Timberline: Homesick Dutch Ovener

Timberline: Homesick Dutch Ovener

(Timberline part 6)

We had 110 boys come to Timberline the second year we were at Bristlecone. I had a few boys from my own troop and those of the troops  of our sister wards. With 110 boys it was very apparent that we would not get to know each boy as well as we would have liked as scoutmasters of the troop. We had one young man who was very homesick and each of us took turns trying to help him stay the entire week. It got to the point that we all at least knew one boy very well. Anyway one night Doug and I decided to try something that had worked in previous years and might in this case. We had a prescription drug bottle in our First Aid kit that had a title about being a pill for homesickness. It was a capsule filled with powder sugar and was merely a placebo pill. So that afternoon when he got his usual case of sickness we called him into our tent and gave him a priesthood blessing and then told him we had a pill that might help him. He immediately responded with “my mother is a nurse and doesn’t let me take any drugs that she hasn’t given to me.” We were set back a little but then I told him that I knew his mother quite well (which I did and he knew it as well since we had been in the same ward with them a few years earlier) and that I am sure she would be OK with us giving him the pill. He seemed ok with that after we had a little more discussion about it and after we decided to let him talk to his mother for permission (of course I talked to her first in another location so that she was aware of our intentions, she laughed and said it was quite OK) and then he took the pill that evening before he went to bed. Well the next day at the usual time he came to us and said that the pill had really worked well and could he have another one. We let him have one. However later that night as we were getting ready to do a dutch oven treat for the entire camp (we cooked 7 cobbler cakes in the ovens) he started to have a little problem again so we just decided to have him help us make the cobbler cakes. We told him how we needed the help and what to do and stood back as he began to help. This turned out to be the best medicine we had and was the final turning point to his daily homesickness. Several years later and after his mother had died due to cancer, we were moved back into the ward boundaries of his family and I was assigned to be his father’s home teacher. Ryan by that time had moved away and happened to be home while Loren and I were there one day doing our home teaching visit. I mentioned to him the experience and we talked briefly about how much he had loved his mother. It was pretty special to know how deep of a relationship they had held and the reasons for why he had been so homesick at camp, it was due to the fact that he knew his mother was not well at that time even though I was not aware of it at all.