I don't recall ever not having The Golden Book of Camping and Camp Crafts. Typical of Golden Books it's a primer, equal parts inspiration and information.It was my favorite bedtime reading well before I was a Cub Scout, certainly before I became a Boy Scout. If I added up the hours I spent poring over Gordon Lynn's words and, most especially, Ernest Kurt Barth's illustrations, I probably invested a year of my boyhood in this simple book. I was, in a word, hooked.
It had me imagining and planning, studying and dreaming -- and for the first seven years of my life that's all I could do. When it came to family vacations, my parents were all Holiday Inn, no KOA.Scouting changed that. Suddenly I was taking real hikes, sleeping in real tents and cooking over real campfires. Scouting also gave me an official handbook, though I found myself still measuring my experiences against the wellspring of my imaginings -- the scenes in a dog-eared Golden Book.
I'm sure that I still have my original 1959 edition packed away somewhere. I haven't seen it in years, but I was pleased today to stumble across a blog post paying tribute to The Golden Book of Camping and Camp Crafts.I can't begin to describe what it was like seeing those pages again. In an instant I was a kid pulling the covers over my head and clicking on my flashlight, imagining that it was me in colorful pictures I'd seen a hundred times before and to which I'd return for inspiration a thousand times more.
