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of the other troops I was aware of. Our leaders were absorbed totally in the concept of "Be prepared" and taught us about the outdoors like our lives could someday depend on what we were learning then. We did the usual kind of weekend camping and hiking trips all scouts do, but one summer we went on a trip that was quite unusual for us at the time.

An upcoming trip, we were forewarned, was going to be a survival camping trip, and that was about all we were told to prepare us. After being released from school on a Friday afternoon, our scout troop traveled caravan style by car far into the country. We didn't bring any of the equipment that we normally did for a weekend scout camping trip. Tents, coolers, dining flys, cook kits, lanterns, axes, and any of the other gear that typically accompanied us had been left behind. We only had the clothes on our backs. Our destination was one of the biggest lakes in Tennessee, and when we arrived we were told what our survival camping would entail. As we stood at the edge of the lake, each of the 25 members of the troop was issued the following: one piece of aluminum foil, about 12 inches wide by 24 inches long, one half pound of raw ground beef, one onion, two candy bars, one package of sweetened Kool-Aid, a paper cup, a canteen full of water, and three strike-anywhere matches. Then they told us that these items were our survival rations for the next 24 hours. Shortly, two motorboats pulled up to the shore below us and they began loading us in. As we took off across the water, the leaders told us that we were going to be dropped off individually at different sites around the lake where we would spend the night and most of the next day totally alone. We were supposed to figure out how and when to eat the meager food supply without letting it spoil, create our own shelter, make our own fire and keep it going, and learn how, in that short period of time, to survive. When I was dropped off alone and stood there watching the boat pull away, I was terrified. I felt like this was the worst kind of roughing it I would ever experience. I learned that the quicker I embraced the situation and did the best I could with what I had, relying on what I had learned from my Boy Scout handbook and previous camping trips, the better off I would be. I won't describe the whole experience of that particular trip, but it amazed me for years afterward that the 24-hour period seemed almost like an eternity, and when they came to pick me up the

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