Nixon and the Blue Frog  − 8 August, 1974

Among the many scattered tribes of middle class suburban boys in the summer of Richard Nixon, we were the Dakotas. Skinny, unwashed, and living for two long, hot weeks under leaky canvas tents on the western slopes of the Berkshires, the Dakotas rose just after the sun every day and hiked down the hill to a breakfast of powdered eggs and bug juice. Our troop leader was a man named Flip, who seemed ancient at the time but was probably about 23. Flip was a big guy and radiated inner city savvy, even in the dank woods of the Hudson Valley. He knew how to delegate power, and did so freely to a couple of teenage toughs in Scout uniforms who kept us in line with threats of physical violence.

At camp....One day the two aides de camp - whose names are lost to history but to whom I will assign the handles of Vito and Spike - decided to use Vito's switchblade (always a presence in camp, and an unspoken threat) for a friendly game of chicken. It was an exciting tournament, and the Dakotas all gathered around to watch; stuff like this didn't happen at home. Alas, the bout ended early, with the knife neatly penetrating Vito's left hand, front to back, with the point protruding obscenely out of his palm. We gasped in fascination, mesmerized by the wound. Vito screamed, of course, and hightailed it for the infirmary. The amazing part of the story wasn't the wound - it was the fact that Vito and Spike were allowed to continue as our overlords for the rest of the camping sojourn.

Things were different in the 70s.

I was reminded of that fact as I took the boys to Scout camp in the Adirondacks last week. The tents and wooden platforms and cheap metal cots were the same. The mosquitoes were the same. The mud was the same. (I'm guessing even the bug juice is the same). But the organization is clearly different - the value placed on the "camping experience" has been elevated, as has the emphasis on ecology, teamwork, and community values. There is something to be accomplished at camp nowadays (though, of course, we had merit badges) and 11-year-olds are a fully-protected species in the mountains. This made me feel better as a father leaving his son in the woods, but on the long run down the Thruway, I also remembered what it was like when I was a Dakota in the summer of '74.

They'd never allow the Blue Frog Hunt these days - although Nixonian Democracy seems back in vogue (more on that in a moment) and we're more tolerant of failure, corruption, and gross national disgrace. The hunt, which I think may have been called a Wildlife Contest at the time, involved trapping wild animals and bringing them back from the far corners of the reservation to the lodge, where they were recorded and points awarded for the degree of difficulty and the rarity of the species. Mammals were routinely released back into the wild - your usual array of squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons and the like (they gave us humane traps and peanut butter to catch 'em). Reptiles and amphibians suffered a fate far more cruel. Snakes, turtles, lizards, and frogs were dumped into a huge concrete pit with some water and a few rocks - so that we Scouts could observe them. What we observed was a shiny-skinned charnel house as the smaller specimens were devoured quickly.

The highest point total was to be awarded for the tribe that bagged the incredibly rare Blue Frog, a species only rarely sighted in the Taconic hills - though rumored to breed in the swamps on the far side of the lake. Off we went, oblivious to the counselors' little joke. My friend Doug (who comments here) actually plunged into a pond in frenzied pursuit, so sure was he that he'd seen the Blue Frog - and desperate for the sheer glory.

A few days later, we stood outside Flip's tent watching a flickering old portable television. Amazingly, Flip had brought a gasoline-powered generator up to the camp (such a thing would never be countenanced today) and we Dakotas looked over his ample shoulders and watched Richard Nixon resign.

Now, there's a temptation here to observe a certain end of innocence, a hackneyed gauzy-eyed look back to the moment when boys realized the world wasn't such a safe, bright, shiny place. Nixon had failed us. the Blue Frog was a hoax. But I'll resist. After all, this was 1974 - we already knew Nixon was a crook (the hearings had been on for more than a year), and we were a pretty cynical bunch besides. Cynicism resided in the very air of the 70s, on television, in the movies, in Mad magazine, in the newspapers. Being 12 in 1974 meant you came to an awareness of media after the failure of Vietnam, after the assassinations, after all the protests - you were entirely post-60s, but entirely pre-Reagan. We weren't scandalized by the Blue Frog trickery; we knew we'd do the same damned thing given the opportunity. And we suspected that with Nixon, that's just the way things were - that politicians were, in the main, not to be trusted.

The kids I dropped in the woods last weekend are probably less cynical and more protected than I was, but the world they're growing up in has the same echoes. They do not need to be named, so obvious are they. We suffer only from a lack of resignations, a paucity of final helicopter rides, a notable dearth of healthy national disgrace and shame. Those boys can search for national purpose 30 years after we watched Nixon resign in the woods.

But they'd have a better chance looking for the Blue Frog.

Comments:

kga245 (July 18, 2006. 08:46pm)

Tom - this is a very well-wrought story. The re-telling of a shared event makes me want to be a better writer myself. I think we all have these very public "shared experiences" in us. Only finding the right inner voice to tell it in is what makes them special. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for joining. Keep up the good work!