sprawling neo-Victorian homes, strange animal noises, vines and shadows. We boys played close to the centre as we waited for the “meeting” to start.

First thing was inspection. We would straggle into the gym, fiddle with our uniforms, line up, and Mr. Stevens, our scout master, would inspect us. It filled me fantastic terrors never felt before to stand at attention, ramrod straight, waiting to see if he would notice that our scarves were tied wrong or that our socks were white. But instead of banishing us, he’d point with the back of his finger and mumble, “Your scarf….” We obeyed Mr. Stevens, but we had no other way of thinking of him than as one of our teachers. He was a professional scout master who did it for the money. Like all grown-ups, he did things only because he had to. He had a showy, disdainful tiredness, as if he’d spent the day before the meeting driving all over town to clean up our messes. Mr. Stevens was probably a retail salesman who made a living pandering to snooty West Van customers and taking orders from snooty West Van managers. Once a week, he got to tell their kids where they could go. The problem was that even at twelve we could smell his fear. His son showed up at one meeting—we face-washed him in the snow and locked him in a cabinet.

After inspection, we got down to the real point of the “meeting”: playing games. It was too dark to go sailing, so we doffed our berets and sashes and changed into running shoes. I hated this part because I was pathologically competitive but no good at any sport that involved a ball. I was chunky, ungainly and afraid of the bigger and tougher boys who played without thinking, winning on instinct. All the time I was trying to think of how to play better, only to get bodychecked in mid-syllogism. Basketball, handball, soccer, ball hockey—I was usually the last one picked for teams.

Of course “picking teams” is the most primal, savage ritual in boyhood. Every recess and scout meeting it refuted everything our teachers taught us about equality, tolerance and good manners. The best boys know they’re going to be taken first, but the worst always delude themselves that maybe this time someone will take pity and draft them sooner. They never are. There’s a pecking order, and if I can kick your ass, I’m pecking you, baby. I always loathed picking teams and the inevitable “Uh…I guess we get Tavish this time….” But I can’t say now that picking teams is a bad thing. Team sports is about fielding the best team. My thinking was completely individualistic: the best boys were picked first because the most talented, I was picked last because least talented. Just my rotten luck. In fact, the best boys passed a lot and made the players around them better. Boys like me, instead of finding a way to be role-players, offered nothing to the team but neurosis and fear of losing.

Although we spent most of our time playing sports, I believe that Mr. Stevens and his left-tenants made the effort to instill us with good old-fashioned Baden-Powellian virtues: the service-ethic, taking the rough with the smooth, playing a straight bat. These ideas are inseparable from the Churchillian ethos and cricket, and to early-adolescent non-British little shits, about as comprehensible. So instead we picked teams and played ball hockey and hacked away at each other—as Canadian boys are born knowing how to do.

Like boy scouts, we could earn merit badge bling and sew it onto our sashes. To get the knot-tying badge, you had to tie and untie the eight basic seafaring knots in one minute. I tended to go for the badges that required a written or oral test to get. There was a “computers” badge emblazoned with a reel-to-reel emblem. To get it you had to memorize a computer catechism written in the early 70’s.

What are the two kinds of computers?

Analog and digital.

How big is a computer?

As big as a big building or as small as a big room, etc.

Mr. Stevens deadpanned the questions and I rattled off the answers. He saw me smirking and called me on it. I told him about the Apple IIe personal computer we had at home and at school—how you could fit fifty of them in a big room, how I played Zork and Oregon Trail and wrote my own programs. He took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and went back to the computer catechism.

Sea Scouts don’t have jamborees, they have regattas. Mr. Stevens told us months in advance about the regatta and how we would get to camp and live in tents for a long weekend and grill our food on an open fire and meet other Canadian, American and Australian sea scouts and represent our turf and compete in scout events. We were very excited. We got permission and cheques from our parents. We made flags and banners and prepared for the Scoutalympics. Then one meeting, one of the left-tenants told me: Mr. Stevens wants to talk to you in the office.

I knew right away what it was about. Recently at school we’d started listening to the Beastie Boys and teaching each other the lyrics. I had “Paul Revere” cold before I ever heard it. Licensed to Ill, their 1986 debut album, was our Iliad. We’d meet behind the trees and rap our own lines and talk about how we were going to bring cardboard to school and breakdance. I made up this rap about our vice-principal, Mr. Junek. The rap accused him of crimes strange and foul, and rhymed him with eunuch. It made people laugh and pay attention to me, so I rapped it a lot. My friends said I should write it down. Once I did, it circulated in manuscript form. Soon enough, guys I hardly knew at sea scouts were quoting it back to me and slapping me on the back. Friends from my school had given them copies. And poor me, delighted with all this attention, I didn’t see where it was all going to end until that left-tenant tapped me and said I had to report to the office.

that left-tenant tapped me and said I had to report to the office.

There was no office; they used the sports equipment room for hearings too unseemly for the light of gym. I knew I was in big trouble when I saw Mr. Stevens sitting in symmetry, flanked by two left-tenants. I stood next to a crate of dodge-balls. Silence as Mr. Stevens unfolded a paper I’d never seen before and quoted my Swiftian broadside to me:

Junek pimps da teacher-hoes, most a da time,
Then prances down da halls, feelin’ so fine.

He asked me if I’d written it. I was so shocked and ashamed that I couldn’t say a thing. The words that sounded so rad when Mike D or my friends said them were, like, gross in Mr. Stevens’s prim, Presbyterian mouth. I wanted to tell him that I’d written it just for fun, that I actually liked Mr. Junek, but to be cool you had to hate his miserable guts—just like you, sir. Then Mr. Stevens asked me if any of these accusations were true. I said nix to the murders, but for the rest, I didn’t know if they were true or not. They could be. One of the left-tenants asked me how Mr. Junek could be both a rapist and a eunuch. Mr. Stevens told him to shut up.

When all the evidence was in, the Sea Scout Tribunal deliberated for a couple minutes, then pronounced its verdict: I was to be busted down to sub-scout and not allowed to go to the regatta this year. No, no! I pleaded, pounding my first into a dodge-ball. Not that! All my friends are going to the regatta. I’ll do anything!

“Yes,” said Mr. Stevens, standing up, “you will, won’t you.” It was the same heavy tone that Mr. Junek used to cast the pearl of a lesson before us when he thought we were too stuck-up and swinish to understand. Little silver-spoon-sucking West Van bedwetters. But I should say that during this Prozess I was never told what rule I had broken, nor how I should direct my interest in writing in such a way not to libel others and traumatize myself.

Over the next few months, I furled my sails and drifted out of sea scouts without having really learned anything other than new modes of trouble. I went back to the lotus-eating of television and video games and trivial one-upmanship. One night a week and a long weekend a year were not enough visitation rights for the redoubtable Mr. Stevens to make men of us or even to get us to give a damn.

Instead of a motto, the Sea Scouts uphold a promise:

The Sea Scout Promise

As a Sea Scout, I promise to do my best
To guard against water accidents;
To know the location and proper use of the lifesaving devices on every boat I board;
To be prepared to render aid to those in need and;
To seek to preserve the motto of the sea, “Women and children first.”

The Sea Scout handbook notes that, “in modern times, this historical maritime phrase is not meant to be sexist, but is taken to mean that those who are trained and most capable should give special assistance to those who are not.” I suppose this means that I was a child or a woman—in the modern, non-sexist sense of the word. This being the case, maybe it was right for me to jump from the scout ship before my friends did. Either that, or the special assistance I received was of the drumhead kind so necessary to the maintenance of discipline at sea.