Scoutmaster
Memory is ephemeral. We do not remember everything. This much is certain. And this is why we must gather from time to time to recollect, compare notes of what is remembered of the common past. It is a way of retrieving what has been forgotten for one reason or another. In this ritual of rebuilding the past there are monuments that provide the foci to hold disparate memories together. They are axles on spoked wheels, the centers around which people, as John Lennon once sang, “Come Together!”
In the case of Sacred Heart, the Jesuit school in Cebu, now also called Ateneo de Cebu, one such monument is Apolinario Leyson, former teacher and Scoutmaster of the Boy Scouts of the Philippines program there. He is now retired. Generations of class batches remember him with great fondness and respect including Class ’72. They had him at a reunion dinner in his honor.
One by one they recounted to their old mentor small anecdotes that would have to do with how they would lead their lives. How they learned to swim in the course of getting merit badges. How they learned to tie knots, survive and lead others through the wild outdoors. How they learned to put garbage in their own pockets rather than throw them in the fields and streams as they trekked the hills. As at one time, hiking the hills from Dalaguete to Badian. How they rode the slow boat passing through Romblon on the way to a jamboree at Clark Field and another time at Nueva Ecija. The staple of scouting memories once learned, never forgotten: A scout is kind, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.
And Scoutmaster Leyson is carried too by the lift and lightness of his own memories. The mentor’s mentor was Scoutmaster Damaso, once of the Colegio De San Jose-Recolletos. It was because of him that he went into scouting. He remembers hanging out near the school as an “istambay sa Carbon” until 1960 when the local Jesuit community hired him for 2 pesos a day for various positions with Sacred Heart School for Boys including scoutmaster, manager of the boarding house, assistant prefect of discipline and vocational arts teacher.
The school’s boarding house included for its regular dormers quite a number of difficult kids from all over the country. It was in dealing with them that the young Apolinario learned how to deal with his students. Back then, the fare of disciplining strategies prescribed a degree of corporeal punishment. These were strategies that did not sit well with him. In time, he developed his own manner of developing strict discipline among his students. This was a strategy his co-teacher, writer Mrs. Evelyn Luab, would honor with an advice for him to write a book about it.
And yet while Apolinario Leyson is remembered as a disciplinarian, he taught his discipline without once resorting to scolding or long speeches. He was always a man of a few words and wherever possible these few words were delivered in light comic form. And always he made the hike, the camp-out, the trek, a metaphor for life itself.
One learns to tie the knot and tie it well because at some point in one’s life, all will depend on it. And there are all manners of knots to deal with all sorts of situations. How do you descend a cliff using rope without losing the rope after your descent? How do you make sure the knot never slips? How do you make sure that it does at some appropriate time? And see how well a length rope might serve you through various situations that would otherwise have killed you.
A length of rope is of course only a metaphor, a useful symbol to go with the true understanding of discipline and why it is absolutely necessary in one’s travel though life. This is not about ritual formalistic discipline. One must be disciplined not simply to be disciplined. One must be disciplined in order to be safe and safely go to wherever one wants to go in the sense either of destination or destiny.
The great outdoors, while beautiful, is a dangerous place. All the more so for people who do not think by visualizing everything that might go wrong under certain conditions. A rock could fall on one’s head unless the scoutmaster himself warned his troops about it beforehand, or advised them to wear proper gear. One must stop always to assess every dangerous situation beforehand. One must learn to correctly sense the faintest signs of danger.
And it is never easy to get to the highest peaks, the most beautiful of places. Nor is it easy to come home from there. Either way, one learns to help others along the way. By the end of the trek, you will be more tired than you have ever been. You will be dirty. You will smell of the animal inside you. But you will be happy. This is the discipline of Apolinario Leyson, Scoutmaster, retired.
