Uncivil Air Patrol

In my early to middle teens, I was a member of an organization called Civil Air Patrol
( CAP ). It is a civilian organization that is affiliated with the Air Force. As an organization, it has been around since before WW II, when CAP members did spotting work looking for enemy submarines off the US Coast. I was involved for about 1 year or so. It was a big step up from boy scouts, and it was a lot of fun. We had to wear uniforms, and while that wasn’t so much fun, we got to do some really cool things, like search and rescue missions, flying, and camping, except they called it bivouacking.

One weekend we went camping at the Plainville Fish and Game club. It wasn’t much of a club, I don’t recall there being a pond, so there was no fishing on site, and there was just one lowly building, a one room cement affair with no real furniture to speak of.

We didn’t care, and we pitched a large tent right outside the building. It was an old military style canvas tent and we slept on cots, I think there was about 10 of us in there. During the day we practiced a variety of military type activities such as orientation and rock climbing, and at night we played flash light tag and the like.

It was sort of cold, so we decided that we were going to have a fire in the club house. It was wet so it was hard to find dry wood. We managed to scrounge some up, but our supply was low. There was however an old, broken, wooden, pinball table in the club house, the only real.. anything… in the building, and so it was quickly cut up for kindling. Everything went into the fire, mechanism, wires, everything. It smelled really bad, but it did burn a variety of lovely shades. I think the death of the pinball table was a sign, because the weekend got really crazy.

Oh, things started out quite orderly, but soon dissolved into a Lord of the Flies kind of situation. It started the first night of the 2 night trip. Some older teenagers came by and struck up a conversation with some of our older CAP members. The conversation involved beer, and the next thing you know, the older kids are gone. We hung around waiting for them for awhile, hoping to have some camping-type fun, but after a few hours, some of us went looking for them. Primarily because we had to station a “watch” someone to stay up for a certain period of time, juts like in the military. Someone had to be up at all times, and we did not want to have to do the whole things ourselves.

I remember that it was lightly raining, and we followed the trail the others had taken. It wasn’t long and the trail started to wind itself down to a road. There were no immediate homes in sight. The trail followed some high tension wires and as we stood under them we could hear them faintly snapping and hissing in the rain. They were also lightly glowing as well, an eerie sight.







The older kids did come back and they were all slightly inebriated. I hit the hay somewhat early as I was tired, and I had pulled watch duty for the dead of the night. When my time came, I was woken up by the previous night watch guy. I went outside and sat in a lawn chair. It had stopped raining, but things were still damp. I curled up in the chair with a blanket and promptly fell asleep, I missed waking up my relief and everyone just slept through the night. I never got any grief for it because I think everyone was happy to just sleep.

The next day we did quite a bit of repelling practice. One of the older guys climbed a tree to the top and affixed a rope. The rope was pulled taught across our camping area at an angle and we each took turns sliding down it on various accoutrements, from a type of sling, to something that was nothing more than just a big meat hook on a pulley.

The previous evenings nefarious AWOL trip left many of the guys wanting to go to the land of Buzz, and many talked longingly of alcohol consumption. Some one had smuggled in a few beers, and this just got people even more primed. One fellow said that you could get inebriated by drinking a type of tea, Sarsaparilla, I think it was. He said he knew how to make it so we spent several hours locating the correct plants and then boiling them to make the tea. It tasted awful, but everyone seemed to really be enjoying themselves. It turned out that the tea we made was really Sassafras tea, which supposedly had no intoxicating properties at all.

Despite that fact, people started to get good and hopped up as nightfall came. Again, we all hung out in the cinderblock building to have a fire, and again, we had some difficulty in getting it going because the wood was wet. We discovered that powdered Kool-aid with sugar caused the fire to behave in quite a lively manner and soon none of us had any Kool-aid left. Not satisfied with the size of the fire, older boys cut down a few slender trees, climbed up on to the flat roof of the building and began putting the trees down the chimney. This had the desired effect and pretty soon not only did we have a nice fire going, but parts of the roof were burning too. Smoke was coming out of various locations in and around the roof line and large palls of smoke were also billowing out of the chimney and into the building, such that we had to go back outside, where it had once again begun to lightly rain.

The rest of the evening passed without further incident, though we all kept a wary eye on the roof for fear of it actually bursting into flame. The next day saw us do some more repelling work, this time with the rope tied around the building’s chimney on one end and the bumper of a car on the other. Since the almost-fire of the night before, the guys attitude regarding the building became somewhat more nonchalant. A small group of guys had found a piece of pipe with cement on the end, which they discovered made very satisfying holes in the cinder block walls when thrown like a spear. In short order the side of the wall looked like Swiss cheese. I myself had several goes with the pipe.


In the meantime, we were also preparing to leave. People were packing and taking down the tent. The guy whose car it was that the rope was attached simply got in, started it up and gunned it. Dirt flew everywhere in a large plume, like the wake left behind a jet boat. The rope was still tied to the top of the chimney. We all held our breath as the rope stretched. What would give first, the rope or the chimney? With no audible sound, the chimney came away from the building, not just the top, but nearly the whole thing peeled away from the wall. As it fell it tumbled apart in a cascading rain of brick.

Everyone stopped and stared in silence, and then as a group we all begin to laugh; letting out one big belly laugh. We danced around hooting and hollering with tears rolling down our cheeks. It took us quite awhile to stop laughing, making it much more difficult to pack.

We never did return to the Plainville Fish and Game club.