Scoutmaster's Minute

I was once again wandering through my stacks of books when I came across this passage in Marcus Aurelius' Meditations:

We shrink from change; yet is there anything that can come into being without it?

Marcus Aurelius (one of my personal heroes) tells us that all of life is change: everything you cherish today is the result of the changes you made yesterday. Everything you will cherish tomorrow will be the result of the changes you make today.

In November of 1945, the leadership of the Nicolet Area Council made a breathtaking change. They purchased 320 acres of land in northern Wisconsin for the purpose of establishing and maintaining a Boy Scout Camp on the shores of Bear Paw Lake. Everything we currently know, love and cherish about camp, everything that is celebrated in these pages, came into being because a group of people had the courage to make a fundamental change.

We are poised once again on the edge of a period of fundamental change. Great physical changes will be taking place at camp in the next couple of years. Expansion of the Waterfront and the Ranges will begin in the spring of 2000. Construction of a new Dining Hall is set to begin next September. New campsites and other new facilities are visible on the horizon. All of this is being done with both eyes on the future. Scouting is growing, and the bottom line is that we have to expand our facilities in order to offer larger numbers of Scouts the same quality they've had in the past.

But a lot of this is unsettling to think about, for reasons I understand very very well. We worry that all the little things we've gotten used to, everything we know and love, will fade into the past. Will the new dining hall have the same wonderful wooden smell? I doubt it. Will the waterfront look the same? Nope. Will the ranges have that same feeling they always have in late afternoon, when everything's quieting down and the sun's coming from a different angle and the open ground has absorbed all the heat its going to? I don't know.

We'll be saying goodbye to some of the things we love about Camp. But what is it that made us love those things? The memories and the experiences we all shared. The fellowship and the learning that took place. Above all, the spirit that inhabited (and still inhabits) every square inch of camp. Where does that spirit come from? Does it come from blueprints? Layouts? Buildings? No...

It comes from us.

So all of us -- everyone involved in the BPSC community -- have our work cut out. When the Scouts of 2000, 2001, and beyond see these brand-spanking-new facilities, it will be up to us to make sure that they're filled with all of the intangible things that made the old facilities so special: the fellowship, the spirit, and, yes, the love. It will be up to us to make sure that Scouts in the new facilities learn the same lessons of values, ethics, leadership and confidence that the Scouts in the old facilities learned.

If we succeed -- if we can honor the past, embrace the present, and work for the future --
then, in the year 2050, when another new Dining Hall is built at Bear Paw, there'll be an old Scouter who will lean over to a wide-eyed 11-year-old and say "If you think this is cool, let me tell you about when they built the old place, way back in 2001... now *that* was a Dining Hall!"

In Scouting, our only real measure of success is the future.

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OTHER STUFF:

--Please remember to make your campsite reservations for 2000 with the Menasha office -- space is filling up quickly!

--We're still accepting applications for the 2000 Bear Paw Staff. Note interview dates and locations!

--The Bear Paw Leader's Guidebook will be going to press in Nov/Dec, and details and updates on our 2000 program will be coming soon...

CONGRATULATIONS:

--to Matt , for getting his cast off (finally)
--to Derek and Chip, who look to be as close as you can get to Eagle without actually having the thing on your shirt (finish it up, guys!)
--to Leslie, (asst. cook '96-97), who joins the proud ranks of former Cooks entering motherhood (hear that, Leah?)
--to Keegan (waterfront '95-99), for successfully graduating USMC Boot Camp
--and to Neil, who is entering the initial preliminary stages of thinking about looking into the possibility of maybe sometime in the future considering buying a computer