly needed in my entire life and it was being denied me. By the time I mounted the steps of the Jamboree bus it seemed like the gates of hell slammed shut behind me.

The excited talking and horseplay on the bus - even the "round-delay singing" which usually got me cranked - only made me sink deeper into my hole of loneliness, alienation and despair. Two hours later, as we pulled up to the banks of beautiful Lake Towakanee, my eyes were blind and my heart was completely broke. Added to that it had turned cold and begun to rain heavily, just to start the weekend off right. As we made our way to our campsite we passed a large, ramshackle edifice constructed of seemingly nothing but stacked-up logs and a noisy tin roof. We stopped to investigate; after the mice ran away, we saw that it was a drafty, unlit hanger of a space, with racks of bunk beds which smelled of mildew along the walls. More than anything else, it seemed like a prison to me, and was even colder than the open air. "This is the Hogan," some ignatz younger scout chimed out brightly in the darkness. "It's for sissies who can't handle sleepin' in the great outdoors in their own tent!" I could barely lift my pack and my tennis shoes were slosh-full of black water by the time our lil troop reached its alotted spot.

Putting up the tent was like trying to move a mountain. My fingers slid and stumbled along the splintery white wood of the poles, the stanchions kept pulling out of the muck as soon as you put the lashings on, I slipped and fell on my ass a dozen times before we managed to get the thing to stand there unsteadily in the downpour. My parents would hear about this! And to make matters worse, Vic dropped by to check our work.

Vic was the assistant Scoutmaster, and son of the actual, grown-up Scoutmaster. I came to dislike Vic very much later in life - about a week later in life - and considered him an ass-licking, goodie-two shoes, autocratic martinet. I now realize he was just a dedicated scout trying to uphold the creed and keep a bunch of seriously rebellious underachievers afloat so his dad wouldn't slap him upside the head.

Vic's so-called visit completed my impression: I was a hopeless prisoner in a somber hell of cold and mud, surrounded on all sides by sadistically chipper, chirpy scouts having the time a their life. Then it began to get dark and, almost simultaneously, two things happened.

First, as the light drew down I distinctly caught the cold blue glimmer of a black and white TV set among the campfire dots across the water of the lake. "What's over there?" I inquired innocently as I could. In response, Vic narrowed his eyes and said "Hey...", drawing the word out with an accusing look which made me sure he was onto my plan. He even wagged his finger at me, like the worst old auntie I ever had. He smiled, but I knew it was no joke: "Don't even think about goin' over there", he intoned. "That's the girl's Camp an' it's SOL... Strictly Off Limits!"

As if that were an explanation. I had no idea what he was talking about - girls, so what? - but still felt the requisite guilt and shame nevertheless. Vic was thirteen to my eleven going on twelve and took his job as Number Two Scout quite seriously. He probably thought the same thing any 13 year old would think of as my reason for sneaking into the girl's camp... boy was he wrong. For me, the only warmly throbbing, near-irresistible fact about the human beings across the lake was that they were allowed to have TV sets.

And the second thing that happened was, Taylor appeared. He emerged tromping from of a clutch of skinny looking trees, walked straight through our camp and stood looking down at me in the mud. And he was smiling.

Taylor was a great pal who had been forced to leave the Dallas area when his mom and dad got divorced - the only such luminary I had ever known - "The Child of a Broken Home". Very cool. He had moved to Arizona or someplace equally foriegn, but there he was in front of me, grinning like a fish while rain dripped from the end of his nose.

"Taylor!" I shouted. That was his family name of course - we never EVER called a friend by his first name. And I could tell by the look in his eye that he was thinking the same thing I was.

Making a long story short is something I've NEVER been able to do. Sorry. But actually, reading this over and remembering, I want to write the whole story up and that'll take way more time than I have now. So a brief synopsis:

Taylor and I made our way to the girls camp in a leftover canoe, after pretending to puke and retiring to the so-called "hogan". It was a real shame to miss all that great opening-night action, we agreed... but you can't leave a couple of sick boys out in the rain, can ya?

When we got to the other side we discovered that the girls had teepees. TEEPEES! Big, full-size, authentic leather luxury teepees with wooden lodge poles and camp matresses and heaters and thick blankets and other stuff equally fantastic. My first thought was: "Wow! Girls really ARE different from guys!" When you got up close to their teepees you could see they were real, actual indian teepees, authentic down to the smallest detail. And they smelled good. The girls got these really cool Indian teepees, all prebuilt and really warm, and dry, and comfortable, with electricity and matresses and boxes of after-dinner snacks, and the boys got...

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me just say I did get to see part of that movie and didn't quit Scouting immediately, tho the incident did precipitate events that caused me to leave.

Was it worth it? Absolutely. It was the best of both worlds - I got to go to the big Boy Scout Jamboree and also, through sheer tenacity, courage and foolhardiness got to see a large chunk of "20 million Miles to Earth". The only problem was, by the time we left the girl's camp we couldn't have cared less about scouting or monster movies or any of that childish stuff. We had changed completely and now carried that large uncomfortable lump in the chest that denotes both maturity and love sickness. The problem was, we had met Marian Boelhauer.

We walked out of the teepee through the mud, silent, both of us trying to figure out words that would put this new world into some kind of perspective, cause we both knew that everything had changed completely. "Really", I whispered to Mike as we sluiced the canoe across the gritty beachhead and into the black icy water, "it's just like that scene in 'Forbidden Planet' where Captain Les Nielson tells cohort Jack Kelly (the guy who played Bart, the coolest Maverick brother on the TV show) that he has fallen in love with Ann Francis, the only woman on Altair 4.

It's not just what he says but also the way he says it; looking down at the ground, he shrugs his shoulders sadly and shakes his head sadly and says, with an air of something that can only be called wistfullness, 'cause he knows he's done for and some things just can't be undone and something tells him he ain't ever going back: "Doc", he says, "something entirely new has been added!" And Doc knows exactly what he means.

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