Our Hiking Arrangement

Over the better part of fifty years, Bob and I went on long walks. Probably most people call them "hikes," but there wasn't anything fancy about them. We usually carried a couple of water containers. Bob generally brought a book or a tract on the area we were about to cover. Since they had names like Keet Seel and Sutter’s Buttes  (the nation's shortest mountain range). Beaches -- and the east end of the San Bernardino Range -- were on our considerable list of destinations.


I always toted a camera. Neither of us ever wore walking shoes, whatever they are, and usually some lotion. We didn't call ourselves hikers. We just went for walks... some of them far enough, like 45 miles. Yes, we packed food on those.
One reason, I'm sure, that Bob enjoyed our trips was the preparation. We'd get out topographical maps, rangers' notes, and any yarn we could dig out from any previous sojourner.

One night at Bob’s house, we were in his kitchen examining maps, when Bob looked up and said to his wife, "Taz, do you remember last month we were looking over topo maps of the Sierras?  I can’t find it here."




She stared at him for a long moment. Then she turned and went to the far wall, pulled a cookbook off the shelf, and brought it to him. At the table, she opened it with the maps having been used as a marker.






And there was "the agreement."


I was six feet tall. Bob was about five - five. If there were steep hills involved, we would start together at the base, and I would take my natural strides, which gradually gave me a considerable lead after awhile.  Bob would walk at his natural stride. When the grade switched to down, Bob would find that his legs began to accelerate. Most often we would reach the base nearly together. Of course, if the grade was not particularly steep, we had plenty of conversation, camera clicking, and discussions involving John Muir.

John Muir in Yosemite

Every time, on the way home, we were already working over the next go. 


I recommend friends like that.

What Do You Do for Work?

One day, as I passed by a student’s desk in my 5th grade classroom, he looked up and asked, "Mr. Singer, what do you do for work?"




Taken off guard, I replied, "I'm here five days a week, all day."


"I know," he nodded. "But what do you do for work?"


The question itself wasn't all that remarkable, I suppose. I was at a meeting that included a board of education member saying, "You people just sit at a desk all day." I should have retorted what I was thinking then: Yeah, sure, with six of my students already on the police blotter.

Sixth graders wtih Bert at Madison Elementary School. Pasadena, CA.

The real humor of this boy's question was that he almost never got an assignment turned in on time. When the kids lined up, he was always near the end. I overheard a girl saying to him, "Don't you ever do anything? You don't even run to first base."


What I "do for work," young man is apply for summer jobs. They're easier.


G. B. Shaw was cited as saying, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach."


He must have been a school board member and never entered a classroom. In nearly thirty years of classroom teaching a school board member entered my classroom exactly once. That was unannounced, and he was ticked that I ignored him. He was the member who contended that students needed only three books: a speller, a reader, and an arithmetic book. He never said at what levels.

When I Was a Girl Scout

For several years I was a card-carrying Girl Scout. It came about very naturally: my daughter told someone that her father would be all massively thrilled to drive a truckload of gravel for them up to the Girl Scout mountain camp.




Naively, I thought that complying this one time would close the deal. How little I was clued in to the world of volunteers! I missed that “one time” by eight years!

California state highway #2 is a two lane, tightly winding, rapidly climbing forest highway through the Angeles National Forest with La Canada at one end and the San Bernardino Mountain Range at the other. Along the north side is, de facto, the western end of the Mojave Desert. At the base of the “Angeles” are the San Gabriel Valley, Los Angeles, and smog--perpetual, ugly, brownish, and smelly. The drive up from the San Gabriel Basin past the television relay towers to a mile above that crud is actually worth dragging a load of gravel some forty-five miles.

Anyway, it became evident shortly that The Girl Scouts of Pasadena had gotten themselves a new patsy. At least, I wasn’t alone. I was shortly inducted into a committee that met to fix things -- things at the camp, things in town -- and especially to bargain with local pooh-bahs for providing stuff, and inventing ways to do things... lots of inventing. I never dreamed those little girls needed so much stuff to sing “Make new friends ....”

By then I'd been "advanced" from just driving "Jimmy," the supply truck up and down the mountain, to random chores in the camp, which gave me general use of the Jeep, a WWII relic that everyone in camp hungered to ride along the camp's steep slopes. 


To be authorized to sign whatever for the Scouts, I had to be an official member. So, for years I carried a card. That also put me on the automatic “to phone” list -- everyone’s. Among all the Pasadena Girl Scout troops, and even a few Campfire Girl groups, I became referred to as “Uncle Bert.”


The camp director was a helplessly hooked freebie collector. Once she turned up with six twenty-foot flagpoles. Lacking any other notion of what to do with them, she asked me to install them by the camp swimming pool. It wasn’t easy. The granite mountains of the San Gabriel aren’t billiard table flat or made of loam.


I got them in, seated and in line, and I called the director over.
When the director came to look, she scowled.


“They’re not level at the top,” she snapped.  She was standing by the deep end of the pool, so I had her walk with me to the shallow end.


“That’s crazy,” she said. “Now they slant the other way.”


“Now stand in the middle between them,” I said.


She did, then walked away grumbling, “Everybody will always think they’re crooked.”


I offered to take them down, at which she whirled toward me and said, “We’re the only camp in California with six flag poles.”

They're Called CHARTS

Bert at one of the narrow beaches

Beaches in Polynesia seldom amount to much. Waikiki is a magnificent exception. There are few others. Micronesia is no better, worse in my experience. Teachers in France take their elementary classes to Omaha Beach for some history and excursions. In New Guinea and the Philippines the children would almost have to walk in single file. Pacific battles weren’t fought on beaches. They took place in the jungles, or, rather, through them. Until you hacked them out of the way, their trees, leaves, vines, mold, cob webs, slithering things, and myriad insects counter-attacked before the enemy could.

Troop uniform of the day

We lucky ones, called “Navy men,” didn’t have to contend with anything but the heat. I remember how the crew cheered when we got north of the Equator, and the nights finally slid below one hundred. Also, we finally had U.S. marine charts to use.


In sea going parlance, a map is to inform one about the land, a chart about coastlines, sea bottoms, tides, shoals, etc. We had a real problem with charts as we worked around the New Guinea coasts. The Australians basically used the British charts, which were sloppy. In one instance the chart we had missed a light house by several miles.


None of the British charts were reliable. Far better were the Dutch, also the German. Germany had done considerable work in those waters, and their charts were right on.


That is, if we could read the languages. Names around New Guinea were in Dutch, German, some English, and many in Papuan. The Aussies and English we worked with pronounced these names in almost any way they pleased, so that a verbal identification of a place usually left one just as puzzled as before. Wakde was typically called “Wad – key.”   Moresby usually came out “Mores,” and some I just asked to be marked as “X” on the chart. I could get there. Fair enough.


Yes, names in the Philippines weren’t much better, some worse. But the U.S. had had forty years to chart that area, and the navigational words were those I’d learned since I could read. Now, when shoals turned up exactly where they were indicated, I enjoyed missing them. I also began to enjoy words like Tutuila, Tagalog, and Mindoro because I knew they wouldn’t eat me one dark night. And I felt real smug learning the correct pronunciation of Bataan, Tagalog, and Panay; but I never understood why Filipinos nearly all call their own country the “Pee - lee - feens.”