A chip off the old blockhead

Today I was perusing a nearby “outdoor” store. I use parenthesis around the word Outdoor, as most of these stores are nowadays quite unrecognizable as such. Entering to purchase fishing gear, I was momentarily disoriented by a wrong turn into the cappuccino bar and while fleeing, turned left instead of right and wound up in the skateboarding section. I didn’t immediately grasp that the area was so dedicated since all the clothing appeared to be military surplus.

I decided to check out the duds before leaving and stopped to look at a price tag. It became immediately apparent that all the “old” clothes were in fact designer-labeled skateboarding apparel that cost more than my first two boats. That was just for a pair of camouflage pants.

As the salesman came up and greeted me with a highly trained “S’up Dude?” I fled from the area lest he think that I was some kind of weird 41-year-old man looking to purchase a mid-life crisis. I am, but I didn’t want him to know it.

This small incident weighed heavy on my mind as I stood in the check-out line pondering this while waiting for Summer Fawn (as noted in block letters on the name tag) to finish her phone call and ring up my carp bait. As Fawn tried unsuccessfully to operate a tiny cell phone and the sophisticated cash register simultaneously, I recognized that my upset was due to fact that one more cherished piece of childhood had been subverted, perverted and co-opted by ultra-sophisticated youth marketing geniuses. That bit of childhood I am referring to is the corner Army Surplus Store.

Though I have just barely reached middle age, it saddens me to realize that we were perhaps the last generation to understand the joy of walking into the Army Surplus store with a hard-earned dollar burning a hole in our non-stone-washed jeans and walking out an hour later with enough stuff to outfit a light infantry brigade minus the artillery and sidearms. Today, a child walking into an outdoor store with one dollar could not even purchase a double decafe latte.

For stirring up faded memories of childhood in any male of my era, there is nothing quite like the scent of mildewed canvas, Cosmoline, rotting jungle netting and rancid boots to immediately transport you back to 1975. The air in a surplus store was not only fragrant but also undoubtedly highly contaminated with military fungicide, various tropical mold spores and bacteria from places that had never seen antibiotics. Sometimes I wonder if these dangerous fumes adversely affected my brain development, forcing me into a life of outdoor writing instead of gainful employment.

The trip to the surplus store was always full of surprise and adventure. Since most of these establishments were run by crusty and slightly disreputable old men, inventory control and hygiene standards were lacking by 1860’s standards but we happily dove anyway into the oversize crates that lined the store, tunneling through mountains of stained sleeping bags and unrecognizable canvas in search of hidden treasure. Because of our incessant digging or perhaps in spite of it, the store displays tended to be highly disorganized, making a shopping trip an extended scavenger hunt where a neat bombsight might be found buried under a huge stack of ripped parachutes.

We watched the store like hawks, waiting for new things to appear. When the store got in a fresh shipment of canteens, we descended like a swarm of locusts to root through the pile in order to find the best. The finest ones were not the newest but rather those with interesting damage that could have possibly been the result of combat. After buying such a treasure, we made up elaborate stories about small surface dings that we believed had been the result of a hidden sniper who was attempting to kill General Patton as he was drinking from that very canteen.

All of our lawn-mowing money went for those necessities such as bayonets and spent mortar shells that were mandatory for an overnight sleep-out when you are 12-years-old. As our group of neighborhood boys traipsed to the top-secret campsite in the woods across the cornfield, we resembled a platoon of half-pint soldiers en route to a date with destiny and burnt marshmallows.

Unfortunately, we got older and the Army Surplus stores ran into a new generation with seemingly unlimited amounts of discretionary income and a distinct contempt for things that smell like military preservative. Today’s kids would no more consider sleeping in a torn and fungus-infested army pup tent than to wear last year’s snowboarding apparel. The current generation was the death knell for the surplus store.

Looking back at all the nights I froze in those worn-out sleeping bags, perhaps the current generation did us a favor.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites