Heater Stacks!

I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.

There were a dozen of us from St. Paul’s east side troop at the Tomahawk Scout camp in Wisconsin that summer. It was my first time attending this week-long adventure. One of the unique experiences was how they fed us. The meals were prepared at a central camp location, packed into heavy metal cylinders, and sent out to each campsite. We could hear the old farm truck bouncing down the road, and someone would shout, “Heater STAAAACCCKKKS!” and we ravenous scouts scrambled down the path from our campsite to the road to help unload our meal.

Back then, each of us had a pocket knife or two of varying sizes, and a few kids had small fixed blades. And then there was Jonathan. First of all, you never called him John or Johnny, or John Boy. Jonathan. He liked his name. That wasn’t the weird part. What was weird was he didn’t have a pocket knife or a small blade. He had a machete. His parents sent him to camp with it. I couldn’t imagine another 13-year-old showing up with a machete that had a sharpened 18” blade and a leather handle. Whenever he strapped on the scabbard he looked like some kind of pirate.

We hauled our heater stack back to camp and opened it up to find our bounty. No eggs, pancakes, cinnamon rolls, or cereal this time. This particular morning, we had oatmeal, raisins, and bacon. Ok, we were kids so we had the raisins and bacon. A few of us tried the oatmeal. It wasn’t ‘stick to your ribs.’ More like ‘stuck in your throat.’ Nasty. It’s one food that just doesn’t travel well, even the short distance from the central camp to us. By the time we opened that container, it had congealed into a gloppy mess.

We cleaned up what we could, and commenced our usual post-breakfast game of tag. We chased, ducked, ran, and jumped around for almost 30 minutes before the game was over. Jonathan won, and declared victory by pulling out his machete and swinging it wildly in the air, yelling, “I own you!” The sun glinted off the blade as we followed its arc down onto the corner of the wooden picnic table where we ate. He took off a big chunk of the table. Cleanly, I might add. A good cut.

We all stared in silence at what had happened. Big trouble was coming our way for damaging camp property. “What did you do!” a few of us said in unison. “I…I…chopped it,” said Jonathan. He picked up the piece of wood and stared at it. “We need some glue.”

We were in the middle of the woods, so there wasn’t glue available. And we sure weren’t going to tell any adults what had happened. “Assembly in five minutes!” shouted our scout leader. We looked at each other in horror. In a bit of frenzied panic, Louie, the quick thinker amongst us, grabbed a handful of oatmeal, pasted it on the table corner, grabbed the wedge of wood from Jonathan, and stuck it back in place. It held. We were saved. By lunchtime that same day it was hard as cement.

I came back to that camp every summer for the next four years. That corner was still there, held in place by that oatmeal.

I wouldn’t eat oatmeal again for more than 20 years.