HBM081: Kinnikinnick Nick VS The Bear
Here Be Monsters
Here Be Monsters Podcast
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 27 September 2017
⏱️ 33 minutes
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Summary
Boy Scout Leadership Camp was a bad fit for Jeff Emtman. He was a meek 13 year old who didn’t eat meat and talked to animals with his mind. Regardless, Jeff wound up in the dry forests of Eastern Washington, with a group of other boys and a young scout leader, Nick, whose leadership style was...let’s just call it “eclectic”.
Content note: language and drug use.
Nick was rarely around, and when he did show up, he’d impart scouting wisdom on building giant towers, making drug paraphernalia, and pooping in the woods. It was Nick’s lesson on plant identification that earned him the nickname “Kinnikinnick Nick”. He browbeat the virtues of smoking the dried leaves Bearberry, a plant that grew wild across camp. He claimed the plant an intoxicant similar to LSD. Nick also sold weed.
As the camp’s middle management wised to Nick’s dealings, they slowly sowed the seeds of conspiracy into the minds of the Jeff and the other campers. And the middle management prepared for a late-night sting.
Jeff Emtman produced this episode, along with help from Bethany Denton and Nick White.
Music: The Black Spot
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From KCRW, this is Here Be Monsters. |
| 0:07.0 | The only bear that's ever scared me is one that I never saw. |
| 0:12.0 | One night in the dry forests of Eastern Washington, back when I was 13 years old, |
| 0:17.8 | I ran for my life. I ran into the dark with untied shoes in my pajamas without a flashlight. |
| 0:25.2 | And I never saw it. |
| 0:26.6 | I only heard it crashing through the underbrush behind me. |
| 0:31.3 | And this incident, let's call it that, the incident. |
| 0:35.0 | It just never sat right with me. |
| 0:38.0 | And now, half a lifetime later, I'm still thinking about that betrayal. You see I've seen a lot of bears in my life, |
| 0:46.0 | mostly grizzlies and mostly through a couple layers of thick metal fencing. |
| 0:50.0 | There's this place in my hometown where you can go and watch them. |
| 0:54.0 | There's a parking lot at the bottom of a hill and an ice cream store nearby, |
| 0:58.0 | and you can go and take your waffle cone and just watch a couple bears being bears through that fence. Mostly they just sit there and look unimpressed. |
| 1:04.0 | Mostly they just sit there. |
| 1:05.6 | Sometimes they bathe or play, but mostly they just sit there |
| 1:09.0 | and look unimpressed. As long as I can remember, I've had a psychic connection with animals, all of them. |
| 1:19.0 | Nothing special really. I've just always felt clued into the conversations of nature. |
| 1:24.0 | I used to share entire dialogues with animals and we'd talk and talk and talk. |
| 1:30.0 | But eventually I lost those words. |
| 1:32.0 | And nowadays my abilities exist only as exchanges of knowing looks. |
| 1:37.0 | When I was a young adult, I was backpacking on the edge of a valley near sundown and I looked half a mile across that valley to see a black bear matching my pace. |
| 1:51.0 | We walked in the same direction for some time, just sharing occasional glances. |
... |
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