The Scout Law
“Foggy Stop” by Michelle McElroy
1. A Scout is Trustworthy
I sit in a plastic chair next to a police officer who is meticulously going through my possessions, recording each one, so I don’t report something missing whenever I’m released. It is late, close to 4 am I assume. This is her night shift. She faces a computer and I face the opposite direction, a small window to the hall, where the cells are just to the right. While I wait, the other man in the drunk tank they put me in hours ago calls out asking for a blanket—it is February and the cells in the county courthouse don’t seem to be heated properly, or at all. I’m glad to be in this office for a while.
At one point, the officer asks me, “What was your Eagle project?”
I assume she reached the Eagle Scout card in my wallet, nestled between my credit and debit, university ID, and blood donor card.
“Renovating a church,” I say.
She doesn’t ask me to elaborate. It’s the only small talk we make. My cellmate for the night, whom I know from the university, calls again for a blanket. When the officer finishes processing me, has placed my possessions in a plastic bin and sends me back to the unheated holding cell, I join my friend on the concrete bench. We watch an ant crawl across the floor over an indistinct set of letters carved into the cement.
At the university, our offices are two doors down. In two different arrests, in different vehicles, on either ends of the city, we both wound up in the same cell, except that the friends I was driving home that night know where I am, while he was alone, and we have not been given a chance to call anyone, despite asking. Of course, I promise to bail him out if my friends manage to do the same for me. We are both dependent on the charity of others in this moment, made vulnerable by circumstance, made to confront our poor decision-making by having our independence removed and hung above us like roadkill.
Just before sunrise, E, whose office at the university is across from my cellmate’s, shows up with $500 in cash for my bail. She holds me for a moment in the cold morning outside the courthouse while some other friends wait in a vehicle in the parking lot. I tell her you’ll never guess who else is in there. She drops me at an ATM at a gas station, where I make good on my promise and shore up another $500. I spend the next week paying people back what I owe them. I spend months paying one fine or another: An evaluation, a class on the effects of alcohol, a breathalyzer in my car, legal fees. So be it, I insist on telling myself. I have just enough in savings. I know it could be much worse.
The sun is out and the wind is harsh when E and I finally return to my apartment. We fall into bed in our clothes, the air in my bedroom too cold from the heat having been off all night for us to remove even our sweaters.
2. A Scout is Loyal
The phrase “marked man” comes up regularly during the Eagle ceremony (Article 12), like a kind of branding. US presidents, astronauts, and serial killers are among those marked men who, as teenagers, consented to live by certain principles (Article 7), to live by certain behavior that puts others first, to be a sort of caretaker-on-call. To abide by the twelve declarations in the Scout Law, each a short, four-word description of what a scout is.
Am I still a marked man? Does it show up in a background check? How permanent is the mark? Is it like a bruise, a tattoo, a hickey? Years after finishing with the scouts, an older man I took camping for the first time used the phrases Boy Scout and Eagle Scout as terms of endearment while I built us a campfire (Article 3), but I forcibly pushed the term out of my head as we moved onto necking in the tent, wanting very much not to be reminded of the Boy Scouts while I was with him.
Achieving the Eagle rank, and the institution of The Boy Scouts of America, is a ritual of masculinity, and more so of whiteness—perhaps not officially, but the BSA reinforces whiteness as much as heteronormative masculinity. It appropriates and repurposes Native American iconography as middleclass suburban boyhood wilderness retreats (Articles 11 and 12), incorporating fake indigeneity and redface into the theatricality it uses to mark men.
As far as I can find through research, there is no formal process for having the Eagle rank revoked. In 2012, several Eagles Scouts publicly renounced the BSA and returned their Eagle badges to protest the organization’s ban on letting gay boys join, which the BSA later rescinded. The Mormon Church left the BSA (against Article 2) to start their own organization after the scouts made increasingly progressive changes.
These conversations must have been taking place for years. Before my Eagle ceremony, I underwent a test with the scout leaders for northern Arizona’s troops, the Grand Canyon Council, like a job interview or a thesis defense. To prepare, one of the other scout dads tutored me (Article 3) on how I should answer. He told me explicitly that if the Council asked me my attitude about letting girls join the scouts, I should emphasize to them how much I disagreed with that idea.
But when the Council interviewed me at the church in Flagstaff where they held their meetings while a portrait of Jesus hung over me, his face as pale as mine, they never asked me about girls joining the BSA, nor any of the other loyalty tests for which I prepared. They mostly asked about my manners. I passed with flying colors.
3. A Scout is Helpful
I achieved the rank itself during the hundredth anniversary of the scouting movement, in 2010. For that centenary anniversary, the BSA held nationwide celebrations (Article 8) and rereleased four of the original merit badges that a Boy Scout could earn in 1910: Carpentry, Pathfinding, Signaling, and Tracking. During the past century, the badges have updated more than scouting has. I remember Astronomy and Computer Science as options, among many other contemporary sciences. But I was selective with what I took: Art, Public Speaking, Citizenship in the World, Cooking.
As a scout, I was never useful in the way the boys wanted me to be. I’m not skilled with cars, motors, or electronics. Instead, what helped me get through was the Scout Law, how well I practiced it. I made myself available, ready at a moment’s notice to offer help, to be kind and supportive.
I remember Scout Master Sunland, a man in his eighties who hiked up Mount Elden just outside town every single morning—whose heart and body were in such good condition that the night he had a heart attack at a scout meeting one Tuesday night that the hospital put him at the top of the list for a heart transplant anyway—used to end every meeting with all of us joined in a circle. He would read us a passage about one or another man behaving well in the world, exercising one or another virtue. Humility, generosity, openmindedness, patience. As a leader, he actually practiced what he preached (Article 1), imparting perhaps the one lesson that has stuck with me all these years, something not mentioned in the law or the badges: To never hold someone to a higher standard than I hold myself.
4. A Scout is Friendly
Because of the pandemic, my sentencing three months after my arrest is held by phone. I go to my lawyer’s house on a rainy day in early May. I’ve just completed the last week of grad school, and the only other deadline on my calendar (Article 9) is a conference call with the prosecutor and judge. I say yes, your honor more times than I can count (Article 7), like a chant. She tells me to hold up my right hand. My lawyer and I smirk at each other as we sit on her couch, her cellphone between us, the judge’s voice emitting from it through jolts of static. I raise my right hand, and almost compulsively bend my thumb and pinky finger into my palm to form the scout salute, the way we started every scout meeting standing at attention in front of the US flag reciting in unison the Scout Law. I resist the impulse but suddenly feel like a teenager again, polite and loyal to a higher authority. Here, I am prepared. Performing good manners makes me feel at ease, like I can control at least something in my life. Yes, your honor, I’ll be obedient, I understand. Yes, your honor, I will.
5. A Scout is Courteous
Once, as Senior Patrol Leader, I had to yell at a kid for wrapping his hands around the throat of another kid. They had been such close friends before the incident, and it was the boy’s parents who were the most upset, who made the thing an issue to begin with and not the boy himself. The kid who had felt his friend’s hands on his body stood in embarrassment rather than rage (is this Article 4?) despite how upset his mother was. Still, I had to turn around in the center of my troop encircling me as I stood in the middle suffocated by them like an ingrown hair while they refused to make eye contact. I forced my voice into a higher register (Article 9) to make myself heard, to make myself sound angry. I’m not good at yelling. I don’t know how to be angry, and I couldn’t fake it when I had to, when the scout dads stood with their arms folded waiting for me to be a good patrol leader and exercise discipline and I couldn’t bring myself to yell because I felt sorry for everybody, because of how embarrassed both boys looked and because I knew how painful it was to have any kind of incident put on public display, to have one’s reaction to it made into a spectacle, another kind of ritual.
6. A Scout is Kind
In the woods we went and formed circles (Article 12): Around campfires, around chanters, around flags with our hands at our hearts, around a boy crying, around a boy bleeding, around dead things or living things, around food, around nothing but the dirty jokes that scouts shared when the scout dads were off in their own circles.
I remember the smell of boys in tents very distinctly, rolled up in sleeping bags, skinny tan limbs stretched and moving in the night, however many could fit in a tent. They smelled like socks, the boys in summer, like sweat, deodorant, and upturned soil, and I remember catching a boy peeking at me in the shower and holding his gaze, never sure if it actually meant something. I remember moments of genuine joy at learning to swim, learning to cook on an open fire, learning to use a pocket knife to carve letters into wood. Hiking, renovating trails, repairing buildings. I want to keep those good memories as much as possible, cling to them more than the bad ones, the moments of shame—about the body, about being good enough, about the force of the law pulling us all together like chickens into a coop.
7. A Scout is Obedient
The wording on my Eagle card is simple: “The National Eagle Association invites you to join a distinguished group of world explorers, national leaders, and other accomplished individuals.” The badge itself is a small metal eagle pendant with wings spread, hanging under a red, white, and blue piece of cloth, emblazoned with the scout motto: Be Prepared.
But what am I supposed to prepare for? The Eagle card reads like an advertisement for joining a pioneer brigade for the Oregon Trail. As in rugged individualism. As in manifest destiny. As in bloody and shameful histories of conquest that don’t deserve rehabilitation.
I’m ambivalent about the admittedly broad variety of skills and experiences I was left with when I rose up the ranks. If I could take stock of what I gained in scouting, the list would be capricious: A guilt complex, a sense of confidence, a sense of humility, years of worrying about being masculine enough (though any boy could pick up this anxiety anywhere in America), a belief that the USA was permanent and sacred, a tendency toward kindness, a series of traumatic nightmares that I only have when sharing a bed with someone, a love of hiking, a love of accomplishment, a strong work ethic, a hatred of hypocrisy, an overwrought sense of loyalty to principles, a love of campfires and celebrations and celebrating the accomplishments of others, a difficult relationship with other people’s hands.
8. A Scout is Cheerful
The night before I am arrested for a DUI, I see an article in The New Republic titled “Let the Boy Scouts Die Out, Already,” by Matt Farwell, a fellow Eagle Scout. In his conclusion, he is (Article 1) admirably blunt: “Though I didn’t have the language to express it in my youth, I discovered that the Boy Scouts of America was full of men like Bob Gates: self-righteous, well-scrubbed creeps who kept their external aura of civic virtue shiny, obscuring the grubby evil in the institutions and traditions they oversaw.”[1] His article comes in the aftermath of the BSA’s announcement that it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. He lays out the reason for the institution’s longstanding corruption—its protection of pedophiles, its performative guise of a particular kind of toxic masculinity, the psychological pressure it puts on boys.
I agree with the sentiments, with Farwell’s assessment. It’s time to let this institution fade out (against Article 7). Yet what I’m most struck by is the image that accompanies the article: A young scout holding a large sign over his head wearing a MAGA cap at the 2016 Republican National Convention. Behind him, a man glares—is this a scout dad? The position of the photograph is mortifying because the boy looks uncertain, caught by a photographer with a man watching behind him, sitting casually in the seats before the convention.
Nobody in the photograph looks happy to be there. The scout dad looks contemptuous and the boy looks frightened (Article 10). Neither of them seems like they consent to being photographed. Does the boy know he is watched? Does he consent to being at the RNC? This photograph, more than the article, captures my experience in the BSA—a network of anxiety and surveillance, never certain of my agency—except that for me, it was the other scouts, not the scout dads, who were the problem.
9. A Scout is Thrifty
The scout dads would joke about what they did with their Eagle cards. They talked about how great it was to be a marked man, especially if a cop pulled them over. They would flash their Eagle card instead of their driver’s license. Woops, they said, sorry officer. Wrong card. This would get them off the hook for a speeding ticket (Article 1), not that any Eagle Scout would get caught speeding (Article 7), let alone lie to an officer.
Some of the scout dads were cops, who openly talked about giving preferential treatment to known Eagles. It was one of the perks of joining the cult of marked men. They told me to put it on my resume. They told me it would land me jobs. It’s a get-out-of-jail-free card, a golden ticket. I never got the chance to try that out, though. By the time I was pulled over, I was so far removed from the Boy Scouts that I had forgotten I even had the card in my wallet until an officer pulled it out hours later with my insurance and debit. All I could think to do was comply with the situation as well as I could (Article 7) without trying to trick my way out of a conviction. There was no way out.
10. A Scout is Brave
In an 8-person tent at Camp Geronimo, when I was thirteen, the older boys started talking competitively or jokingly about their sex lives, as older boys do. I didn’t know when to laugh, or what the punchlines were in some cases. I was a late bloomer. They noticed my confusion when I didn’t react to a story about jerking off. One boy asked me if I even knew what that was, and I had to admit that I did not—I wouldn’t masturbate (or even really know how) for about three more years, much later than most boys. At thirteen, I hadn’t had any interest in trying; was that normal? I really didn’t know, like there was something wrong with me. That’s how they decided to make it seem, at least.
One boy, some years older, who had decided during those years to be cruel to me whenever possible, decided to demonstrate. What I remember is him standing over me while I tried to ignore him in my sleeping bag, his hand making salad tossing motions over his, another boy telling him to get a sock. I turned my back as he kept at it. I don’t remember if he finished. At that age, I didn’t even know what it meant to finish. Was that normal? I wasn’t normal. I didn’t know what to do and I didn’t want to see it anymore, not then, not with him, not like that, not that it mattered what I wanted.
11. A Scout is Clean
When one of the scout dads prepared me (Scout Motto) for the Grand Canyon Council’s interview, we sat down together at one of the chipped, brown foldup lunch tables in the gym while the other scouts played capture-the-flag. Ordinarily, scout dads, as the acting troop leaders, are supportive and polite and kind. This time, the troop leader negated and workshopped my possible responses to the Council’s possible questions. My ethics were at stake. It wasn’t about the quality of the home repair I had done or my mastery of fire-building. What mattered was whether or not I was a qualified law-abiding scout.
Once, he asked me what it meant to be clean (Article 11). I didn’t realize how coded the question was. I said that to be clean meant order and precision, that it meant routine, that it meant a moral compass without infiltration, without distraction.
No, he told me. It’s about drugs. You have to be clean, get it? A scout is clean, as in, he’s not on anything. Clean as in sober, or at least smart enough not to get behind the wheel when he’s not. It was then I realized how coded the language we had been using really was, how simplistic so much of it was meant to be. I remember him leaning forward and telling me that if I got this wrong, I might not pass the test. I could almost smell the sterilized sliver of dissolving mint glued to his tongue.
12. A Scout is Reverent
The description of the Eagle rank on the scouts’ website is delightfully melodramatic: “Eagle Scout is not just an award; it is a state of being. Those who earned it as youth [sic] continue to earn it every day as adults.”
This isn’t just a marking, but a state of being. So be it. It took six years to go through the ranks and become an Eagle. It took another six to feel, however briefly, at ease with the marks it left. In the fall of 2016, at a Halloween party when I was a grad student in Nebraska, I loaned what I had of my scout uniform (Articles 3 and 7)—a green sash with all my merit badges and a red kerchief—to an officemate for his costume, “questionable scout master.” He paired my real scouting paraphernalia with short jeans shorts, black reflective sunglasses, and a fake mustache, and joined another officemate who dressed up as “toxic masculinity” by wearing a cub scout uniform. We were English grad students—all of our costumes were niche to our community. We went as inside jokes about theory and literature. I went as “David Imposter Wallace” by wrapping a bandana around my head.
We danced and we drank long into the night. In my cohort, being an Eagle Scout became part of my reputation—as a follower of rules, a law-abiding do-gooder. The reputation clung to me, not that it mattered what I wanted. It’ll probably be part of my reputation forever.
I ended the night in a blur watching my officemate dance with his notoriously long, gangly legs while my merit badges slipped over his boney body, trying to remember what half of them meant in their stitched white circles. First Aid, Swimming, Wilderness Survival, Citizenship in the Community, Camping.
[1] Matt Farwell, “Let the Boy Scouts Die, Already,” The New Republic, February 21, 2020.
about the author
Keene Short is a writer in Spokane, Washington and the managing editor for Atticus Review. Find more at keeneshort.com.
about the artist
Michelle McElroy is a native New Englander who studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Interested in how light and shadow can transform everyday scenes are a constant inspiration. She may see these while on early morning runs, getting midnight snacks in the kitchen or simple common observations that people can connect with or create a narrative of their own. She enjoys connecting with the viewer who can relate and share a similar feelings from common scenes that are actually special moments. You can find Michelle's work at www.michellemcelroy.com.