by statesofminds

Created on: April 18, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

What has become of the Boy Scouts in this country? Have they become so modernized in this day and age that they have forgotten their outdoor roots? Have they done away with their outdoor merit badge program including the one for identifying poisonous plants such as poison ivy? I had an experience that leads me to think so.

I was lucky in the fact that while I grew up I was able to spend vast quantities of time in the woods hiking, camping and boating. As strange as it sounds, the only poison ivy I saw was of identification sketches in books-until I moved to the large city of Philadelphia.

My friend and roommate whose, whose nickname was Scoob, also enjoyed the outdoors and had been an Eagle Scout (the highest level in the Boy Scouts). We had many conversations and even a few outdoor experiences which convinced me of his competence. I was about to learn the hard way that costly mistakes can happen even with a wealth of experience.

We had a beautiful row home in the middle class area of the city called Manyunk. We even had a backyard, with a catch: it was uncared for in the months before we moved in and was in extreme need of being trimmed and cleaned up.

Scoob had decided to tackle the backyard problem at the worst point first, in the very back of the yard where a thick tangled mess of vines were sprawled. That was where he was when I found him, trying to find a way to remove the buggers. The only problem we believed we had was a lack of tools; Scoob had been wrapping the vines around his wrists and forearms and yanking them from the ground, leaving them in piles before bagging them.

Not being a slouch, I offered to help. I had considered whether the vines were safe to be removing in this way, but dismissed the question quickly as they had no thorns-and I figured if anyone would know, it would be Scoob. I was wrong!

It was a hot and dirty job taking about three hours, but, working together, we finally got the entire yard looking good. Not wishing to stay dirty and smelly, we each took a shower afterward and felt fine. But poison ivy can be tricky. Scoob noticed the first symptoms three days later-the infamous itchy rash. I followed a day after that.

It took us another two days of itching but not scratching to narrow down what it had to be. The three day wait had been enough that neither one of us considered that we may have gotten into poison ivy. I was luckier than Scoob, since I had been wearing long sleeves and did not touch my face when the oil had been on me; I only had it on my forearms and hands, while Scoob also had the rash on his head, face, neck and chest. The irony never escaped either of us that we both lived in a rural area and spent much time out of doors most of our lives, yet we did not experience the fun of poison ivy until we moved to a major city!

There is another humorous part to this story. We thought we had gotten all of the poison ivy from the yard that day. We learned differently from our new roommate the next summer. He mentioned one evening in passing that since he had a day off, he planned to clean the yard up some. Neither Scoob or I warned him of the danger, even though we should have. Hey, we had gotten it all, right? We were wrong, but at least we could tell our new roommate what he was afflicted with!

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