it's really, really hot.

As in, 103 with a heat index of 113 in New York today. Compared to the chilly (relatively) temperatures in Vermont -- heck, I wore a sweatshirt out at dinner last week -- it's been a rough adjustment back to the city, and I could hardly bear to leave my apartment today.

It's not even sultry, steamy, Blanche DuBois hot. Or maybe I'm just not sultry enough. Regardless it's more of a sweaty, bags-under-eyes kind of hot. The kind of hot where we left our window unit running all night at 85 and it felt downright chilly compared to the rest of the house.

In honor of the heat, and in honor of my own return to the Handbook, I went back today to see how the scouts of 1911 would have coped. (Did I follow through with all these? No. Man, a scout in 1911 didn't have air conditioning, and despite my total stubbornness until this very summer, there is no way I'm going back.) I didn't get too far.

The Handbook starts out simple -- put green leaves inside your hat. In the days before the entire Patagonia catalog of wicking fabrics, this may have been valid. But this is also an artifact of the days when men wore hats, and when green leaves were (for everyone) easy to get one's hands on. For me, this was an interesting way of thinking, I guess, about who the Boy Scouts were intended for, at first, and about urbanization in general. See, in the 1920s, my maternal grandmother (and her family, my great-grandparents and various great-aunts and great-uncles) actually lived in the same neighborhood where I do these days. No trees. Also, very few Scouts -- honestly, the first scout troops were largely white (as in, African-American scouts were banned formally, until 1915 -- a topic for another day) and Protestant (as in, Catholics were banned until 1913, at which point a sort of separate-but-equal Catholic-only troop setup began, mirroring a similar Mormon-only troop structure a few years later).

Maybe it's not fair for me to think about green trees as being exclusionary, but that's where I am right now. Being up in Vermont and in way, way upstate NY until only yesterday has made me hyperaware, today, of just how remote my existence in Brooklyn is from the more rural scouting-ish lifestyle. It's the same issue that's present in a lot of educational equality discussions, the kind of inherent biases that some people think don't matter on standardized tests, things like that -- when you ask a city kid whether a slope of 90, 45, or 0 degrees would be better for cross-country skiing, you're putting that kid at a disadvantage, just by the very nature of your assumption that this city kid knows what these things are and how to deal with them. Am I calling the Boy Scouts inappropriately rural? Not by half. It would be like calling Neighborhood Watch too neighborhood-centric. Or like calling out the Hells Angels for a reluctance to pursue pony rides. It's the nature of the organization. But still, any organization will be easier for some people to join than for others, and we need to be aware of that.

Anyway. I'm disjointed, but it's hot. I'm going to eat me some ice cream, and we'll pick up this thread tomorrow. It's going to be 102 in Brooklyn, buddy, and I'll have a whole lot of time indoors.