What I Know

 

What I Know

Noel Laflin

9-23-22

I write about what I know to be true. And what I know to be true about this old photo is that I was twenty years old and happily posing in the doorway of a log cabin a bunch of other teenagers and I built at our Scout camp, Camp Ahwahnee.

We had just put that door in place, the last item on our list of Log Cabin Building 101, and called the place home until the camp closed eight years later and was no more. I think we kids were a lot smarter than the adults that made that poor decision way back then, but that's the proverbial water under the bridge analogy, of course. However, we did build a pretty fine bridge once upon a time, too, but that's different story for another time.

The cabin is no more, unfortunately, as it burned to the ground in the Running Springs fire some thirty-five years later.

It took a summer and a spring to construct our pioneering project. Our self imposed teenage rule was that no power tools could be used and natural materials (like living trees) had to be used sparingly. So we chose to build the walls with old telephone poles, notching and scoring them with two man saws and axes.

Approximately a hundred and fifty kids took part in the sawing, lifting of heavy poles, chinking cracks between the logs of the interior walls, laying a cobblestone floor, and figuring out how to correctly slope and shingle a roof so that it would withstand heavy winter snow loads. We played with Lincoln Log sets to help figure it out.

Somehow, we did figure it all out, and aside from blistered hands and sore backs, no one was hurt throughout the long construction. Many of those kids are now grandfathers of children now older than they were then back in 1972/’73. I often wonder if they mention to those grandkids what they once undertook when they were their age. Do they talk about a Tom Sawyer type summer, perhaps?

But the kid in this photo was pretty damn happy to have been a part of this old adventure, as some pictures just don't lie.

This I know to be true.

A Scout is Trustworthy, after all - even some former Scouts still cling to this antiquated belief.

I know this to be true, too.