How to Cuss in Western

by Michael P. Branch

  Back in those days there was a lot of pressure on us little scouts. Lots of performance tests and social comparisons and merit badges earned or, more often, endless strings of minor failures that prevented the earning of badges. In retrospect, it all seems sufficiently ridiculous. Who even knows what it would mean to receive the merit badge in “Composite Materials”? Who really cares about achieving the “Coin Collecting” badge? (Better to earn the considerably more useful “Lifesaving” badge, so you can attempt to rescue your numismatist friends as they die of boredom.) How were we supposed to keep our priorities straight as we aspired to earn points within an organization in which “Dentistry” and “Nuclear Science” had equal value? How were we to decide between “Insect Study” and “Welding,” between “Truck Transportation” and “Space Exploration”—all of which are actual merit badges?

  It seems to me that “Wheelie Popping” or “Talking to Girls” or “Not Getting Your Ass Kicked by the Neighborhood Bully” or even “Fart Detection” would have been more useful than most of these merit badges. The value system of the entire enterprise appeared arbitrary and oppressive. If the camel was made by a committee, scouting seemed to have been created by a committee consisting of a Baptist missionary, an accountant, a government bureaucrat, a hippie back-to-the-lander, a marketing agency executive, a cigar store Indian, a New Age charlatan, and an undercover cop.

  If you are speculating that the unhealthy energy around my not-so-warm-and-fuzzy memories of scouting suggests that I am protesting too much—that I am trying to cover up something—you are correct.

  One lovely week during summer vacation, my all-white “tribe” of Webelos was on an extended camping trip, where we were commanded by Scoutmaster Williams, a man who took the “master” part of his moniker seriously. Master Williams was a “drop and give me twenty” kind of leader, though it was common knowledge among the boys that beneath his goofy uniform and hyperbolic Davy Crockett rhetoric was a plain old suburban dad, a henpecked, three-martini-lunch, lawn-mowing, golf-playing, mid-level sales guy. While the forest smelled of pure freedom, being there with Master Williams was a highly regimented and competitive experience. We boys wanted to explore the woods, to play hide-and-seek, scramble up rocks, and go fishing, but under Master Williams’s leadership our experience was the opposite of play.

  I do not exaggerate when I say that we could not dig a hole to take a dump without his turning the occasion into a competition—fastest hole, deepest hole, even roundest hole—and had there been a badge for meritorious defecation he would no doubt have adjudicated that contest as well. By the third night of the campout I had been forced to participate in so many competitions that I felt like an exhausted decathlete, only one whose events included boot waxing, dish washing, and melodic whistling. The only thing more frustrating than being forced to compete at whistling or scrubbing dishes was having my ass handed to me time and time again by the other boys, who seemed naturally to possess either the skills necessary to excel at such things or the sheer drive to humiliate me in head-to-head competition. It may sound silly now, but at age ten you do not want to be a loser every time, even if what you are losing at is whistling or digging a poop hole. Why couldn’t I make that damned hole rounder?

  On our third night, Master Williams arranged yet another competition, this one to determine who could build the biggest, best, fastest fire using only a single match. This challenge had everything Master Williams liked best: implied masculine potency, a pretention to survival skills, the drama of a winner-take-all race to the finish, and immense potential for the utter humiliation of the losers. The idea was that we would each gather our own materials—tree bark, twigs, pine needles, leaves—to lay and then ignite a fire that would, if we were truly skilled, be the first to leap high enough to burn through a sisal string that the master had tied tightly between two trees.

  Master Williams blew his whistle to begin the first phase of the contest, a mere five minutes in which we fanned out into the woods to collect whatever we judged to be the most flammable and, therefore, choicest materials. Already exhausted, I headed into a thick stand of brush beyond the muddy spot where my own leaky pup tent was pitched and began to rifle through the duff on the forest floor in search of something dry enough to assure victory. But everything I gathered was thoroughly damp; even spruce cones and the cups of acorns felt moist clear through. A feeling of dread gathered in me, my chest tightening and my breathing accelerating as the seconds remaining to find something ignitable ticked away.

  When Master Williams whistled the one-minute warning, I felt a wave of panic wash over me. It was in that moment of despair that I made the observation that would forever alter the trajectory of my career as a scout. I noticed, sitting near the mouth of my little green tent, the small red can of Coleman fuel we had used to refill one of the troop’s cookstoves. Grabbing the can, I stepped behind my tent, squatted to the ground, and sprinkled some gas—and then a little more, just to be sure—onto the moist pinecones and twigs I had harvested from the forest floor. In that moment, I was not thinking of my pledge to be “trustworthy.” I didn’t think about what I was doing at all. Something in the reptilian part of my brain just felt—felt that I could not face another defeat after the embarrassing drubbing I had taken in the boot waxing and melodic whistling trials.

  Arriving at the group just seconds in advance of disqualification, I now had five more whistled-off minutes to lay a fire, consisting of my pathetic little sticks and cones. I stooped to one knee and hunched unsteadily over the spot where I would be tested, trying with trembling hands to construct the ideal little teepee shape that was rising in front of the more capable boys working to my left and right. But the harder I tried, the more my little stick umbrella collapsed, and I could feel Master Williams’s critical gaze fall upon me, even as a row of tidy twig wigwams materialized up and down the line. The tension was palpable and the concentration intense, because I knew what was at stake: to build a fire was the critical rite of passage into manhood.

  At last the final whistle blew, and Master Williams counted down from ten, as if NASA were launching an Apollo rocket right there in the soggy woods. We ten truck-driving, tooth-filling, life-saving, steel-welding, coin-collecting, insect-studying, wood-whittling astronauts prepared for blastoff. Three…two…one…ignition! Up and down the line I heard the synchronized scratch and pop of ten individual wooden matches as they were simultaneously struck. Each boy knelt over his little stick teepee, lowering himself to touch the match to just the right spot of bark or twig. That single, tiny, flickering point of sulfurous fire was all that stood between triumph and humiliation, and I guarded mine as a kind of eternal flame, one that either would be extinguished in a moment or would burn brightly into manhood. I balanced awkwardly on one knee and bent forward slowly, lowering toward my malformed structure of twigs and cones, trying one last time, in my little, collapsing world of inferior whistling and inadequately dug holes, to keep my hopes from being extinguished. I chose a promising spot in my stick pile and lowered the match’s small flame slowly toward it.

  I do not remember the moment at which the match made contact with my little pile of damp sticks. I do recall that the resulting detonation sounded like a concussion grenade and that the rising fireball blew me backward onto my shoulder blades. There followed a welter of gasping and scurrying and, when I came to, a dim awareness that I was looking up through swirling smoke at the face of Scoutmaster Williams, who wore an expression of genuine concern. I was coughing a little, and the smell of singed hair was unmistakable.

  “Son,” he said at last, “you’ve burned your damned eyebrows off. Are you allright?”

  I nodded yes, though I did not have the slightest idea.

  “You’re disqualified,” he added, flatly.

  I do not recall now whether I cried. The rest of my story is the unvarnished truth. Kicked-out scout’s honor.

  THE OTHER DAY Caroline asked me
, quite out of nowhere, a provocative question. “I know I’m five,” she said, “but how old is the Earth?”

  “Four and a half billion,” I replied.

  After being reassured that a billion is not, like a zillion or cajillion, a made-up word, Caroline had more questions. “How did anybody ever figure out such a big birthday number?”

  “It all started with seashells on mountaintops,” I told her.

  “How did seashells get on top of mountains?” she asked.

  “That’s exactly what people tried to figure out for a few thousand years,” I said.

  Caroline persisted. “What did people think when they found the shells up there?”

  “Well, some folks thought they were washed up by a big flood that’s mentioned in the Bible, but a lot more people thought they just grew there, right out of the rock,” I answered.

  Now Hannah jumped in. “Seriously? How could anybody believe that?” she asked.

  “Back then, nobody realized the planet was super old,” I explained. “They just counted up the generations of all the people named in the Bible and reckoned that the Earth was about six thousand years old. And nothing in those six thousand years that they knew of could explain how seashells ended up on the tops of mountains.”

  “So how did they finally figure it out?” Hannah asked.

  “With the head of a great white shark!” I answered enthusiastically.

  Caroline, always obsessed with predation, was genuinely interested: “What! How?”

  Now having the girls’ full attention, I went ahead with the story. “During the mid-seventeenth century, some fishermen in Italy caught a huge great white shark. They chopped off its head and sent it by cart to this dude named Steno, who they knew was really interested in learning about nature stuff. When Steno studied the teeth of the shark, he noticed they were almost exactly like the teeth found on mountaintops along with seashells, and, in that moment, he made a giant leap of the imagination. Suddenly, he imagined a time in the deep past when those mountaintops were under the ocean, and had sharks and a lot of other cool things swimming around them. Steno realized that the only way seashells and sharks’ teeth could end up on mountaintops is if the Earth is really, really old and has changed a whole bunch over time.”

  “Sharks swimming around mountaintops! They must have thought Steno was pretty cool for figuring that out,” Hannah added.

  “Actually,” I said, “they thought he was nuts, and they were sure he was totally wrong. But, over the next couple of centuries, people figured out that he was right and that the Earth has had around four and a half billion birthdays.”

  Now, Caroline had a more practical question. “Are there any seashells on these mountains?” she asked, gazing out her bedroom window toward a serrated ridgeline of unnamed desert peaks.

  “I’m not sure,” I answered. “Should we check?”

  “Yeah, let’s go up there tomorrow,” Caroline said, pointing. “And, in case we don’t find any ocean stuff, let’s take some of our own to leave up there.”

  The next morning, the girls sorted through a bag of seashells and sharks’ teeth we had gathered several years earlier on a family trip to the Florida Everglades. They selected a few tiger and lemon shark teeth, some sand dollars, and several cat’s claw shells, which they put into their daypacks along with sun hats, binocs, water, and enough licorice to allow us to survive the apocalypse. After eating a big breakfast of scrambled eggs, provided courtesy of what Caroline calls our “homemade chickens,” we took Darcy the dog and headed up the brushy slopes west of Ranting Hill.

  It was a typical summer afternoon in the foothills of the western Great Basin, which is to say that the Washoe Zephyr was blasting out of the canyons at thirty miles per hour, making it necessary for us to holler in order to be heard over the big wind. After hiking into a headwind for forty-five minutes, we paused on the dusty slope of the mountain to drink some of the well water we had slogged up the hill. Like any enterprising kid, Caroline had overpacked her daypack and then decided that I should haul it up the mountain along with my own. Just as I was offloading both packs to pause for water, an especially strong gust lifted a swirling cloud of sand and debris from the flank of the mountain and blasted it into my face. It felt as if a dump trailer of base gravel had been emptied into my left eye. No amount of blinking and dousing it with water seemed to help, and eventually I decided we would continue our mission even though I was now half blind. Caroline suggested, helpfully, that if my eye didn’t heal I could wear a permanent eye patch, which she assured me would be “totally piratical.”

  Suddenly, I noticed that Darcy was nowhere to be seen. It was common for her to flush quail and jackrabbits, but this time she had not circled back, instead simply vanishing into the howling desert. We yelled for her, but the zephyr was so strong that our calls barely penetrated the roaring wall of wind, never mind crossing the expansive desert beyond. While the lost-dog-and-blind-dad misadventure was in full swing, the ocean of blooming rabbitbrush in which we stood had caused us all to begin sniffling and sneezing. We resumed our ascent, though by this point I had tied a bandana over my eye as a makeshift patch and was, as a result, off-balance and staggering. I was hoarse from screaming for Darcy, and I had no water to drink because I had poured the last of it over my face in a failed attempt to dislodge the gravel from my stinging eyeball. I was also wiping snot off my face with my sleeve—mucus I then accidentally transferred to my good eye, which became so red and itchy from wind, rabbitbrush, and snot as to no longer qualify as good.

  At last we reached the summit ridge, where I flopped down in the lee of a granite palisade to gather myself while the girls did some climbing in the rocks. “Watch for rattlers, and don’t put your fingers anyplace where a scorpion would hang out,” I called, as the girls picked their way up through the granite boulders.

  “We know, Dad,” Caroline replied.

  After a half hour the girls clambered back down, announcing they had discovered not a single seashell or shark’s tooth. For my part, I was thirsty, tired, snotty, fretting about Darcy, and much in need of the Three-Cold-Beer Remedy for my injured eye. I declared it was time for us to leave our own seashells on the mountaintop. The girls unpacked their sand dollars, cat’s claws, and sharks’ teeth and located perfect notches in the granite, where they placed these ocean treasures as carefully as if they were religious icons being set ceremoniously into the niches of a temple wall. I snapped a few pictures to commemorate the event, and we turned our backs to the wind and headed for home.

  Fortunately, Darcy was waiting for us back on Ranting Hill, though, unfortunately, she had passed the time by destroying my baseball glove, which she retrieved from the top of our picnic table. The ensuing moments continued the day-long comedy of errors. While yelling hoarsely at Darcy to drop my mitt, I tripped over a railroad tie and nearly impaled my formerly good eye on a bitterbrush branch. I then staggered inside, where in near blindness I immediately batted over the long-sought-for beer I had just opened. In frustration, I reeled away from the foaming mess and groped my way into the bathroom, where I removed my makeshift patch and emptied an entire bottle of optical saline into my injured eye. It later turned out to have been a bottle of nasal drops.

  As I sat on the living room floor, sneezing and holding an unopened beer over my injured eye and an open beer in my free hand, I asked the girls, “How did you like our adventure?”

  “I think it worked out great!” Caroline blurted. “We should name the peak where we left the ocean stuff. Let’s call it ‘Shark Mountain.’”

  “Shark Mountain it is,” I agreed.

  “Sorry about your eyeball,” Hannah added, “but that was pretty awesome putting those shells and teeth up there and thinking about Steno and the shark head and everything. I’ll bet that, someday, thousands of years from now, somebody will find the stuff we left and wonder what happened.”

&n
bsp; “What do you think they’ll guess?” I asked.

  “It might take a long time of thinking about it,” Caroline said, “but if Steno could imagine big sharks swimming around a mountaintop, maybe somebody will have a good imagination about it and figure out it was us. And even if they don’t, they’ll still have a mystery, and that’s great too.”

  I HAVE ALREADY bemoaned the four-letter word cute, but there is another four-letter word that, as a Nevada writer, I generally avoid using. It is a filthy word, one that immediately conjures up a range of unpleasant associations. To quote the character Eighties Robot in the movie The Muppets, “R–E–N–O. That spells Reno.” I have the Muppets to blame for my need to use this foul word.

  Not long ago, I was watching the 2011 film with the kids when, to my surprise, I glanced up to see a shot of the famous Reno Arch, an iconic landmark that spans the main drag of our downtown and reads, “The Biggest Little City in the World.” That this odd equivocation is our city’s official motto makes it clear that we’ve resolved to make a virtue of necessity by attempting to turn our community’s identity crisis into a marketing coup. Is Reno a quaint town or a bustling city? Is it a family-friendly place or a den of iniquity? Is it an outdoor recreation hub or a gambling mecca? As our motto perhaps suggests, the answer to all of these questions is “Yes.” But if we Renoites experience some confusion about our relationship to this place, it is at least a legitimate confusion that remains endlessly fascinating.

  “Look, girls!” I exclaimed, pointing at our hometown on the TV screen. “The Muppets have come to Reno!” This was big news, because it suggested that our nearby city was about to get its fifteen minutes of fame—an outcome virtually assured by the fact that loving the Muppets is one of three things most Americans have in common (the other two: disliking paying taxes and thinking we sound good singing in the shower). Having your local town appear in a Muppet movie is like receiving the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, with the important difference that no one has read Good Housekeeping since 1959, while this Muppet flick has grossed close to one hundred million bucks.