This story was originally published on Friday, September 23, 2005.
As you should know if you have read a newspaper in the past year, the hot topic in the world of public education nowadays is the teaching of evolution versus “intelligent design”. The whole thing seems very silly to me. I believe in God, but I don’t see how belief in a creator cancels out the simple science of natural selection. Evolution is visible on a daily basis. Your science teacher will point this out by saying something about a hummingbird’s beak being long and slender enough to enter a flower and suck out it’s sweet nectar, and how that specific shape was derived by a series of eliminations of birds with short beaks over hundreds and thousands of generations. But you don’t have to look that close to see evolution. It’s right in front of you.
When I was learning about natural selection and ancient species in junior high school – free of glued in science book disclaimers – I was able to view the real deal on a regular basis at Boy Scouts. My troop was filled with variations of the human race that would never survive in the wild. There were kids that were too fat to hike up Mount Cheaha. They’d never escape the jaws of a saber-tooth tiger. There were kids that were too dumb to pitch a tent or start a fire on their own. They’d die the first day of an ice age winter. And then there were the kids that were just so weird that they would have been killed and eaten by their own species the first time they opened their crazy-ace mouths and said that they had an imaginary alligator named Jack who tells them secrets in the bathroom. The almost normal boys of the troop were like raptors, traveling in packs and eliminating the weak with their razor sharp joke-downs. Blood was never shed, but those who weren’t fit for troop 406 soon found themselves out of troop 406, and our species evolved into a group of boys who talked a lot of S, paired with boys that could put up with a lot of S. But no single raptor can take on a T-Rex. Our fellow scout Frank had to learn that lesson the hard way.
Mike was a T-Rex. From his first days in the troop he was twice as tall as every other scout, young and old. He was a tragic display of pubescent awkwardness, as if all the development from ages eleven to eighteen were jammed into him overnight. He was greasy, he was crazy tall, and strong in random parts of his body. He had zits and curly hair dripping with sweat, and his voice sounded like someone was constantly flipping the 33”-45” switch. His limbs bent and moved in impossible directions totally at random. This made walking almost impossible for Mike. If you were in the same room as the kid he would at some point collide violently into you no matter what. When we were hiking he would veer from one side of the trail to the other because walking a straight line was a physical impossibility for his teenage body. It didn’t matter how steep the cliff or how far the drop, Mike would almost fall off of it. If there was a cast-iron bucket full of potatoes hanging from the tent ceiling, Mike would hit his head on it every time.
Mike would eat all the F’n food for your entire patrol and then brag to your emaciated face that he was a growing boy with a big appetite. Then he’d slam some little crying Cub Scout on the ground during a game of King of the Hill and stare at his own hands proclaiming, “I don’t know my own strength.” He wasn’t a jerk. He just wasn’t prepared for the responsibilities of being an overnight T-Rex, and we as a troop had to bear the consequences.
One winter camping trip Frank, Skippy, and I decided to play a trick on Mike. We were at a familiar campground- the old abandoned section of the old camp Tukabatchee. There were two fun parts of our campground. One was a dilapidated baseball field with giant mounds of dirt that we would roll a huge monster truck tire down to chase and run away from. The other was a big ace hole in the ground. The hole was an inverse cone shape, like the sand monster pit where Boba Fett died, about twelve feet wide and eight feet deep. It was filled with leaves so you could throw kids in and they wouldn’t bleed. Our plan was for Frank to hide under the leaves at the bottom of the pit and jump out to scare Mike when he came close by. Frank, an expert in redneck camo stuff, concealed himself in the pit and laid waiting to attack. Skippy and I went to invite Mike into the woods.
“WhERe aRE wE Going”, asked Mike as we neared the pit.
“We’e gonna go play with that big ace tire. You remember the tire don’t you Mike”, I replied.
A huge grin stretched across Mike’s wiry facial-haired face. He took off running for the field and leapt in the air above the pit, howling “Oh Yeah, THE TIRE!!!”. In a true display of survival of the fittest, Mike came down, in the most precise move his goofy body had ever performed, feet first, directly onto the ribs of a concealed Frank. Mike was so excited about the tire that he ran directly out of the pit without noticing Frank’s desperate gasp for air. Skippy and I rushed down to see if the boy had survived. We brushed away the leaves to find Franks red face, which showed as much pain as a redneck boy’s face is allowed to show.
“what the f?”, he whispered through trembling lips. Frank’s pride was hurt more than his torso, but he was lucky just to have survived a run in with such a beast. He never F’d with Mike again.
Previously: Don’t Stop Till It’s Broke
