Lawrence Block - Step by Step

A few years ago I was on a book tour for The Burglar on the Prowl, and when I got to Des Moines I spent the night at the governor’s residence, Terrace Hill, at the invitation of Christie Vilsack, the governor’s wife. In the morning she cooked my breakfast. (This sort of thing would make book tours bearable, but don’t get the wrong idea; nothing remotely like it ever came my way before or since.)

Breakfast included ham, which she obtained from a local pig farmer who raised his swine organically. It was, I realized, the best ham I’d tasted in years; it was the first ham that was a match for what my Jewish mother used to put on the table on Starin Avenue.

I kept a blog during that book tour that brought me to Terrace Hill — something else I’d never done before, and rather doubt I’ll do again. And after my breakfast with Mrs. Vilsack I mused in my blog on the ham I’d eaten, and the ham I had on Starin Avenue, and our family’s sole and singular taboo.

I learned we weren’t the only ones. “It was exactly the same at our house!” a woman emailed me. “Ham yes, bacon yes, pork no. I always wondered why.”

Why? Because Jews don’t eat pork, that’s why. I thought everybody knew that.

I’ve no idea what percentage of the kids at Hopi Village came from kosher homes. Enough, surely, to warrant a kosher kitchen, and a separate mess hall, and, ultimately, a wholly separate camping experience, in which we shared the lakefront and the hiking paths with the rest of the Scouts, and nothing else.

Looking back, it seems so antithetical to the whole notion of Scouting. Why were there Jewish troops in the first place? Why weren’t Boy Scout troops established by neighborhood instead of by religious affiliation?

Well, they were, sort of. But they were generally centered in neighborhood churches, because those institutions had the space available. And... well, never mind. We had our little ghetto, our camp within a camp, and barely knew the others were there. And they hated us, and it’s hard to blame them.

Eventually matters came to a head. The consortium of Jewish troops pulled out of Scout Haven, bought a tract of land, and established their own camp. But that was years after I’d outgrown the Boy Scouts. The camp I remember is Scout Haven, and I had a good time there, and once a week I got to go on a hike.

Every Friday every Hopi Village camper picked one or two partners, and we all filled our canteens, tied our shoes, and made sure we had a couple of dollars in our pockets. Then we set off for one of several nearby towns.

Scout Haven was south of Buffalo, and its mailing address was the town of Arcade. Arcade was a popular destination for us, because it boasted a restaurant where you could get good short-order food. EAT HERE OR WE BOTH STARVE, proclaimed the sign over the door, and I thought that was as brilliant a marketing device as I’d ever encountered, though I suspect the people who actually lived in Arcade got pretty tired of it.

Arcade was seven miles away. It took a couple of hours to get there, depending on whether or not you saw any reason to hurry. Eating and loitering took another hour or so, and then we’d walk back. That pretty much did it for the day. The counselors and camp staff got a day to relax, and we got some pleasant exercise, plus a chance to get away from the herd and go off in pairs and trios.

As an alternative to Arcade, we could walk instead to Freedom or Sandusky. One was five miles distant, the other a little closer. Sandusky was on the way to Arcade, as it happened, and there was a store there, catering to the local farm folk; you could buy a Coke or a candy bar, and one time I came back with a straw farmer’s hat that set me back half a dollar. I don’t remember what they had in Freedom, though it couldn’t have been much, and it’s possible I never went there.

The roads were two-lane blacktop or gravel, the traffic light. We’d been taught to walk on the left, facing traffic, so that we could see cars coming and move onto the shoulder. Nobody ever got hit by a car, and as far as I know nobody ever got into any real trouble, except for Larry Biltekoff, a camper a few years my senior, who earned his twenty-first merit badge, the one that would qualify him as an Eagle Scout, and celebrated the accomplishment by going into one of the nearby towns and losing his virginity.

God knows how he managed this. He couldn’t have taken his prize by force or he’d have been thrown in jail, and it would have to be easier to find a rich man in heaven than a working girl in Arcade. So he must have gotten lucky with some eager amateur.

For this he was quietly disciplined — no one would come out and say for what — and at the camp’s closing ceremony he was denied his Good Indian award. (You stood one at a time before a council of elders, with your fellow campers in a great circle around you. The elders asked you if you accepted the Good Indian; in other words, did you feel you’d been a good camper? If you said no, that was the end of the matter. You resumed your place in the circle. If you said yes, then it became their turn to say yea or nay. If the answer was yea, someone accomplished at arts and crafts painted the profile of an Indian on your webbed Boy Scout belt. If not, not. I think the whole deal was more for the benefit of the counselors than the rest of us. It was their only chance to say a hearty Fuck You to the worst of us.)

Larry Biltekoff, who’d been given to understand what was coming, said nay himself, and there the matter rested. So Larry got laid but didn’t get his Good Indian, and I don’t know anybody who wouldn’t have cheerfully traded places with him. All the same, I don’t think they should have withheld it from him. I think they should have given him a special merit badge, for resourcefulness.

Not every Friday, but every once in a while, the Hike Day options included a cross-country trek to Lime Lake. This was undertaken not in twos and threes but in a body of fifteen or twenty boys led by one or more counselors. (We didn’t use that term, incidentally; besides campers, there were junior and senior officers, JO’s and SO’s. Older campers moved up to JO when they were deemed ready for the responsibility, and I suppose they got the summer for free. SO’s were paid counselors, but almost all of them had come up through the ranks.)

Our destination was a lakeside resort, and you got there by going over hill and dale some twelve miles. After a couple of hours eating and swimming and going on the rides, everybody reassembled for the walk back to camp. The Lime Lake contingent left right after breakfast and tried to make it back before the mess hall stopped serving dinner. It made for a good day’s outing, and called for a certain amount of stamina, as the distance was not that far short of a full marathon, and some of the hills were imposing.

We also did some overnight camping, and that involved hiking, since that’s how you got to where you were going to camp. The usual destination was Council Hill, and about a dozen of us would go at a time, climbing the hill, spreading our sleeping bags on the ground, building a fire, and cooking meals only a hungry boy would willingly put in his mouth.

Hopi Village was itself divided during each two-week period into six or seven smaller villages, each consisting of three four-person tents under the aegis of a village leader in the person of a JO. (Each tent had a tent leader as well. I was never in the military, but aspects of camp life would have helped prepare me for it.) Sooner or later, each village had its turn to hike up Council Hill, cook out, sleep under the stars, and return to camp the next morning, no doubt the better for the experience.

I did this a few times, and I always enjoyed it well enough, but there wasn’t all that much walking involved, and nothing terribly interesting ever happened. Except for the time that my good friend David Krantz, an occasional companion on my walks around Buffalo, insisted on laying out his sleeping bag on the slope above the campfire.