Scoutmaster Podcast 152

And now the old Scoutmaster. Well, why don't you ask your patrol leader about that?

Well, ask him. Ask him again.

Alright, well, ask your senior patrol leader about that. Well, where are you supposed to be right now? Hey, this is podcast number 152..

Welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green.

It's been a great year And this is our New Year's edition of the Scoutmaster podcast, in which we're going to play some excerpts from some of the interviews that we did over the past year. A couple of little features, And I hope you enjoy it. There's a lot coming in 2013.. 2012 was a great year for the podcast.

I had a great year scouting And we were able to talk to some really interesting people for the podcast, And we're going to have some excerpts of those interviews coming up here in a moment. But before we do that, I wanted to just talk to you about 2013.. It's a promising year And I mentioned this in the last podcast, but I'm working together with some people to develop a monthly live event. Put aside some time on Sunday evening, January 13th, for a launch of what we hope will become kind of a monthly virtual roundtable.

What we have coming up in January is a presentation about the BSA STEM NOVA program, which, if you're not familiar with it, it's a relatively new initiative And it's a focus on science and technology. Looking forward to the presenters that we've lined up, who've been very involved with the STEM NOVA program since its inception, And I think you'll get a lot out of it. January 13th- It's a Sunday evening, You know. Look around seven or eight o'clock.

I'll have more exact information and links and all that business posted, But right now we're in the middle of our holiday week. We've got some excerpts from interviews we've done over the past year. Let's see. We've got Lenore Scanesi, who's the author of Free Range Kids. Lenore's boys are in scouts And she is a columnist and a writer who brings a very pragmatic point of view and a dose of reality to raising children, And I really enjoyed talking to Lenore. Next we'll have Andrew Skirka, And Andrew is this incredible long distance backpacker who wrote the backpacking gear guide that I know that a lot of you have now.

That was published by National Geographic this past year.

Mike Malone, the author of Four Percent: The History of the Eagle Scout Award, which just recently came out in a hardcover edition. Mike and I had a great interview about the book and about being an Eagle Scout. We'll finish up with an interview I conducted with our immediate past National Counsel Executive, Bob Mazooka, who was kind enough to join us back in the spring and talk a little bit about his journey to Eagle and his work as our National Scout Executive.

So that's a pretty full podcast, wouldn't you say. I would say So let's get started, shall we? Lenore Skinezi joins us today. She's a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist. Lenore, welcome to the Scoutmaster Podcast. Oh, very happy to be here.

I salute you, Clark. Every parent, they're torn between the safety of their children and wanting to see them do interesting, wonderful things that help them develop and help them develop this kind of confidence. Right, I'm saying they go together.

So it's not really a trade-off between you know, on the one hand I want them safe but on the other hand I want them to have adventures. In a way, having these adventures in a sort of tried and true environment, which is the Scouts, makes them safer, And having your kids do those interesting things that maybe are not perfectly safe but are still safe.

I mean, you know, you have trained scout leaders who are there and you have older kids who have learned a lot and are willing to look after the younger kids. You know, scouting is not dropping your kids off at the side of a highway and saying go into the forest and I'll pick you up in three days. It really is a way to train kids to become just more competent. I love what scouting is doing for my sons.

You know, I mean it really. They have to grow up and they might not even want to sometimes.

I mean sometimes it really involves, you know, putting away the tent, which is what I hear is a total drag. Or getting the little kids to, you know, clean up the litter, which is hard to do, and it's like me cleaning up the house, like easy to just do yourself, but no, they have to get the kids to do it.

And then they come home and they're a little different, They're just. I mean, I want them to grow up and be responsible and be proud and reverent and brave and true and all that stuff.

And weirdly enough, you know, I don't think scouts would be around for 100 years if that wasn't, you know, if there wasn't proof that that's what happens.

Andrew Skirka has won a lot of attention for his solo long distance backpacking trips And he figures that in the last decade or so he's covered 30,000 plus miles And that's the equivalent of traveling 1.2 times around the Earth's equator. He's been named adventurer of the year by both outside and the National Geographic Adventure magazines, as well as Person of the Year by Backpacker Magazine. He's also the author of the recently published Ultimate Hikers Gear Guide from National Geographic And if you look at your March April edition of Scouting Magazine there, he is right there on the cover. I'm happy to welcome Andrew to the Scoutmaster Podcast. Good morning, Andrew.

How are you? Good morning, Thanks very much for having me.

Well, no, I really appreciate you spending the time. So you talk about the first real backpacking trip. You went on as being that you left. You set out from Springer Mountain in Georgia on the Appalachian Trail.

How did that go? Oh, it was bad. It was bad.

So it was my first congress trip. It was my first backpacking trip, And now I describe myself as a camper by default, which is a backpacker that takes too much, because they're basically packing their fears. They justify a lot of gear decisions on the grounds of what if or just in case, and they just don't know. I also shared a lot of conventional gear, which is because I just didn't know any better And I thought that what the industry was telling me and what an REI catalog was telling me, that that was the right thing. You go into detail about that experience and kind of the evolution that you went through as far as the selection of gear and everything, and your philosophy and your approach to these trips in the Ultimate Hikers Gear Guide. It's really a game changer.

I think it's a great piece of work and I think it's going to make things really, really work for people. If they'll go and look at the book and follow your advice, I think we're going to see a whole lot more successful backpackers developed out of it. I certainly hope so. I've made a lot of mistakes and have suffered as a result because I chose the wrong stuff or I didn't have the skills to use it properly, And I've also made some really good decisions that I've learned a lot along the way, and the book I share that The focus is on backpackers who want to enjoy hiking my idea of writing a book.

I think you were successful in kind of helping to redefine exactly what we're doing out there and how we make it happen. Well, One of the things that I first saw about you was a YouTube video and it really made me anxious to talk to you, And this video is when you encounter the porcupine caribou herd.

Where were you at the time? I was up in the Yukon Arctic, so basically far north, far northwestern Canada.

So you have, like this moment- I don't know exactly how to describe this moment- a moment of enlightenment or clarity or some kind of transcendent moment. Can you share that with us?

Can you explain what happened? Yeah, I still struggle to explain it, to be honest, but basically I've been so worn down by what I was going through And at the time I was in the middle of a 657 mile 24 day stretch, without crossing the road and without seeing a human being, And I was just getting beat up on a regular basis by big floods and bears and mosquitoes, And I was just so worn down by those elements. In addition to just this larger sense of exposure and risk and self dependence, When I came up on a porcupine migration trail corridor, which is this very visible track across the tundra, I just broke down and realized- or not realized, but felt like I was tapping into their energy And I knew that this is a species that, for their survival, has this journey plus a year, where they migrate back and forth from their wintering grounds to their migrating grounds, And when they're on that journey, they are just basically eating, sleeping and moving. And for me it was the same thing, And I had this sort of connection with the caribou, where I was just one of them. I stopped being some elevated species, I was just another animal, first in this landscape that was having the same experience: that they were looking over my shoulder. I was trying to send myself off from those variables that I listed before.

It was a pretty amazing moment, and definitely never something that had happened before and not something that would have been possible if I hadn't really- almost only intentionally- worn myself down and just wasn't unable to keep my guard up to have that experience.

So, friend of the blog and podcast, Michael Esmalone is one of the world's best known technology writers. Now, in this centennial year of 2012,, the centennial year of the Eagle Scout, Mike turned his considerable talent as an investigative reporter and writer, as well as his extensive experience as a scout and adult volunteer, towards a book that no doubt will stand, at least in my humble opinion, as the definitive history of the Eagle Scout Award. It's called 4% and subtitled The Story of Uncommon Youth in a Century of American Life.

I think it's not only an authoritative history of the award but it's kind of a meditation on the meaning and the spirit and importance of it