Camp Sebring was a huge Boy Scout camp in South Florida when I was a kid. It is closed now. We would all pile into a car at the tail end of a Florida East Coast Railroad train (away from the grown up passengers of course!) for the trip there. I do not remember how many summers I attended. One memory is a song parody about the camp director:
“One sunny morning, when we were all in class,
Mean old Mr. Black lit a fire in the grass,
And as the flames spread around,
We all gathered ‘round,
Singing “There’ll be a hot time in the old camp tonight.”
I do not remember much besides making lanyards, but one event is burned into my brain. Some background first. My dad, Leon’s, third college degree was an MS in Science Education from Columbia University. The house I grew up in was a science library. It’s why, at an early age, I was already a science prodigy. Dad built me an actual chemistry laboratory in the garage. It was a wooden cabinet on the wall whose plywood front came down with chains holding it to be the lab desk, with shelves holding regents and equipment against the wall. There are many reasons he came to regret it. It was not a toy store chemistry set. It was a real lab. There was a chemical supply house downtown where we bought reagents. I have tried to remember its name, but I just can’t.
With Dad’s library, there was lots of trouble I could get into. Ammonia plus iodine – “touch powder” – Nitrogen Triiodide. It is an insoluble crystal that precipitates out from the solution it forms in. You pour the solution into a funnel with filter paper. When it dries you can set it off a feather! It is still ¼ unchanged iodine crystals. When you set it off there is a cool purple cloud. Most substances have phase changes that go from solid to liquid to gas. But not iodine – it sublimates straight from solid to gas, just like dry ice. One day I made an especially big batch and was stoopid when I set it off. This was after rolling it up into tin foil “bombs”. I detonated it with a hammer! I was 14 – intellectually advanced – retarded in all other ways. I looked at my hands and arms. Embedded all over them were iodine crystals. I knew it was poisonous. I freaked out. I went to my mother. We went straight to the ER. I told the doctor how it happened. I am sure the bemused look on his face was
“How in hell did a 14 year old do this?”
“It takes a lot more iodine than that to poison you. That is no more than we might put on a wound. Go home and wash. It will be absorbed.”
It was the tradition at scout camp every summer for the counselors to hide in the woods and we had to find them. I had fools gold, iron pyrite, in my mineral collection. It was those two sulfur atoms, iron pyrite, FES2, dropped into acid for our pool (muriatic acid, actually hydrochloric acid) that gave me my idea. It was all I needed to make clouds of hydrogen sulfide, the source of the smell from rotten eggs. Not poisonous enough in the open to harm the counselors, but unpleasant enough to drive them out of hiding and we would win. So much for that idea. Why? Like an idiot at so many times in my life I talked about it with my fellow scouts. At least one of them thought I had made an explosive, and talked to the intended targets, the camp counselors.
Next thing I know, I am surrounded by grown-ups wanting to know where the explosives were. Can you picture a 14-year-old trying to explain chemistry to essentially uneducated adults (at least in science). Nope. They confiscated my stuff, told me to stay in my tent. They were calling my father to come get me. It was a 3-hour drive from Miami. No way I was sitting still. I neither wanted to face my father, and I was pissed off at failing. I packed my knapsack, my little aluminum boy scout cooking kit, filled my canteen, scrounged whatever snacks I could from the tents in my group, and headed for the woods. Florida in 1962 was a very undeveloped state. There were failed housing developments consisting of little but paved roads! Not enough customers. Florida around Sebring was also very thinly populated. A night, a day and a night passed. The following morning while making my breakfast a camp counselor finally tracked me down. I was often greeted by a lot of bemused looks on the faces of adults during that part of my life.
“Well, if you’re not kicked out of the scouts, I’ll sign merit badges for hiking, camping, nature – whatever – for you! You clearly qualify!”
I was never allowed back at Camp Sebring. I did finish my Eagle badge. In high school I was in the Sea Explorers. More stories to come about my sailing adventures out of Coconut Grove, including the near abuse by a pedophilic Scoutmaster.