Terrible indeed. Note: This is how I remember my Cub Scout uniform.
When I was a sturdy young man in Jersey City, New Jersey back in the previous century, I was a Cub Scout (eventually, an Eagle Scout, a fact that blows minds to this day–suffice to say when you meet me, Eagle Scout is the last thing that comes to mind). As a Cub Scout (a WeBeLo, no less, which will mean nothing to you if you weren’t involved in the scouts at some point) I got to go on a week of summer camp every year with my pack. The first time I went was pretty great, and I remember one very odd detail: Every night in the dining hall, they would make announcements. And every time the guy got up to make the announcements, everyone would chant:
“A-NOUN-cements, A-NOUN-cements, a terrible death to die!”
(or, yanno, something like that; I was nine or ten years old).
It was so oddball. Obviously an ancient custom at the summer camp, and I never quite understood it, although of course being a very nicely socialized little bugger (Jebus, did I mention I was in the fucking Cub Scouts?) I chanted along with everyone else. If you do some light Googling, you’ll find that this song is pretty universal in scouting environments, for some bizarre reason (note: almost all of my scouting memories must be followed by the phrase for some bizarre reason). There’s little information about its provenance or the reasoning (if any beyond a little light ribbing for the authority figures) behind this little ritual.
Now, normal kids might have remembered the knots they learned. Or the funny songs. Or swimming in the ice-cold lake, or the campfires, or the time our camp counselor took us on a hike and got lost and we were tramping through the wilderness for 8 hours (oh wait – I do in fact remember that). But what I remember is the dumb A-NOUN-cements song, because that’s the sort of insane detail that seems completely impossible, and yet is real. As a writer, this is important, because it helps you trust that instinct that some insane detail you want to include in your work won’t actually make everyone start passing it around on the Internet for the lulz, but actually might sell the whole story to a reader, because the detail is lived-in, and real, and crazy enough to be somebody’s normal.
The world seems like a continuum, with generations passing information on to the next in an orderly fashion, and so the assumption is that because we know how to refine gasoline today, we will continue to know how to do so in the future. But the fact is, this “passing on” is messy. I learned the stupid “Announcement” song, but I don’t the why or the history of it. I know a verse, and if the collective survivors of the Zombie Apocalypse came to my door and asked for help reconstructing this portion of world culture, I would provide them with a really shitty answer. Details get glossed over. Origins get lost. A cosmic game of “Telephone” is played with the details, and the future is a little fuzzier than it used to be.
And now I have that damn song in my head.