1975, Sequoia National Park, California

By Peter Stekel

Between my senior year in high school and college graduation I worked at a Boy Scout summer camp in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. We all have a time of passage from adolescence to adulthood, and this was mine. As a member of the Camp Wolverton staff I learned how to become a leader and experienced what it meant to be responsible. I made deep and everlasting friendships. I also discovered my personal place in nature - not as a person moving through the landscape, but as a human being living within it.

Looking back on it today, I wonder if parents of the scouts knew that a bunch of teenagers were responsible for the health, safety, and education of their children. Even a 14-year-old on staff was chiefly in charge of taking a troop of scouts and adult leaders on four-day backpacking trips into the High Sierra. We were in charge of meals, choosing campsites, taking care of first aid and supervising the kids. We guided the scouts and adults on - and, off - the trails.

The days not spent in the backcountry were used for conditioning hikes and working on advancement. Each one of us had to teach a couple merit badge classes. The work was not easy, and a list of chores never seemed to shorten. We also helped in the kitchen, did maintenance work, dug latrines, led star hikes at night, and participated in campfire programs.

It wasn’t all work, work, work and no time to play and have fun. The daylight hours were long and we had plenty of free time to investigate the world and enjoy the company of friends. It was great. Summers off spoiled my adult life; how can anyone have a “real job” all year when there are mountains to explore?

Whenever I returned to Camp after a year at school it was like coming home. Some things memory can’t forget. I may not have been at Camp Wolverton for a year, yet it was as familiar as yesterday. I met the new staff. They weren’t any different than I was. Wilderness camping was all that mattered in life, and there was no other cause more worthy than introducing others to our joy.

I learned early that what made the place so special was not the physical setting of Camp but the special type of person who tended to drift there to work. More than anything it was like an extended family.

During the seasons I lived there I became part of a small group of staff who specialized in the natural history of the Sierra. Every free moment was devoted to learning about the plants, animals, insects, birds, geography, people, and weather of our mountain home. Every conversation centered on these themes. To the younger staff, and scouts, we were “The Professors.”

The Scout camp facility dated back to 1939, when it was a Civilian Conservation Corps camp. We lived in tents and ate outside at picnic tables set up in four rows beneath a stand of tall red fir trees. The kitchen occupied the “Lodge.”

Some interesting design features were used in constructing the Lodge. To hold the building together during the heavy Sierran snows there was a roof with a steep pitch - like what you see in Swiss chalets. The idea is that a steep roof sheds snow and keeps the building from collapsing. A row of 20 rafters ran from one end of the Lodge to the other. The rafters floated above an 8-inch-square main beam by about an inch. Steel truss rods, perpendicular to the rafters and attached to the ceiling sill, were installed to keep the walls from bowing out. The idea was that the snow load would push the roof downward and the floating rafters would absorb some of that weight, like a spring. Once the load was on the main beam the truss rods would do their bit by using the downward force of the snow to pull the walls inward.

We didn’t have electricity. Our refrigerators used propane, as did the Lodge lights. Gas light glows with an eerie yellow incandescence.

For entertainment, while working on meal prep or clean-up in the kitchen, we had a portable radio/tape player. Everyone on staff chipped in to keep the boom box in D cells. To improve radio reception we had rigged up a thin copper wire antenna that was looped onto the steel truss rods. No one in the Sierra got better reception than we did, because the whole building served as an aerial. At night, when the airwaves were clear, the AM dial would pull in broadcasts from England and even Japan.

California summers are hot, dry, and boring in the lowlands. Not so in the high mountains. July, in particular, is thunderstorm month. Clouds blossom instantly, it turns cool and dark, the sky cracks open with sound and, sometimes, it even rains. More than likely, though, the moisture is re-evaporated before it reaches the ground.

It is something to see. Tall trees are hit with electricity and wood flies everywhere.

I was standing on the Lodge porch one day, during my second summer, watching a storm. The lightening strikes were coming a bit too quickly and a bit too closely so I started to move inside, taking a few steps towards the door. All of a sudden, a bolt of lightening hit a tree about 50 feet in front of me. The top of that tree shattered, and a large chunk of wood shot down and hit the spot I had just vacated.

I ran inside, my heart beating hard enough to burst my eardrums. One of the professors was giving a discourse, reading from a reference work on the causes of electrical storms. My attempts to share what had just happened to me were waved aside by the speaker with a pause in the recitation and a dirty look.

In a moment it began to rain like we were inside a waterfall. It rained and rained. The lightening began again. Flash. Boom! Flash. Boom! Flash-boom. As it came closer and closer the intervals got tighter and tighter. Flashboom! When it passed, the rain sounds took over.

Then, it happened. We heard it first, or, rather, felt it: a humming in the ears and a tingling in the bones. The room took on a bluish tint, as if Captain Kirk was about to beam aboard. Suddenly, all the truss roads in the building began to glow. The humming grew louder, and with a snap, a glowing bolt of electricity passed through the rods, racing back and forth and chasing itself through the building. It cracked and the bolt disappeared into the ground via the radio. That radio never worked again.

We were all shouting and laughing. Such a strange sensation to feel part of something larger than ourselves. Once, while caving, I sat down beside a little creek flowing through the earth. I contemplated what it was like to be part of the water table. Now, I had the distinct feeling of being part of the atmosphere for the first time in my life.

I don’t want to be one of those people who puts humankind down because we think we hold dominion over planet Earth. Except, how easily we forget our place in the universe. I’m glad for those little jolts nature bestows upon me from time to time that remind me, intrinsically, I’m not more special than anyone else. What is special is how I participate in, and experience life. That is what makes all the difference.

Peter Stekel is currently working on “Final Flight - Unraveling the Mystery of the Ice Man,” an account of the WWII flyer whose body was discovered in October 2005 in a Sierra Nevada glacier.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Friday, February 23rd, 2007 | Email This Post

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