Schnoz and I go way back. It started even before Boy Scouts when we would camp and hike and fish and pretend to be men, unlike now when we are men pretending to be boys. When I think about how we became friends, it comes down to three things. We always liked fishing, starting with cane poles and bluegill, moving on to Zebco 202 reels and bass, and finally graduating to flyfishing for trout, which is not really a sport but a disease, kind of an obsessive/compulsive disorder with the symptoms of lust for gear, a fascination for bugs that ordinary people swat or ignore, and a great desire to walk in nearly freezing water on very hot days when gnats, mosquitoes and blackflies feast on human perspiration, blood, and tenderloin of ear. The second thing that made us friends is that being with Schnoz is much like traveling with a vaudeville act. I am never bored.
The third thing that cemented our friendship was Sallie Backus. Our friendship became permanent in fourth grade when we first realized that girls were different from boys and we secretly liked the difference, which at that time was primarily length of hair and finer facial features. We both had a crush on Sallie Backus, a cute, blondish prima donna, who distracted us from math, science, and spelling. When we finally confronted her and told her she’d have to choose between us because that was only fair, she said, “Well, I like one of you except for his nose, and I like the other one except for his ears.” Schnoz looked at her and said, “You know what, Sallie Backus? There’s nothing wrong with Grumpy’s ears. He’ll grow into them and be fine. You’re stuck being a girl forever.” Then he just walked away before she could hit him, so she hit me instead. It was worth it. The next week we saw her passing notes to Alexander Terra, the rich lawyer’s son, and realized ears and noses were not the real issue with Sallie. Ah, yes, fourth grade.
In Boy Scouts, Schnoz was the kid who never understood that it was an organization born with military ancestry that included uniform requirements such as a well-wound neckerchief, a web belt with a shiny buckle, pins, medals, and patches with a crazy set of rules about who could wear what and where he could wear it. I looked pretty good beside Schnoz, and his best gift to me was a healthy dose of “Who cares about that stupid rule?” After a while, the Scoutmasters gave up on him and figured some boys would just be Tenderfoot their whole career. If there had been a rank based on campfire stories, Schnoz would have been an Eagle Scout.
One night during a week-long summer camp when we were in seventh grade, a terrible storm blew through camp before we even had a campfire going, which scattered our troop into their tents. The lightning, thunder, and rain were horrific, especially since those were the days of heavy tents made of canvas and somehow designed with built-in leaks, drippy seams and a smell like that of wet dog.
After one particularly nasty cannonade of thunder, Schnoz said to me,”Grumpy, are you still wearing that St. Christopher medal your aunt gave you?” When I said yes, he said, “Give it to me.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Save our lives.” He took the chain, gave me back the medal, saying, “Here, this is useless.” Then he tied the chain to our aluminum tent pole and ran the chain over the old slats of the platform our tent was on and buried it outside.
“See, if lightning strikes, it’ll run down the pole through the chain and into the ground. Now we can sleep safe and sound.”
I would have, except for a steady drip right above my head where some previous Scout had apparently touched the canvas with a forbidden cigarette. With Schnoz’s help and some shoe strings, I tied one corner of of my Scout poncho to a tent pole and another to a corner of my army cot and then tied the hood to the other tent pole to make a kind of lean-to above my cot so the water would run down to a gap in the deck slats. It was a thing of beauty, except that it pooled water at the edge of my cot and we had to empty it every hour. When we noticed our packs getting wet on the deck, we put them on his cot and covered them with his poncho, making sure all the corners draped over the side so any drips would run down to the deck. It was another thing of engineering beauty. We thought we could sleep on my cot with his head at my feet and my feet at his head, but that wasn’t very comfortable because the cot sagged, so we spent the night sitting back to back telling stories about three-legged dogs, lanterns made up of thousands of fireflies, and comparisons of Sallie’s butt to kettle drums, walrus blubber, inner tubes, and twenty more outrageous things. Sallie didn’t really have a big butt, but in seventh grade, reality never mattered when it came to nicknames. We decided that night her nickname would be Sallie Packass. Eventually she had to marry a proctologist and leave town to get away from her nickname. Schnoz grew to like his nickname and I tolerated mine so we never had to leave town.
In the morning after that storm, it took us a while to get out of our tent after taking down our engineering marvels and untying most of the granny knots in our shoestrings, but we found the trouble well worth it when we lined up at adolescent attention before marching to the mess hall and saw that we were the only Scouts not soaked to the bone. A minor casualty was one of Schnoz’s broken shoe strings, but that didn’t really matter because he usually shuffled along in his boots without tying them anyway. It takes a real friend to sacrifice a shoe string for you. We were the envy of the whole shivering troop because we were dry.
To this day, we can tolerate a sudden downpour, huddle in a high-tech nylon tent in a storm, or wait out flashes of lightning in a car by the side of a favorite riffle by looking at each other and saying at the same time, “Remember Sallie Packass?” Wherever you are, Sallie Packass, we still appreciate you for making us friends and we secretly thought you were pretty. Thank you. We’re sorry for the nickname we gave you. Not really. We’re still fourth graders.
kurthaberl 
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