Wood Badge May 2011--Mutual Dell

I have not been a very consistent historian this last year. I have written letters to my family almost weekly, but have not shared anything on my Blog so that it can be included when I ever get around to publishing it. I went back to my family letters and extracted this information about my third Wood Badge experience the last week of May, 2011. It was a wonderful experience to work so closely with the great Scout leaders in American Fork East Stake. A lot of the participants were also from the East Stake, but I had a few in my Owl Patrol who were not--Jim White from Highland, Kasey Walker from West American Fork, and Nancy Davies from Eagle Mountain (I think). Here is the letter that I wrote on May 30, 2011, with a few pictures added.

 I just finished my third experience with Wood Badge last week, this time as a Troop Guide for an amazing Owl Patrol.

   

 Owl Patrol: (Left to right) Me, Jim White, Tony Anderson, Nancy Davies, Greg Squires, and Kasey Walker in front; Ryan Gunther and Lerin Porter in back.

Senior Patrol Leader Sam Liddiard and Scoutmaster John Miller

Staff and Participants

 It was fun to have Ammon and Brian on this Wood Badge course also. I sure enjoyed myself and learned so much. The first time there was just so much to digest that it didn't all sink in. Then I was on staff for a course last August and learned some of the things that I had missed the first time. This time I was a Troop Guide again and it was an absolutely amazing experience because I was not as worried as the first time that I was on staff. I was able to concentrate more on the principles that we taught instead of always worrying about what came next. Over the coming weeks I hope to be able to put into words some of the lessons I learned so you can share in my experience. We were in American Fork Canyon at Mutual Dell and there was no internet or cellphone service so we felt quite isolated but we prayed that the Lord would take care of our families at home while we were away from them. See Teresa's Blog for her experience getting locked in a downstairs bedroom with her boys and how she was blessed to get out of that predicament. I have a conviction of the value of Wood Badge in helping leaders of boys in Scouting and also in their personal and work lives. I witnessed a lot of opposition thrown at those who were on staff and I am convinced that it is because of the importance of the lessons to be learned at Wood Badge that Satan doesn't want to see happen because of the great strength it can be in doing the Lord's work. Sam Liddiard, who was the Senior Patrol Leader for the course, had his father die a week before Wood Badge and his funeral was the day before we began. He could have asked to be excused from serving on course but he did not. The morning that we were to begin, Bishop Back's son came up a bit early to let him know that his mother-in-law had died that morning. He could have gone home also to help his wife with funeral arrangements, but he did not. I had some personal obstacles to overcome. Each time I have gone there has been a fear I have had to face. The first time it was just a fear of being put in a patrol with a bunch of strangers and having to stretch the limits of my interpersonal relations and doing silly things like songs and skits in front of a crowd of strangers. I conquered that one. On staff last summer I had to go to bed each night knowing that there were mice running around in the cabin where I was staying. That kind of freaked me out but I made it through that one. I know, it is a silly thing but nevertheless it made me very uncomfortable.

This time I was more aware of the fact that we were camping in bear country (IN TENTS). My flashlight was not used so much to see the ground in front of my feet but to search to the end of the flashlight's beam to make sure there were no bears "out there." Of course, no one encountered a bear and I was mighty thankful for that. 

 My worst opposition came when I went to take a shower the third day. The women's showers were reserved for the eight women on course from 9:30 p.m. until 5:30 a.m. and after that they let the men use them. One day I decided to shower in the evening. I took a very quick shower and washed my hair and reached out to get my towel and realized that I had forgotten to bring it with me. Now what? I had my dirty clothes, the ones that I was going to put on and I had a headband that I use to keep my hair out of the way when I wash my face. I ended up using the headband to dry off. Not very efficient I decided. Next I went to the sink area with my dripping wet hair and plugged in my hair dryer to blow dry my hair. The hair dryer worked on Monday morning but now it did not. No amount of fiddling with the reset buttons would get it to work again. I tried to dry my hair to some degree with my curling iron but that is hard on hair and was very ineffective because of how wet my hair was, so I finally gave up and decided to see if one of the other ladies was still up so that I could borrow her hair dryer. Fortunately I was able to borrow one and got my hair dried so I could go to bed, albeit a bit later than I had hoped. The strange thing is, when I came home and unpacked I decided that I would just throw away the useless hair dryer. I plugged it in to make sure I hadn't been imagining things that night, and sure enough, it worked for me. I had a chance to laugh at myself that night but it did not discourage me or keep me from having an amazing experience. Well, it is late so I will write more next week. I hope you all had a good week and will do great things this week. Love, Mom/Grandma/Colleen

A glimpse at a week of Wood Badge

Serious times...

Competition...

Skits and Silliness...

Devotionals...

Taps...

and Farewells.

Back to Gilwell, Happy Land...

Going Back Once More

Today I was working on another grandbaby quilt. As I was ironing quilt pieces I thought of how much I enjoy my extra wide ironing board and lightweight steam iron. For an instant I went back to when I was a child in my semi-pioneer home in Montana. I call it that because it was a homesteader's home built about 1900 and then converted to fit my parents' growing family when we moved there in 1951. It was outfitted with conveniences like the old tin tub, the "outhouse", the oil-burning stove (later changed to coal burning stove), and a few conveniences that came later like an electric washing machine, and even later an electric dryer and eventually even a telephone by the time I was in junior high school.

When I was really young, my mom had a couple of the old-fashioned irons (the original flatirons which are not even remotely like the "flatirons" used for hair today) that have to be heated on a stove or other heat source.
(These are similar to the ones I saw as a child.)
She showed us how to use them, but we had an electric iron so we didn't need to use them for real. One needed to own more than one so that there would always be a hot one. When one cooled off, it was placed back on the heat in exchange for a hot one.

Denise and I started ironing clothes at a very young age. We started with handkerchiefs, dish towels and pillow cases and later graduated to shirts and dresses. Nearly everything we wore had to be ironed because there were not many synthetic fabrics then, mostly cottons. We didn't have steam irons so we had to "sprinkle" the clothes to help get the wrinkles out. We would get all ambitious and sprinkle the whole batch at once and then begin ironing. Of course we didn't get through even a small portion of them so what did we do to keep the rest of the clothes from getting mildew until we could iron them? Easy. We just put the clothes in the freezer until next ironing day.


My mom was lucky at some point to get an Ironrite mangle iron; don't ask me where she got it. It was similar to this one (This lady is not related:)) It looks like something you might have seen at a dry cleaners. It didn't seem to me that we were rich enough to own such a device. It was quite an impressive machine, and I loved to watch mom operate it. She actually used it for the large parts of shirts and dresses but it was hard to do the areas like collars, sleeves, and yokes. Though the machine was a bit intimidating, I do remember ironing handkerchiefs and dish towels with it. I was just wondering why this amazing piece of technology of the 1940s and 1950s didn't survive to become a household necessity standing in every home of America right next to the television.

What Takes You Back?

The other day Katrina asked me to put some lotion on her arms, as she has had carpal tunnel surgery and her right hand was in a splint and she couldn't do it by herself. I told her that I liked the scent of the lotion. She said the smell of it took her back to her mission days because it was a brand that was used a lot there.

That comment reminded me of my morning walks this summer that have brought me in contact with reminders of my childhood. I think the senses that Heavenly Father has blessed us with are an amazing form of time travel. These are some of the sights, smells and sounds of small town/country life that have transported me back to our Montana farm this summer.


As I walked by the river bank leading to the Wellsville dam, I saw this abandoned car down in the old river bed a ways from the dam. On our farm, we had a few pieces of old equipment that sat in the fields rusting away. We liked to play on them. Some of them later became collectors items that Dad was able to sell. Unfortunately people really did follow up on the urge to push a useless vehicle over a cliff such as you see here. Someone at some point before we moved there in 1951 abandoned an old truck in the Musselshell River just beyond our barnyard. It just happened to be about the deepest part of the River for some distance, so it became our swimming hole. I was always kind of afraid to go near the truck when I was young, but as I got older and braver, I discovered I could touch it with my tiptoes and still have my head above water, then push away and do kind of a surface dive away from it. I never tried to explore it's depths but imagine it would look something like this old car that I guess was exposed after the dam was built on this river.






The fields with alfalfa






and sweet clover evince several memories...

the bustle of hay harvest time, scorching summer heat, dried alfalfa leaves stuck on glistening moist skin, field mice taking refuge under the bales of hay, trapdoor spiders hiding among the stubble, hershey bars tucked away in the glovebox to provide a welcome treat, the sweating canvas water bag that was our lifeline as we worked and the welcome midday meal followed by a short siesta until the sun began it's downward descent and we once more made our way to the fields.





We didn't have a flower garden when I was young, besides lilac bushes. But I enjoyed the wildflowers--that I later discovered are mostly weeds--like the dandelion--

and the morning glory. What I found interesting about both of them is that they respond to the light, their blossoms opening up in sunlight and closing up at night. We used the dandelion to predict whether someone liked butter. (If you hold a dandelion under your chin, your chin will reflect yellow in response to your love of butter, or so we were told.) I don't know how many handfuls of dandelions my mom accepted from us and graciously placed in a cup of water to beautify our kitchen:)
Another weed that I saw recently was what we erroneously called Indian tobacco. I asked Katrina if she knew the proper name and she said she thought it was Curly Dock. According to Mr. Google, it is Curly Dock.












As we played along the ditchbanks and the banks of the Musselshell River, we discovered a more elegant flower, the wild rose, whose scent no perfumer, in my opinion, has been able to successfully reproduce. I love that smell!

According to God's plan, there are also some irksome plants to afflict and torment man. Among those that I despised as a child were the Russian thistle (which turns into a tumbleweed when it is dry),

the foxtail,










purple thistle,









the burdock and cocklebur













and other sock-grabbing plants.











Then there were the trees, my favorite--but most annoying in the springtime when the cotton was flying--was the big cottonwood tree that we used to climb. We loved making whistles with the leaves.















Other plants of my childhood that fell someplace between shrubs and trees were the berry producing bushes that we enjoyed. This one was a tree, the crabapple. We used to help Mom pick crabapples from a neighbor's tree and she would make apple jelly with them. The fruit was small and it took a ton or so to make a batch of jelly. It's tartness challenged our tastebuds, and they were kind of hard to eat because they were small, the majority of the fruit being the core.


We also went on excursions with Mom to find currant bushes. I don't remember any on our property but I remember stopping along the roadside to pick a basket of currants, which my mom also turned into a beautiful, dark translucent jelly. I thought it was a form of magic the way she transformed those rather unpalatable baskets of fruit into succulent jellies.


Even though the previously mentioned fruits tasted sour to me, I felt we had made a joyful discovery the first time I tried another berry that grew along the river. This one was the Buffalo berry. It took a whole handful to make a bite. If one were to try just one berry, it would yield far less than a single pomegranate seed. The center of the berry was similar to the pulp of the pomegranate. Because the berries were so small, we didn't attempt to stand there and fill a bucket with the tiny berries. Instead, we would each break off a branch or two (we had no idea that was diminishing next year's harvest) and we would go back to the house and pick and eat the berries at our leisure. It is a very tart berry but we enjoyed eating them to see if we could eat a handful without pulling a "sour face." The most miraculous thing happened once the first frost hit those berries. Their scarlet-red color deepened in hue as they turned more translucent and they became sweet and wonderful to eat.


Lastly, as I walked past the cornfields, I was reminded of the cultivated crops in the summers of my youth--which included, in addition to our garden vegetables, the potato patches and fields of field corn. We used what is called a grain drill to plant grain as a starter crop for new alfalfa and I think to plant the corn too.

This picture that I found reminds me a lot of the grain drill that my dad had, according to my very young memory, since these were not crops that he repeated every year like the hay.






I remember sitting in the garage cutting the many gunnysacks full of seed potatoes into small pieces, making sure to have an eye or two in each chunk. Then Dad dumped the potatoes into the tractor-guided planter which distributed them in neat rows in the field. This picture reminds me of the field where Dad set us to work plucking off the potato bugs from the plants to save his crop. It was probably only about an acre of potatoes, so not his greatest farming venture, but it sure looked big to me as we set out in the morning to cover all of the rows and find the annoying potato bugs.

Another of the aged pieces of equipment that we used to play on was an old potato sorter, similar to this one. Ours was simpler and very crude, a wooden frame with a conveyor belt that sent the potatoes down to two areas.
There was a chute that could be moved back and forth between two bags to separate the small and large potatoes. I don't think we ever used it for what it was intended but we had fun on it.

Well, this ends my trip back in time, traipsing through my memories. I am actually rather exhausted but it has been quite fun!!

Wood Badge 2010

Last fall I indicated that there would soon be an update to my Blog about my Wood Badge 2010 experience. I keep checking back to see if it has been documented yet…still nothing.
I guess I will just have to do it myself.

Kendall Warburton asked me in 2009 if I would be on a Wood Badge course he was directing in August 2010 at Scofield Aquatics Camp and serve as a Troop Guide. I was secretly hoping to have this opportunity ever since I attended a Wood Badge course in 2008, so I agreed. The first thing I learned is that being on staff for Wood Badge is a lot of work!! It is also a very rewarding experience because it is such a worthwhile program and the people in our Stake who dedicate themselves to being on staff and providing a great experience for other scouters are absolutely amazing! I wanted to be a part of that. It was a bit tricky to juggle my schedule to attend the course development meetings but I managed to get to all but one of them.

Scofield, Utah in August is very hot and there aren't many shade trees there…okay there are no shade trees there. It was a long drive to get there. A discussion was held about whether to move the location to Mutual Dell up American Fork Canyon or leave it at Scofield. It was decided that we were supposed to go to Scofield so go we did.

There were five women who signed up to attend and I was assigned to be their Troop Guide. We were the Bob White Patrol, which is what I was as a participant also. I knew most of them because a large number of the people in attendance were from American Fork 9th Ward, the Ward for which Kendall Warburton is Bishop. He was actually called to be Bishop after he had committed to be Scoutmaster for the course, but he went ahead and fit it into his busy schedule. I was excited to have this opportunity. I admit now that I was not nearly as prepared as I could have been but I felt comfortable with my preparation and felt that I would be able to relate to the ladies and have a good experience. And I did.

Tents were pitched for the rest of the staff in the stockade area of the camp

The tents for the male participants were pitched in an open area between the First Aid Station and the Lodge.

The women slept in the First Aid Station which had a main room, a kitchen and two bedrooms. It was a little awkward to be staying in the same area as the participants but it worked out fine. We discovered that we would also be sharing the building with some mice but they (meaning the mice) didn't seem to mind. The last two nights the participants were all in tents for their "overnight experience" so it was just me and the mice. It tried my courage a little bit as I don't have a fondness for the little creatures, but in the end, everything worked out okay.

The week was filled with training sessions presented by the Senior Patrol Leader and the Assistants to the Scoutmaster. Other sessions were conducted in a patrol setting, taught by Troop Guides. There were a lot of activities that reinforced the principles taught in the discussions…to be brief: a feature movie, followed up by rocket making and launching of said rockets, game shows, campfire programs, skits, competitive games, service projects and worship services as well as the overnighter where the patrols moved to their own campsites and performed as patrols. It was a great week. One of the hardest parts for me was after the first few days of being the leader and example, the Troop Guides had to step back and let their patrol members take charge and we stayed in the background as a "shadow leader." It is a lot like loosening the reins on our own children as we step back and watch them turn into amazing leaders and parents.

I am very glad that I had the opportunity to be a Troop Guide. This past February I had the opportunity to present the Wood Badge beads to all five members of my Bobwhite Patrol.

I can't wait to do it again!! (Actually before I was even through preparing for this course, John Miller asked me to be a Troop Guide for his course which was to be held in May 2011, and I accepted so there is even more to come about Wood Badge.)

All Things Bright and Beautiful...All Creatures Great and Small

Well, I am back in California to help Andrew and Melissa since the birth of their new baby, Asher Andrew Hatch, who was born January 30, 2011. He weighed in at 7 lb 13 oz and was 19 inches long. He is so lucky because he has come into a family that truly loves and adores him.

I love the relatively mild weather of California and Las Vegas in January and almost feel guilty that I have run away during January for the past few years and thus have not experienced the cold weather at home. I said I ALMOST feel guilty.

I have commented before, but this is such a nice place to take my morning walks. Upon arriving at Mason Park the other morning, I was so taken by the beauty of this place. The cool mist that blanketed the lawns and ponds brushed my skin as it rose to meet the sun and I could almost taste the scent of the eucalyptus trees around me.



All my senses were aroused and I felt to give thanks to our Heavenly Father for such a beautiful world. As marvelous as the world is, families are even more amazing to me, in particular my own wonderful family. Here are some pictures of Andrew's family.




Andrew commented that it is funny how much love he feels for Asher after just a few days with him. That is a wonderful gift that Heavenly Father has given us.




I discovered a principle of math that I find difficult to explain but I believe is true. If I have X amount of love for one child, with another child ADDED to the family, it appears that love now has to be DIVIDED by 2. Instead, the love is MULTIPLIED X 2 so the love for the first has not diminished but actually grows. Now MULTIPLY that X 10 and then add those children's spouses and all the grandchildren and the love I feel now expands to INFINITY. What an amazing phenomenon!!

As Ecclesiastes says "He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart." I love this world, but my heart is full because of my family. I love you all.