best way to learn a frog? And say, Not by reading. Not by seeing a picture or even by holding one in your hand. To learn a frog in a full and lasting manner, you must find one where it lives in nature, watch it, listen to it if it is calling. Study its habitat, Raff, take note of where it has chosen to sit, stalk it, capture it, put it in a jar, and keep it a little while. Study it there, release it next to the edge of the water where you found it, watch it kick away and submerge out of sight. The concept of frog will be with you forever if you follow this kind of education. You can pick up additional information from science and literature and myth, and all those things you have at school, but you will be wiser for being rooted in the full reality of frog. You will care about frog too, like nobody else.
It was predictable that Raphael Semmes Cody should seek the company of those who saw the world as he did, and for which I offered him encouragement. On the earliest possible date, his twelfth birthday, he joined the Boy Scouts of America.
Both parents were pleased with the decision, and I added affirmation.
"It'll teach you how to get along with other people," Ainesley said to Raff. "You spend too much time by yourself. You'll learn how to do some grown-up things. Come graduation from high school, it'll help you get into West Point or someplace like that, in case you thought about going into the military."
Marcia wasn't keen on the military aspect, but otherwise was happy to see this sign of ambition in her son, and the status it might give him early on.
As a former Boy Scout myself, who stayed into my late teens and achieved the rank of Eagle Scout, I could not have been more pleased.
"You've got to understand," I said to Ainesley and Marcia when we met again at Nokobee, "this organization was made for Raff. You know he's a boy who just loves the outdoors, and he's already learned an amazing amount of natural history for a kid his age. He'll fit right in, and I may be wrong, but I'll bet he's going to do wonderfully well."
I can't say I score very high on predicting human behavior, but this time I turned out to be right. The Boy Scouts of America don't run a boot camp, which would have repelled Raphael Semmes Cody. They don't sit you down for scheduled tests, which boys naturally detest. They don't discriminate or try to classify you by intelligence, or talent, or anything but your own personal effort. Effort and achievement move you through the ranks, and at your own speed. From Tenderfoot (nobody wants to stay a Tenderfoot) to Second Class (nobody likes the sound of that either), then First Class, Star, Life, and finally to Eagle Scout. Tests are self-paced. If you fail at first, no problem. Work at it some more with one of the scout leaders, and try again.
Raff was able to move quickly upward by himself or in small groups, reporting his progress in each rank to the scoutmaster. The merit badges, forming the main steps to the advanced ranks, rewarded achievement in a manner suited to the orderly development of the adolescent mind. To Raff's delight they included the outdoor activities for which his talents and passions were best suited. Swimming, lifesaving, hiking, campcraft, pioneering, first aid, zoology, botany, and entomology, each was mastered and its badge added to the growing rows on his uniform's sash.
The Boy Scouts did something else that was important as well. They legitimized the life for which Raff had been unconsciously preparing himself. They bestowed a spiritual and a social blessing upon the wildness of Lake Nokobee.
13
RAPHAEL SEMMES CODY was a citizen, I said to his parents one summer day, if any member of the human race can be called that, of the Lake Nokobee wildland. He came to know it better than the neighborhood of his home five miles away, better than the classrooms and playing fields of the schools he attended. He loved this tract of land as though it were his own, and he knew deep in some seldom-visited part of his reflective mind that if he ever failed in the venues of ordinary life, he could return to the solace of his life membership in the Nokobee wildland.