Thanks.

Happy Thanksgiving, folks.

I'm out of New York for the next few days, visiting my parents in Vermont, and right now I'm enjoying some pre-dinner ice cream while John and my folks watch some sort of James Bond movie. (Which one? I have no idea. Carly Simon sings the theme song.)

My original VT plan of completing the Astronomy badge seems to have fallen to pieces thanks to days of rain and cloud, save for a few gorgeous hours this afternoon when we took a walk around the lake. However, given that those gorgeous hours were, well, this afternoon, using them to observe the stars might not have been entirely successful. And, in fact, it wasn't. So there. We did, however, see a monument to Lord Jeffery Amherst, best known for Amherst, MA (and, later, Amherst College) and for early germ warfare via the distribution of smallpox-infested blankets.

Instead, though, I do have something of a Thanksgiving post for you. I guess it's pretty unsurprising that a document like the Handbook, which so admires and idolizes hardiness, manliness, and woodland endurance might find the Pilgrims of particular interest. And, in fact, it does.

We only hear a little bit about the Pilgrims, mostly about their place within American mythology. "When the Pilgrim Fathers founded the American colonies, the work of Arthur and Alfred and the other great men of ancient days was renewed and extended and fitted to the new conditions and times." Wow. Plymouth Rock as Camelot, and how. The Handbook goes on to compare Jamestown (not Pilgrims, I know, but still) to the foundation of "a new race of men" and "a new kind of knight."

Both Thanksgiving and the Boy Scouts themselves are really about this kind of popular legend -- the idea of the iron-constitution'd woodsman tromping through the forest with an axe in one hand and a blunderbuss in the other, creating his own kingdom in the wilds of the frontier (though, of course, the frontier had moved considerably from 1621 to 1911). It's a superhero story, when you get down to it, and it's perfectly suited to the Boy Scouts. (You can argue, of course, that we always get the superheroes we want or need, whether the Axis-battling Captain America, Spiderman and radiation in the '60s, or the Dark Knight of the late '80s. Hell, there's Jack Hinks, Newfoundland's fisherman superhero.)

I'm not going to spend time right now discussing Thanksgiving as a political entity, or any of the messy analogies between the settling of the Americas and genocides (hi, Lord Jeff, 150 years post-Pilgrim!). Instead, I'll leave it with this: The Handbook portrays the Pilgrims as the kind of superhero a Boy Scout really needs. Can you really blame them for it?