When I turned eleven, I was eligible to become a Boy Scout. That was also the year we moved to the suburbs of Peoria. Our new house was on Parkwood Drive in a subdivision named Idyllbrook. It was a nice house on three levels with a two-car garage. When we first moved in, my brother and I shared a room where we slept on bunk beds. I remember laying in the bottom bunk of that bed closing first one eye and then the other to experience the little jump in the position of the objects in the room as the view changed from one eye to the other. That memory stands out, I suppose, because later in the year I was to lose that ability.
My father had helped with the Cub Scout troop while we lived in East Peoria and helped me get up through all the achievement levels of that organization. I enjoyed being a member of the Cub Scouts. Bullying was not permitted there and I found that there were things that I could do, goals that I could reach and skills that I could learn as a member of that group. The Cub Scout regimen is more or less a kind of boot camp for the Boy Scouts in that many of the skills learned at the upper levels of the Cub Scout program are intended to make the transition into the Boy Scouts a natural progression. When we got to Peoria, my dad and I joined the local Boy Scout troop, number 233. I was in my element in the Boy Scouts, so was my dad. I learned about knot tying, carving, swimming, camping and, most important, safety. Finally, I was learning not only how to do things I enjoyed doing, but I was learning how to do them safely. Up until the Scouts came along, I hadn't really gotten the point about why safety was important. When you are learning to handle knives, axes, guns, fire and small boats, it is good to also learn to handle them in such a way that you don't kill yourself or others. What I really learned was that there are consequences to one's actions and how to become aware of what those consequence might be. This is primarily a matter of awareness of your surroundings. Skill at observation and planning are essential to creating a safe environment for handling dangerous tools. In learning how to safely carve small figures from a stick of wood, chop and split a log for a fire, build and keep a fire under control, and put a bullet into the bull's-eye of a target, I was also learning how to observe and think logically. Observation and logical thinking are skills that have served me very well throughout my life, but, like any sort of skill, it is necessary to practice them constantly to maintain an acceptable level of ability in applying them.
Boy Scout Troop 233 was an active, outdoor kind of troop. There were other troops that stressed more urban skills, but in Troop 233 we camped and hiked and went on canoe trips and built towers and bridges. We went to summer camp and learned to shoot rifles, indentify trees and plants, practice our camping skills, and help other, younger Scouts learn their basics. Every other weekend or so, the troop would load up into the cars of those parents who had volunteered to drive and head off to tackle some hiking trail around Central Illinois. One in particular, the Amaquonsippi Trail, was an endurance trail that featured a rope bridge and some other obstacles along the route. "Amaquonsippe" is an American Indian word. I don't know what it means, though, perhaps, "eighteen miles of hills, forests, creeks and poison ivy" might be a possible definition. It was that kind of trail, and we needed to hike it all in one day.
We had loaded up the cars early, before dawn, but the sun was already up when we climbed out of the cars and got ready to hit the trail. Some of us whose parents knew a bit about hiking and outdoor activities had come equipped with day packs, proper hiking boots and canteens, but there always seemed to be a couple of kids who just didn't get it. They would show up wearing regular leather shoes and carrying their lunch in a brown paper bag. Before long these ill-equipped Scouts would be having a miserable time on the trail with their feet sore and their hands tired from carrying that sack lunch. They always made it to the end of the hike and, though they may not have enjoyed the experience, eventually, they learned the right way to do it. Eighteen miles is a long way to hike in one day, even with the proper equipment and I always had very sore leg muscles the next day. I didn't envy those guys hiking the same trail without the benefit of the right gear.
Hiking was easy for me, though, as I said, I always paid for it in very sore muscles the next day, but some of the kids just didn't have hiker's bodies. Seems like there was always one kid with flat feet. He usually suffered the most on one of these hikes, but I had to admire the fact that, in spite of his physical liabilities, he kept plodding along to the end. The flat-footed kids were also usually the ones carrying their sack lunch in their hands. I always tried to be at the front of the group setting the pace for the hike. At lunch time we waited for the slower guys to catch up so as to keep the group more or less together and the adult leaders always kept track of the slower kids to make sure that no one got lost or left behind.
After lunch, with the Troop all together, we set off on the last half of the hike. We were out of the forest for the moment hiking through a open meadow where some very tall weeds had grown up earlier in the year. By now, in the fall, the leaves had dried up and fallen off leaving only tall brittle stalks along both sides of the trail. As we walked along we would break off one of the four to five foot tall stalks and hurl what was now basically a spear out into the field. I had broken off a stalk and was using the flexible, feathery top end to tickle the back of the neck of the hiker in front of me. This annoyed him greatly and he told me so with great vehemence. Of course, that was exactly the reaction I was hoping to elicit, and so, instead of quitting when I had achieved this not-so-lofty goal, I continued to torment the poor Scout seeking ever more unendurable heights of annoyance in my victim. Obviously, the lessons about safety that I had previously been taught and supposedly had learned hadn't sunk in. Humans are just a dangerous when treated carelessly as any knife, axe or gun, and this one was no exception. When his level of annoyance exceeded his tolerance level and elevated into a state of rage, he turned and chucked the spear-stalk that he was holding in my direction. I don't suppose he was aiming it at any particular spot on my body, just at me in general, but the broken-off end of the stalk penetrated the front of my left eye and bounced off the retina on its way out.
There are no pain receptors in the eyeball itself, so I was never in any pain, but I knew I was in trouble since there was fluid draining out of my eye and the lights had gone out for that side of my vision. I clapped my hand over that side of my face and ran towards the front of the line of hikers shouting, "My eye, my eye." The front was where the adult leaders were hiking and my dad was among them. He had me remove my hand so he could inspect the damage. There was no mirror, so I don't know what it looked like at that point, but I suspect the damage was obvious. A first-aid kit was produced and a gauze pad was placed over the eye and held in place with one of our Scout neckerchiefs. It was like something right out of the Boy Scout manual on first-aid. Since we were at a mid-point in the hike, we were not anywhere near the cars, nor were we near any source of transportation that we could use to get to the cars. Off in the distance, a mile or so away was a farmhouse. While the rest of the group continued on with the hike, my dad and I started hiking off across the fields toward the farm house. We climbed a few fences and finally made our way to the house. Fortunately, the family who lived there was at home and let us use their telephone. My dad called the hospital in Peoria, explained the situation to them and told them we were headed in their direction. We got a ride to our car back at the trailhead and my dad, exceeding the speed limit and, somehow, not getting caught, drove us to the hospital.
At the hospital, the doctors took over. After various medical personnel had looked me over and evaluated the injury, I was given a shot, put on a gurney and rolled into surgery. When I woke up, I was in a bed in the children's ward with a bandage over my left eye. I was told that the hole in my eye had been sewn up and that there was a good chance that I would regain some small amount of vision in the eye. While I was in the hospital, the kid who had thrown the weed-stalk came by for a visit. He felt really bad about what had happened, and I told him that it was no big deal and not to worry about it. I don't suppose that made him feel any better, but it really was just another case of unintended consequences for both of us. After a couple of weeks, I was released from the hospital. Before I went back to school, my mom wrote "Closed for Repairs" on a piece of paper and taped it to the bandage on my eye. I was quite the celebrity at school for awhile with an interesting story to tell, but eventually even I got bored with it. I just wanted the thing to heal up and was anxious to see if I really would regain some of the vision in that eye.
I had to put drops in the healing eye every day and when the bandage was off I would close my good eye and check if there was any vision in the left one. I started to be able to see shadows with the left eye and that was rather encouraging. The eye surgeon who had worked on my eye had warned us that if, at some point, I experienced pain in the left eye when the pupil contracted in the light we were to call him immediately. One morning, as I walked into the bathroom to brush my teeth the pain was there. That was the beginning of a whole new chapter in my life.
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