Swarms and Moses

You're on the edge, on the brink...about to be swallowed up in a sea of khaki, herds of doughy little legs, a cacophony of indistinct languages, all swirling like some giant maelstrom while millions of pounds of metal -- wheels, blades, struts, and fuselages -- dange like some monstrous Damoclean armory (not just the sword) above your head.

Welcome to the Air & Space Museum. In summer. When there's a National Jamboree in town.

Yeah, you heard the last part right; Boy Scouts of every shape and size (and their associated Scoutmasters, who demonstrate an even broader range of size -- emphasis on broader) have descended on the Capitol like a swarm of locusts on an Egyptian field of grain.

As I glanced through the door and beheld the scene of mayhem on the floor of "the world's most popular museum," I felt a chill run down my spine. A little voice in my head screamed the fear that the Potomac was running red, that Jehovah had fallen asleep on the job and misdirected the thirteenth plague to the wrong place...and millenia. Your people are free, Lord, they are free!

My biblical reverie was shattered by a bawling security guard who hustled my bag off my back so quickly I feared, for a moment, I might go along with it through the scanner.

Escaping that irradiated fate, I stumbled into the main forum and cringed underneath the suspended vehicles. At any moment, I expected a zealous patrol of Boy Scouts to try and add another badge of honor to their highly adorned shirts by leaping into the Spirit of St. Louis and piloting it back to their home state.

I should preface this post (albeit somewhat belatedly) with a disclaimer regarding my description of Boy Scouts. I bear them no ill will. None at all. I am a former Boy Scout. Granted our Boy Scout trips were filled with starvation, altitude sickness, lost vans, Mormon vandals, and cougar scares. But, hey! No troop is perfect. Regardless, Boy Scouts are great.

But take a Boy Scout troop, multiply it by a billion, add in antagonistic non-BSA teens, and the natural result of putting tens of thousands of adolescent males in one building...you begin to see my concern.

But the specter of riots (with at least dozens of boys, no doubt, well practiced in tying knots including hangman's nooses) turned out to be an unwarranted fear. Over time, as I accomodated myself to the mayhem of Scouts falling into exhibits, Scouts touching planes, and Scouts hurling invective at non-Scouts, I began to realize there was a more critical problem: Scoutmasters.

Tramping from exhibit to exibit, I experienced a wonderful variety of information about the history of aviation, its varied participants and heroes and their innumerable accomplishments. The one, sad, common feature of every display, though, was the misinformation. No, the Smithsonian is not spreading falsehoods or inaccurate info. But Scoutmasters are.

That's right, without fail, from room to room, there'd be at least one portly character, often sporting an outlandish hat (usually the most prominent feature of an entire costume that merited the same adjective) pontificating ceaselessly on the virtues of this and the benefits of that, when he should have been noting the vices of the former and disadvantages of the latter.

The discrepancies were at first seemingly innocent -- one man in a straw hat confusing a Browning .50 caliber weapon for a howitzer -- but soon grew much less so. Planes went misnamed, wars were misrepresented, and by the time I got to the Wright Brothers' exhibit, it sounded like Orville Wright was being mistaken for Orville Redenbacher (the popcorn giant).

By visit's end, I was certain of one thing. The Boy Scouts of America were in good hands...that is when left to their Scout patrol leaders. Oddly enough, that is directly in contrast to my own experience.

When I was a wee Ass. Patrol Leader (it took me some time to realize that "Ass." is not the appropriate abbreviation for "Assistant"), our sliver of the troop bore the proud name of the Rat Patrol, complete with a rodent pennant that waved above our adventures. Our quartermaster position was alternately loved and reviled as different scouts rotated through. On one memorable trip, the quartermaster was the subject of incredible hatred, due in no small part to the misplanning that allowed us to run out of food on Saturday after a dinner on Friday that consisted of hamburger meat...and nothing else. No buns. No ketchup. No salt. Nothing. I'm not sure we even had plates. Needless to say, that scout never returned to the quartermaster lineup.

But all this is neither here nor there. My trip to the museum ultimately went off splendidly, plagues of scouts aside. That building deserves to be the most visited museum in the world and will see my foot traffic again.

Next adventure: navigating the National Gallery. But that's a story of its own telling.

Pictures to come as soon as Radioshack decides to start stocking five-pin camera cables. *Sigh*. Ah well.