The anarchist scout's cookbook

In my years as a scout, one thing captured our imaginations more than anything else. Fire.

Fire was a mystical, yet practical tool. We spent many hours learning how to create it, how to kill it. We tamed the beast and made it work for us. Fire provided us with food, with light, and with a place to gather around at night and sing campfire songs and tell stories.

Being good scouts, and budding scientists, we would experiment with the boundaries of this tool. What burned longest, what burned fastest, and what was the best way to build a fire. This led to some amusing consequences. In general, if you asked one of use to build a fire for cooking on, you would get something that burned so hot for the first hour, it could not be approached closer than a meter without protective clothing.

We experimented with chimneys. We found that if you took all your old sisal rope, coiled it inside a 44 gallon drum with no top or bottom, set the drum up on bricks so it had a good draw, and set fire to the rope, you could get 25 feet high flames.

Our curiosity extended also to the best methods for starting fires. We had matches dipped in wax, we had flint and tinder, we had liquid firelighter (colloquially known as "BP Spirits"), we even had the old favourite, the firebow.

And then we had chemistry. Boy did we have chemistry. Many many household chemicals can combust beautifully when mixed in the right way. Homemade incendiaries were fun and instructive. We cooked up batches of smoke bombs using sugar and saltpeter. We made black powder, we even corned it. We mixed brake fluid and HTH, although the resultant chlorine fumes lowered this solution's usefulness. Touch powder (Nitrogen Tri-iodide) was a staple, although not useful for actually making fires, just hilarious practical jokes. And making large iodine stains on the carpet. My parents still complain about that.

The holy grail of our fire making, however, was something you could carry around in your survival kit, had multiple uses, and could reliably start a fire. Bonus points if it was obscure. Strike anywhere matches were dangerous, and lighters are right out. Our solution was Potassium Permanganate (KMnO4). It was light, safe, you could use it to sterilize your drinking water or treat a blister, and when mixed with Glycerine, it bursts into a joyous flame. Both were easily accessible in any pharmacy, and are completely safe chemicals when kept separated.

It was useful too because it had a built in timer. You could drop the Glycerin onto the pile of crystals, and then you had a few seconds to find safe harbour before the show started. We used it to light firecrackers, and the aforementioned barrel of rope. With the addition of magnesium shavings, it became a good way to light home made thermite. It could be combined with other chemicals to make different coloured flames.

We didn't just dabble with the elements, we pulled up chairs to the periodic table and feasted on it's contents. By "feasted", I mean "set fire to". I learned more about chemistry, at least in the limited field of exothermic reactions, in scouts than I did in school, and still today I fondly recall most of those experiments.

My favourite bases

It’s tough deciding which bases I enjoyed the most. All of them were valuable, and I learned a lot.

The electronics base was fun, not because of the electronics, but because we were visited by a large boomslang who decided to investigate our table. It was like a scout explosion, it’s amazing how fast people can move when they’re motivated.

I enjoyed the shooting base, because I turned out to be good with a shotgun, despite the first shot knocking me over backwards. I got the highest number of skeets, and, as a reward, got to shoot a .303 scoped rifle and pulverise a rock so far away we could barely see it.

Rock climbing (pictured) was a definite favourite. Especially the abseiling down.

Water base was enjoyable simply because it was water, and we were very hot. I managed to windsurf all the way across Clanwilliam Dam before I realised that I had no idea how to tack against the wind. I had to be towed back by a motorboat. Parasailing was the highlight of that base.

I think my all time favourite though was paintball. Crawling through the bushes, creeping up on your opponents, and giving them lovely bruises. It was most enjoyable.

When we got to the base, we found that a rival patrol who had been dogging us for a while was slated to be our opponents. They had a couple of egotistical folks, and they’d been doing the cederberg equivalent of trash talking us for the last couple of days. As a bonus, there was a journalist there who would be taking pictures, and he had brought his 11 year old son with him. He asked if his son could join in. The kid was a little overweight and geeky, so our opposition passed. We happily welcomed him onto our team, since we were out to enjoy ourselves, not “win”.

Our pistols had a “feature” where if you carefully uncocked it, you could pump a second charge of gas into the chamber and essentially double the velocity of your paintball. A couple of us, while waiting around, had also “accidentally” left some of our paintballs sitting in the sun, which has the unfortunate habit of reducing the chance of them breaking and getting you a kill, but also produces the most amazing bruises when fired from a double cocked pistol. It also hurts like hell.

The game started normally, a standard “capture the flag” scenario. At this point, the opposition team discovered, the hard way, that a number of our patrol were excellent stalkers. They also discovered, to their dismay, that the 11 year old kid somehow could not miss. He racked up an impressive amount of kills. We were donating ammunition to him because he could single handedly hold a choke point while the rest of us would sneak over, steal the flag from behind, and take it back to our base.

We won handily, and it was a dispirited, and very black and blue, patrol that left the base with us. There was no trash talking for the rest of the hike.