Imagine about fifteen to twenty blue-collar guys and their sons, ages five and up, occupying a large lodge for three days with no rules or the presence of a single female. Naturally, the result is a lot of beer drinking, fishing, dirty jokes, bad smells, and the occasional thing getting broken. It’s controlled hedonism, and when you get used to it twice a year and then go without it for a long time, it feels like something is missing. So I went back to experience it again, and I was glad to find little has changed.
The Boy’s Weekend was started by my dad and his friend Bob. In the early days it was small and consisted of a pop-up trailer in a campground in the dead of winter. Then they got smart and moved it to a lodge near a stocked pond in late spring and early fall, and invited more guys to offset the costs. Traditions were born and stories that would be told for years were created at every gathering. I was glad to see a lot of those traditions have lived on in the years I’ve been away.
Every year, there are new men that are invited by someone who’s been coming for years, and those new guys have to be inducted. Naturally, this is done by humiliating them. Bob is a master at the set-up and perfect execution of various methods of emasculating poor, unsuspecting fellows. The first trick is The Three-Man Lift. While the target is nearby, it’s someone’s job to start the conversation about Bob’s talent at lifting great amounts of weight. Or, at least he could in his younger days. Legend has it, it is explained, that he was known for being able to lift three interlocked men of any size at the same time. Bob of course insists that he still could, and amidst shouts of “no you can’t, not anymore” and “please dad, you’ll hurt your back” and “I’ve got $20 that says he can still do it,” Bob points out three guys that are instructed to lie down on the ground and link their arms and legs. Here’s what it looks like:

Even better is a game called Itchy-Gitchy-Goo. Twelve or so grown men sit around a circular table. Bob is the game leader, and he is always seated next to another new guy. The game is described as an exercise in composure and imitation. Bob starts off by reaching over and tweaking the chin of the guy next to him like a baby, saying the words “itchy-gitchy-goo.” That guy then has to pass it on exactly the same way, without laughing. It goes around the table until it comes back to Bob, who then touches a different part of his neighbor’s face, again repeating “itchy-gitchy-goo,” and so on. If anyone laughs or is fails at repeating the action perfectly, they have to drink. It sounds easy, and it really is for the new guy. The reason why it’s hard for everyone else, at least to keep from laughing, is because Bob has charcoal dust on his fingers and is basically painting a new part of the face of the guy next to him with every round. It’s hard to believe, but it usually goes on for so long that Bob runs out of places to smudge.

Some traditions have gone by the wayside, such as “Bite the Weenie,” which consisted of a hot dog wiener hanging from a string from the ceiling and men and boys riding by on bikes trying to bite off a hunk of it. Ketchup and mustard were added as the game went on. That one probably died simply because no one ever succeeded in actually biting the wiener. But the longest running and most revered of the traditions has to be the Snipe Hunt. The young children are convinced of a mythical creature called a snipe that is indigenous to the area, some kind of mixture of snake, cat and bird with red eyes. It sounds silly, but I believed it when I was eight.
The adults lead the children, carrying sticks and plastic bags, into the woods. This year, I was amused to see that all the kids’ pant legs and sleeves were duck taped to their ankles and wrists because “you don’t want a snipe crawling up there!” Older boys are sent out into the woods ahead of them to make shrieking noises. You would think that this would scare the crap out of the kids, but they love it. I remember that when I was little, I was more excited by the prospect of seeing and maybe catching a snipe than fearing being attacked by one.
This weekend, near the end of another unsuccessful attempt to capture a snipe, I separated from the pack and walked back to the lodge in the dark alone. I could hear the noises of the overexcited children behind me, and the wounded-sounding howls of what some twenty-something year olds imagined a snipe might sound like coming from the woods around me. As I walked, I thought about how lucky I am to have had that kind of weirdness to be around when I was growing up.

3 comments:
you hail from such a strange world.
men are also very very strange.
so are "stocked" ponds.
Sounds like good-natured funnin' to me, as opposed to the scary fratboy stuff that really makes me have to rethink who men are.
As much as I like reading about testosterone overflow, I think it's time for you to post a new blog entry, dude. Even the girls are whupping yo' ass in the blogging contest.
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