Still Loyal to Their Camp
09/21/03
Debbi Snook
Plain Dealer Reporter
Alban, Ontario
Less than a mile from Hartley Bay Marina on the shore of Ontario's Georgian Bay, two men sitting in a tilting RV grow silent. They know that this twisting, hilly road soon will end, and that water, sky and rocky islands will follow. They strain forward in their seats, as if pulled by an unseen magnet.
Mike Jarus and Kevin O'Donnell are going back to Boy Scout camp. Tinnerman Camp, to be exact. It's what any good Scout would do.
"They fixed the road," Jarus says, breaking the dreamy silence. "In the old days, you couldn't drive it without bottoming out every couple hundred feet."
They first came here as skinny Scouts, kids lucky enough to be part of the Greater Cleveland Boy Scout Council, a group that was given a chunk of this glacier-scoured wilderness 40 years ago.
They were lucky enough to know how to swim and paddle a canoe, entrance skills required at Tinnerman. And they were lucky enough to have a Scout leader who gave them a shot at this granite landscape and a chance to come out a little more grown-up.
A lot more grown-up.
"The first thing you had to do was jump in the water and prove you could swim," O'Donnell says.
"So the canoe guides used to take the block of ice left over from the last group and throw it in the water. They'd tell the Scouts that the water up here was just starting to thaw.
"A 13-year-old would fall for it, hook, line and sinker."
"Yeah," Jarus adds, "but the water up here really felt that cold."
Jarus and O'Donnell are not the only ones coming back to Tinnerman Camp. Plenty of other camp veterans come back to donate their time. They might be retired scoutmasters spending a summer there. They can be working thirty- and fortysomethings who use all of their vacation time to ready the camp for the season, then pack it away again. Or they show up at a Tinnerman fund-raiser, throwing their dollars at silent auctions.
The Scout council has owned the 10 acres since 1963, when the land, the main house, guest cottage and boat building were given to them by the Tinnerman family.
The Cleveland industrialists had built the rustic compound on the profits of their flexible metal fasteners.
Since then, more than 14,000 Scouts from around the country have experienced Tinnerman. It is one of several dozen high-adventure camps owned by local Boy Scout councils, and the only one in Canada.
Scouts from the Cleveland area take a grueling 10-hour bus ride to get here, sleep one night on raised bunks in small wooden cabins and then paddle away from the dock for a five-day canoe and camping adventure. They go with their Scout leaders and a college-age canoe guide, but their work is their own: every paddle stroke, every meal, every cleanup.
It can be a life-changing experience, one that keeps grown-ups such as Jarus and O'Donnell returning in support.
George Qua, a longtime board member of the council and Tinnerman fan, puts it this way: "It's our grail, our Holy Grail."
It is also at risk. After 40 years, the needs of the camp have changed, and grown.
At the end of a short, breezy motorboat ride from Hartley Bay Marina, Jarus and O'Donnell are greeted at the camp by canoe guides and staff. The place is orderly and clean, but the white paint on the buildings is peeling, and the guides are tired.
In an attempt to make the camp more financially self-supporting and give more Scouts the opportunity to go to Tinnerman, this is the first year that the camp has tried two groups of eight campers at a time, rather than one. But two of the guides quit in midseason, and others had to pick up the slack.
Jarus and O'Donnell know that keeping guides is a problem. Guides are the glue of the camp. They are slightly older Scouts who show newcomers around the French River area, a watery landscape speckled with rock outcroppings. They are trained to respond to emergencies and make the call on bad weather.
To the younger Scouts (who have to be at least 13 by January of the year they go to camp), they are he-men. To insecure adult troop leaders, they can be a blow to the ego.
And at a salary of $165 a week to start, they are underpaid.
So Jarus and O'Donnell, former guides themselves, have joined the Friends of Tinnerman/Tinnerman Guides Association, a 100-member group trying to raise extra money to hire, train and keep guides.
Jarus, 54, now a dentist in Albany, N.Y., also donated several thousand dollars to the camp for a special canoe. He had it built in the voyageur style of the French fur traders, who plied the same waters as far back as the 1500s. Without being asked, he can sing the voyageur songs by heart. O'Donnell, 36, an analyst for KeyBank in Cleveland, is writing a history of the camp.
Attracting guides is harder than it might seem. Scouting is still popular, with 25,000 Scouts in the Cleveland council alone. But after World War II, scouting was the only game in town. Now it is one of many.
"My generation is hooked on computers," says Mike Satyshur, a University Heights college student and senior canoe guide. "They don't want to do things to get little badges."
He knows Tinnerman offers more than that.
"We're on our own up here," he says. You learn to live in the moment.
O'Donnell remembers some of those moments well. It was in the 1980s on the screened porch of the main building where he had an audience with the late Bill Wilcox, the camp's most long-standing director. O'Donnell's few weeks of guide training had ended, but the 13-year-old from Seven Hills didn't want to go home. Tinnerman was more than a place for the ethics of scouting.
It was more than being trustworthy, honest, reverent. It had captured his soul. Boss Wilcox was a big part of it. O'Donnell remembers him as a happy man, a cigarette-smoking yarn-spinner who could convince young boys that he once had caught a pike with a soup spoon.
He also was strong. "He never babied or coddled anyone," O'Donnell says. "And if you screwed up, he wouldn't yell at you. He'd just look at you with this punishing eye. He knew this could be a dangerous place, and if you made a dumb decision, you had to live with it."
Wilcox never left you ignorant, O'Donnell says. Working side by side with Scouts and staff, he taught new skills in a way that made people feel necessary.
"It created loyalty, and loyalty is a big thing at Tinnerman," says O'Donnell. "But out in the world, in places like Enron, loyalty has been replaced by an attitude of what-can-we-buy-next and how-much-money-can-we-get-out-of-it. Management today is critical. People are working at companies, but they're not building them. What are we teaching our young men today?"
Jarus, too, has a Wilcox story. In his first year as a guide, he claimed he could navigate through the narrow and confusing landscape to Loon Lake, a legendary fishing spot.
Wilcox took him up on it. Using the compass and map skills he had taught himself, Jarus got Wilcox and other adult staff there and back.
"It was, as described, a fish on every cast," Jarus says. Mostly big pike.
"It was an experience of lasting value for me. I felt so important. I felt it was something I could do as well or better than other people."
Jarus also has carried the benefit of camp friendship. The day this year that he buried his father, he got a call, an eight-way conference call, from all his fellow campers.
"We talked about everything," Jarus says. "We talked about our trip in such detail."
Whatever contributions are made by veterans of the camp, it helped eight Mentor-area Scouts get their Tinnerman legs this year. On the day that Jarus and O'Donnell arrived, scoutmasters Jeffrey Bailey and Bob Baker were camping with their charges at Pike Lake, led by canoe guide Jordan White of Bay Village.
"We've been to Pennsylvania and along the Appalachian Trail," Bailey says. "We've been to Washington, D.C., and New York City. So far, this is the tops."
While Bailey talks, the Scouts are clustering and clambering around the rocks like kittens, answering the question of what they might be missing right now.
"Drinking water," says one.
"Man, a toilet," says another, making everyone laugh.
"Computer."
"Ice cubes."
"My girlfriend."
"My girlfriends," another says. "All five of them."
"You're dreaming," he is told.
Bailey says Jordan showed them some really cool spots like this isolated lake.
He took us out to Georgian Bay to places so beautiful it would take your breath away.
They were places they could never have found on their own, Baker says.
"If we were here without a guide, we'd be lost."
To reach the Friends of Tinnerman/Tinnerman Guides Association, call 216-901-9221 or find online at www.fottga.org.
To reach Greater Cleveland Council of the Boy Scouts of America, call 216-861-6060 or find online at www.gccbsa.org.
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter: dsnook@plaind.com, 216-999-4357