In January 2012 I joined the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), a "boy led" organization that promotes respect, honor, life skills, and personal development.
In reality? My troop is a one-hundred-ish group of 5th to 12th graders that are just figuring th...
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Alright, so every two years my troop goes and visits USS Silversides, a retired submersible (basically a submarine) that we get to sleep on in the crew quarters. It is not fully functional because of a treaty with Canada that says no active military vessel can be stationed in the Great Lakes, but it has largely either been restored or still has original equipment.
Yeah, so with the submersible there is a sizable museum and within the museum there is a giftshop. In the giftshop there are all the usual things, dinky toys, license-plates, and a full arrangement of pop, including Mountain Dew.
One guy in my troop had the bright idea (how he got it nobody to this day knows) that by drinking massive amounts of Mountain Dew he would get to sleep easier. Needless to say, this did not work.
Before getting into the horrific results of this plan, I'll take a moment to outline what the submarine is like. There is a series of long, narrow corridors winding into the middle/back of the submarine where this is a very large room of chainlink bunks. In essence, there are three layers of chainlink frames arranged like giant stacked collections of bunk-beds in the center of the room with more around the edges of the room. On these frames there are thin mattresses where we all sleep. Unfortunately, this also means that when you move, shift, roll over, or generally do any movement the ENTIRE collection of bunks creaks incessantly. So that's the sleeping arrangement.
You can imagine how it isn't the best when you have a whole bunch of teenage boys tossing and turning in the night. Most of all, there is no place to store your clothes or go to the bathroom on the sub. This results in shoving your clothes under the bunks and having to walk out onto the sub (where black ice had formed since it was early winter), across the street, and into the museum to use the bathroom.
Now that you are familiar with the layout, we have one guy who is stacked to the gills with Mountain Dew. As we all try to fall asleep it begins to kick in. The next thing you know he is shouting and running around and tossing people's clothes from the aisles around the sleeping quarters. Thankfully for all of us, around 1:30 in the morning the guy finally calms down, but every hour for the rest of the night he had to go out to the bathroom. His desperation was such that he ended up running out onto the black ice to try and make it to the bathroom every hour in the middle of the night.
The next morning, exhausted from his antics, I couldn't find my pants. As awkward as that sounds, I wasn't only one. People's clothes were all over after he had effectively scattered them across the whole sleeping quarters, leaving us in our pajamas until late that morning by which time we had sorted them all out.
So that was Silversides. It was, in all, a great outing but definitely a memorable one.
