Smelling The Ponderosa Pine
David Patrone
Group Photo
When I was a teenager, a few weeks before my 17th birthday, I went to a Boy Scout camp called Philmont. It’s in the heart of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in Cimarron, New Mexico and it was my first major trip away from home (Philly) without my parents. It was basically an extended climbing/hiking trip between 2,000 and 12,000 feet with about four other guys around 17 years old and two adult leaders. Philmont is a rite of passage for a Boy Scout, just like Order of the Arrow or becoming an Eagle Scout. We hiked about 100 miles in 12 days. The place is littered with Ponderosa Pines, Aspen trees, abandoned logging/miner settlements and great trails that twist and turn through forests and along cliff sides in several different climates. Imagine being dropped into an Ansel Adams coffee table book in full color, smell and feel. One of our adult group leaders, Rob McDermott, had worked out there as a “Ranger” when he was younger and he gave us a view of Philmont that not many others get to see. He also taught us a few tricks and interesting anecdotes about that environment. I was accustomed to the deciduous forests of the Northeastern United States and I had learned at an early age to survive in the wild. As a kid I spent a lot of time on my own in the forests while camping, fishing, shooting or carving flimsy spears to catch frogs and stuff with. I was a budding survivalist at 10. I can remember checking out a survival book in third grade and wondering what it would be like to live like that kid in "My Side of the Mountain." I read that book right after my parents had split up and I had wanted desperately to run away like that kid, to escape the horror of a new school where I didn't fit in racially, intellectually or disciplinarily. I can recall thinking I was going to have to learn to take care of myself, and quick. It was also my first experience with Henry David Thoreau and Walden Pond which may explain my standpoint on Civil Disobedience.
One of the things that Rob mentioned to us while we were taking a break one afternoon, which I thought was kind of trivial at the time, was that a Ponderosa Pine smells like Butterscotch or Vanilla, depending on the person who smells it. If you find a Ponderosa Pine and you sniff the sap between cracks in the bark, you will be instantly hit with a rather surprisingly strong fragrance. When I was at Philmont, it was a big controversy. People would ask, “are you a Butterscotch or a Vanilla guy?”
Years later, while on leave with a frend of mine in Reno, I was trying to explain this to his father in defense of my habit of sniffing trees whenever we went hiking out in the West. A Ponderosa has this thick bark with broad, golden, sap-filled cracks that crisscross all the way up the tree. Many of the pines in the Western United States have a similar pattern so I would always go up and sniff them to see if it was a Ponderosa. We were on his Dad's boat in the middle of Lake Tahoe and I got on a rant about trees. It seems I am eccentric, even for a Marine. When I was in Marine Combat Training at Camp Lejeune, they called me "The Bug Man" because I was always catching strange bugs and animals and letting them loose in the hooches, or guys' sleeping bags. Besides being a natural prankster and curious, I was already familiar with the climate and habitat. I would track animals, eat bugs, fish with my hands, cook using the sun, chew on pine needles for Vitamin C, make Ceviche out of limes and raw fish, you know, all that stuff. These days I’m a downtown kind of guy but there was a time when I was a full-on Tom Brown and it helped me through some rough spots in the Corps. Those stories I tell in private..
I’m sure you're thinking, "that’s great and all, Dave, but uh... what's the point?" You see, to me, the smell of a Ponderosa Pine is more than the smell of butterscotch or vanilla, it reminds me of gaining my independence. Philmont, as a whole, reminds me of my independence. It represents a time where I carried everything I needed in a Jansport backpack (that literally weighed almost the same as I did) for two weeks, in the middle of the wilderness, in adverse mountain conditions like hail, snow, torrential rain, altitude and baking summer days. I didn't just survive; but really excelled with guys who were all younger and a lot bigger than I was (at a time in a boy’s life when bigger is an important thing see the group photo for the comparison). We didn’t just hike either, we had very challenging mental/physical obstacle courses to complete, we climbed grade IV rocks, we rappelled, we spelunked, we did a whole day of lumberjack competition and we explored an abandoned mine. We panned for gold, we roped horses and raced pack mules. We usually dominated the other groups too. We had a tight crew. I tried to teach them stuff that they pretended not to care about, like pointing out a half-chewed branch that was still dripping with saliva from a deer that must have just ran away a minute ago; or the belief that a beaver’s damn could indicate the length or severity of a winter; or a simple trap that would catch chipmunks (AKA Mini-Bears) before they could eat your Twizzlers and Pemmican. They ribbed me while we were at Philmont but when we got back, they’d tell their friends that I was a cool guy to hike with 'cause I knew so much about the forest. You may have no idea what a feeling of acceptance that fosters in a 17 year old city kid. It’s enough to make you want to become a Marine and do that kind of stuff for a living. I actually joined the Marines a few weeks after I came back from Philmont. I had forgotten about that until just this moment, hmmm... (Tapping the chin, thinking, "is this the premise for a novel?")
Some guys associate the “new car smell” of their first ride (whether it was new or not) with their first "freedom feeling". That feeling that you can go anywhere, that you're finally independent. Some associate it with College or their first apartment.
I smell independence in the butterscotch pines that remind me of a
trip when I realized I could survive with nothing but a knife and a compass (and I really
didn’t even need those). In the taste of a root I dug up myself or berries that
I found near a stream I taste that same freedom.
After writing this, I realized that I can’t remember the last time I did any of those things. Some would say, "You need a vacation."
But...
I found another freedom in the satisfaction of knowing I can make a successful living, simply by entertaining people. Of course, there’s a lot more to my business than that: Accounting, booking the gigs, calling the musicians, arranging transportation, updating the website, advertising, learning music and songs blah, blah, blah… but the core of what I do is to entertain. I do it well, and it’s a valuable commodity.
At this rate, I think I’ll never need a vacation.
David Patrone
Naturalist, Essayist, Entertainer
Notes: I was looking at the website and man, they really toned down the treks. We hiked all OVER that bastard in twelve days and we had two layovers. It looks like they started cheesing on the trails. I'm going to have to go find my old Philmont maps and find out our itinerary cause I was sure we did like 96 miles. Maybe I was wrong but we hit a lot more stuff than that lame ass 76 mile trek they call "Super Strenuous" Maybe it was because our leader was a Ranger, we did stuff no one else did but damn that stuff looks weak now.