While I was Waiting...

   I thought I might think back on how I got here. I'd like to say I was born loving the wilderness. That I had a real knack with wild things ever since I was a baby. But it all started with a parrot. It wasn't my parrot. It was nobody's parrot and it wasn't wild. To tell you the truth... there wasn't even a parrot.

   See, what happened was, there was this contest I heard about that was sponsored by PBS. You know who they are. The people who air all those animal shows on NATURE. They do a lot of cool science stuff, too, on another show called NOVA. My mom watches the news programs they put out, but I'm not really into those. Except walking through the living room sometimes when they're on is what got me so interested in survival skills. But that's all I'm gonna say about that, right now. In the beginning, it was the parrot.

   A parrot picture, actually. The contest was to find the best parrot picture, and turn it in for a prize. At the time, I didn't know what the prize was (or I probably wouldn't have done it). But I wanted to win that prize. I also had hopes of getting famous. Like maybe being the youngest wildlife photographer in the world. I mean, that's how I was thinking about it when I borrowed my Grandpa's old digital camera and headed out to get a prize-winning picture that could launch my career.

   OK, so nobody told me parrots weren't native to my part of the country. And I was no hand at remembering school assignments, either. I like science, but I do not -- and I mean, way not -- like doing all those questions at the back of each chapter in a textbook. I remember them about as long as long as they take to write down after you took twice as long to look them up than it did to read the chapter.

   Anyway, that's how I started out on my first expedition. It's how I got my first taste of adventure. It's how I found (stumbled on, actually) my own piece of the wilderness. I'm thinking about this stuff because I'm sitting up here in the Outpost (before the rest of the patrol gets here) working on notes for my new Captain's Class. "How to find your piece of the wilderness when you don't know anything about the wilderness, yet"...

   Yeah, that's gonna be my first subject. Like, where the heck IS the wilderness? Hey, this thing's gotta be real, or what good is it? So, I'm gonna tell how I found mine. It wasn't pretty.

   But -- if you're a captain -- you do what you gotta do.

   Better check if anybody signed up, yet.

   Later,
   W.K.

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