Philmont 3: With a Vengeance

“Just like that Not-Christmas Bruce Willis movie”

Like I wrote last week and the week before, this summer I was at Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico.  But unlike last week, I wasn’t there as a scout on a trek; I was there on staff, to help facilitate the camp for new scouts on treks.  And believe me, being in the New Mexican back country with the same people for three months gave me quite a few stories to tell.  Which, as promised, is what this week’s post is about.

As a general overview, I got to Philmont on May 27^th, and stayed there until August 18^th.  During that time I worked at the Hunting Lodge camp, where I taught kids about the history of Waite Phillips’s old hunting cabin, and where I also taught kids about fly fishing.  Different treks of scouts would come through our camp, some staying the night and some just passing through, and I’d interact with the scouts each day to make sure their trek was both safe and fun.  I’ve all talked about this before.  And the job itself, if I’m being honest, wasn’t exactly the memorable part.

It was a job, like any other summer camp job.  It was a lot of teaching and helping kids and a lot of facilitation of program, as well as a lot of dealing with first aid issues and parents.  If you’ve ever worked at a summer camp, you know what I mean.  And as a job, it’s fine.  It pays.  Not very well.  It teaches responsibility, I guess.  The hours are shit.  But no one working there is at Philmont for the job.  As they say, if you’re working at Philmont for the money, you’re bad at math. People are working there because they love Philmont and it’s a special place to them, and they want to spend as much time there as possible, all while making sure that as many other people get to experience that wonderful place.  That’s what I was there for.

You really can’t beat the location.  My office was a canvas tent and a rustic kitchen in the middle of the mountains, and I basically had free range to explore the camp as I pleased on my off days.  Which I, naturally, did quite a bit of.  I was there to hike, and hike I did.  But I was also there to make friends, and I did that, too.

I had four primary coworkers, the people who worked at my specific camp with me.  There’s Joe, Anna, Ben, and my boss, Maddy, not in that order.  I got along really well with all of them, and we had a fantastic time.  By the end of the summer, we were all sad to say goodbye and to leave each other.  We’d even been told by other staffers that our group was unusually close, as far as staff groups go.  So that was special, too.  I can safely say that I made friends to last a lifetime in one of the prettiest places in the world.  And that’s what Philmont is about, for both staff and scouts.

But let me just get to the stories already, yeah?  Let me start with a pretty simple one; one of the days that I took scouts down to go fishing, I went with this one crew, or maybe they were two crews together, and I taught them how to fly fish.  Of course, July being monsoon season out there in the desert, it began to rain pretty much as soon as we reached the reservoir we were fishing at.  And it rained pretty hard, pouring on us for a couple of hours at least.  But I chilled with the scouts down by the reservoir for a while, and talked with them.  They took to calling me Doc, because my character’s name was Dr. Lyle Birch. I liked that.

Eventually, though, we got tired of standing in the rain, and decided to head back to the camp and go fishing later.  So, just to double check that was okay, I asked the crew leader if that’s what they wanted to do.  Except I didn’t know who the crew leader was, so I asked the group as a whole who the crew leader was.  And three of them responded.

I kind of looked at them, from one to the other, and I asked who the real crew leader was.  They all said they were the real crew leader, and they all had these goofy grins that seemed to say that this was something they’d been doing for a while.  I don’t know if that’s true, but eventually I asked one of the scouts’ their name.  They said their name was Michael, or something like that.  And then the rest of them said their names were Michael, too.

I couldn’t get a straight answer out of any of them, and, bewildered, I decided just to head back to camp, and they all followed me anyway.   All twelve of the Michaels.  To this day I don’t know which one of them was the crew leader, but I do know that they got to go fishing later, which was nice.

My coworkers and I had a lot of inside jokes, which makes sense since we basically spent over 1800 hours with each other.  Some of them were based off of popular memes.  Like the boneless pizza.  Some of them made sense in their own weird way, like how I got nicknamed the Big Sniff, which isn’t as terrible as it sounds.  And some of them were absurdist shitposting, like Beef Stroganoff.  Nothing beats Beef Stroganoff.

Several times throughout the summer, we decided to have slumber parties.  Normally, we slept in separate canvas tents out in the back of the camp, but sometimes we moved our sleeping bags inside and all slept over in the cabin.  This usually involved making popcorn and staying up to long hours of the night, talking about our lives and worries and dreams.  And by long hours I mean 11 pm, because the backpacker’s midnight is 9:30.

A couple times over the summer, we had to run what were called HASTYs, or something like that.  They were basically just mobile first aid crews, where a couple staff would load up on first aid equipment and hike down a trail to help whatever scout was hurt and didn’t feel like they were able to make it back on their own.  Apparently, whenever I ran these, I actually ran them, and by the time I got to the patient, I’d breathe into the radio like I’d just run a footrace.

“This is *huff* Hunting Lodge Portal One *wheeze* to the infirmary, *gasp* we are 10-7 at the patient’s location.  Copy, over.”  Basically that.

On my days off I would hike around the back country, going from one camp to another, and since I only had about five or six sets of days off, I had to use this time to my ultimate advantage.  So my days off were less relaxing vacation days and more hiking 24 miles to get from one end of the camp to the other.  Which I did one time.  Thankfully that was all flat.

I also took the time to hike a few mountains while I was there.  Like the Tooth of Time, which was cool.  I’d hiked it before.  And Black Mountain, which was shit.  And Trail Peak, which was also shit but at least had a pretty neat airplane wing at the top so that was worth it and also a little sad.  And Mt. Phillips, which was probably the best hike I did that entire summer, and the view was amazing.  And I only got slightly lost on my way to the top.

At one point I had to get up pretty early to leave from one camp and hike to another to catch the bus before it left.  It was a little after dawn when I left, and that’s more or less prime mountain lion time, so I was a little freaked out.  So I did the best thing that I thought to; I put my headlamp on the back of my head and carried a pointy stick with me for self-defense.  I never had to use it, and if a mountain lion had been following me, I had no idea.  So I guess something worked, maybe?

I also took a side hike to visit this trail camp that had something called the Lost Cabin, and I wanted to see what the hell a Lost Cabin was.  It was only about half a mile out of the way, so I walked over there to see.  When I got to this trail camp, it had started to rain lightly and some fog had been rolling down off the mountains, so the camp was eerie and damp.  There was no one around, I didn’t hear anybody, and I didn’t see anybody in the entire camp.  And I couldn’t find the cabin, either, which is why I guess it’s called the Lost Cabin.  Or, at least, I couldn’t find it until I retraced my steps and stumbled across it at the edge of the woods.  It was this old broken down pile of logs with no side or notification whatsoever, and I suddenly felt like I was in a new Blair Witch movie.  It was an adventure.

Every so often, my coworkers-turned-friends and I would go on sunrise or sunset hikes up to a nearby hill so we could see the sun.  This meant, of course, hiking in the dark, so we’d have to hike together and with proper illumination.  One night, we were hiking and we saw a set of eyes glowing in the darkness.  Just a few weeks before, Joe had seen an actual mountain lion not a quarter mile from camp, so we were all a little jumpy.  And so we see these eyes, and we’re freaking out a little bit, thinking there’s this mountain lion in front of us, blocking our trail.  We get closer, and try to walk around it so as not to bother it, and we’re stopping and starting and peering into the shadows to try and figure out what the hell to do.  So we decide to finally get closer to it since it’s a mountain lion, how could we not, and as we get closer, we realize it’s a fucking deer.  Fuck those deer, man.

Every night we had to make biscuits for the scouts, and this involved building a fire in a big iron stove we had in our cabin.  Fire-building, of course, requires kindling.  At one point, a crew of scouts offered to do work for us in return for better food than what they were given by Philmont.  Which is fair.  You can only eat so many packages of beef jerky and Larabars.  So we told them to fill up this bucket and collect kindling for the kindling box.  Maddy and I thought this would take them a good hour, but they did it in about ten minutes, and they did a pretty damn good job too.  So we had to give them something, and a package of cookies seemed like a good enough trade as any.  Except I wanted to play a prank on them, so initially I presented them with a single raw egg.  They stared at me, and then took the egg and named it and cherished it for the rest of the evening, even after they got the actual cookies.  Maddy recorded the whole transaction, and as Anna told me later, that video felt like a half-remembered fever dream to her.  Much of this summer feels like a half-remembered fever dream.

One day we spent an hour hitting bags of bread against our kitchen table.  Joe came up with this goofy character called Bear Claw Jones, who spread the good news of the medicinal uses of bear claws.  We built a wind chime out of bones and got hummingbirds to land on our fingers.  Our latrine overflowed.  We recorded ourselves saying things, played them in reverse, and then said them in reverse to play them in reverse and hear them forward.  We lit matches on our teeth and gave cabin tours without the cabin.  We did a lot together, it was a wild summer, and it was an absolute blast.  I hope to stay in touch with the people I worked with this summer, and I’m happy to call them my friends. Even the ones that I didn’t work directly with, like the visiting foresters or the forestry crews, were real cool and I’m glad I met them.

The world has a weird way of bringing people together and splitting them apart, only to bring them together again later.  Or not.  That’s the other thing.  I don’t believe anything is destined.  I think everything is random and completely to the whims of chance.  But as my favorite philosopher, the Happy Mask Salesman, said, “Whether a parting be forever or merely for a short time, that is up to you.”  I’m hoping it’ll be a short time this time around.

That isn’t everything that I did this summer, of course.  Telling the full, uncut stories of my experiences at Philmont could realistically fill and entire book.  But as far as my blogs go, I think talking about my summer at Philmont has about run its course.  One of these days I’m going to put together a video of all the photos I took this summer.  Maybe I’ll link it to here.  Maybe not.  I guess I’ll just have to see.

But tune in next week, because we’ll have something completely unrelated to Philmont.  But now I know that I personally will never be unrelated to Philmont.  And I guess there’s something to be said for that, especially considering I was incredibly anxious and homesick at the beginning of this summer.  And here I am now.  I want to go back to Philmont.

POST SCRIPT: At the time of this writing, 9/16/2019, I found out that my grandfather, William Sima, has passed away. I don’t process grief well, and have a hard time labeling emotions, so the death of loved ones has always been strange for me. But I can say with certainty that I love him and he will be missed. He was as much a kindred spirit as a grandfather. I will have a sort of “in memoriam” post next week, where I’ll talk about him more at length. But until then, I will simply say that I miss him now and I’ll miss him more deeply once the initial shock and numbness turn to proper emotions that I can comprehend. May he rest in peace.