By Eric Marks

I had to choose a birthday gift for a 12-year-old last week. The gift
I selected wasn't politically correct, but it was hip and practical and
should offer the recipient many opportunities to develop a sense of personal
worth and personal responsibility, as well as some good, clean fun.
I gave him a Swiss Army knife.
He can't take it to school, of course, and he's been given the usual list of
precautions: never cut toward yourself. If you need to use a lot of force to
cut through something, cut against a safe surface so you can control where
the blade goes. Don't walk or run or gesture with the blade open. Remember
that a knife is a tool, not a plaything.
Am I crazy? Well, I hope not. Because the fact is, when I was a kid just a
couple of decades ago, every 12-year-old boy I knew had a pocket knife. We
took them to school, we took them to church, we took them everywhere.
We weren't - most of us, anyway - juvenile delinquents in training. We were
proud to have been given a tool we associated with adulthood. For many of
us, a jackknife was the second piece of property, after a bicycle, that we
could truly call our own.
If the bicycle was a gift of freedom, the jackknife was a gift of trust and
a test of responsibility.

I was given my first jackknife by my parents at age 10. I still have
it, and it's still in serviceable condition, though I retired it from daily
use long ago. It's a standard Scout-type knife: a single, leaf-shaped blade,
now worn nearly straight from sharpening; a can opener, a bottle opener and
an awl. You can buy the same knife, give or take a few options, at any
hardware or department store. I thought it was the greatest gift since -
well, since my bicycle.
We had gone family camping every summer since I was three, but the gift of a
camping knife came after I was enrolled in the Scouting movement. Scouts
need knives - and compasses. And matches. And binoculars.
I wasn't the world's greatest wilderness camper. Actually, there are at
least thirty guys in my home town who can tell you I was much closer to the
other end of the scale. For one thing, I didn't see shivering night after
night in a sodden tent under steady rain as "character building." Trials
that you endure in order to survive are character building. Privations you
undergo for the sake of undergoing privations are something else entirely.
It's worth remembering that our ancestors, who variously froze, broiled,
blistered and starved in the great outdoors, most often didn't have any
choice in the matter.
Shortcomings of character aside, I could - and still can - light a fire with
one match, use a map and compass, throw some sort of shelter together from
scratch, identify a few plants that are safe to eat, and have a fair idea
what time it is as long as I have a compass, or what direction I'm heading
in, provided I have a watch. As wilderness skills go, they're not exhaustive
and certainly not up to every challenge, but they're better than none.
What skills I do have I owe to my parents, my grandparents - and neighbours
like Mac.
Mac was an expert with map and compass and an expert survivor - skills he
had learned in the armed forces and honed in civilian life. I don't know
what sort of work Mac did in the forces, though I've heard it entailed a
great deal of personal suffering. Whatever it was, it had been character
building, leaving him tougher and more knowledgable but also deeply
vulnerable. He was a first-rate example of a human being - honourable but
fallible. He was also a volunteer Scout leader.
Mac taught us how to use a map and compass and gave many of us our first
compasses after we had successfully completed an orienteering course. He
helped us master the one-match, wet-wood fire. And though he might not have
realized it at the time, he helped us absorb some of the most fundamental
lessons about life we would ever learn, lessons that we were also learning
obliquely from our parents.
Mac - and my parents - taught me that the most valuable commodity in the
world is free to anyone who cares to use it. It's called ingenuity.
Mac - and my parents - taught me that courage and determination are
renewable resources. You can never run out of them, although sometimes you
need to take a break from the action to recharge your reserves.
Mac helped teach me that patience is a debt we owe our elders, frugality is
a debt we owe our children, and honesty is a debt we owe ourselves.
Above all, he tried to teach me that life, good or bad, is an adventure and
should be approached with an adventurous spirit.
None of these lessons was expressed so clearly and directly as I have
phrased them. If they had been, I would have brushed them off, hearing the
words but not the wisdom. They were taught by example and impressed by
experience - absorbed so completely I've only now come to realize I learned
them at all.

Mac died recently. I hope he - and all the volunteers who spent their
free time teaching wilderness skills to other people's children - knew how
much more we learned.
Many of us, I suspect, still carry pocket knives and matches or compasses,
even when we're not in the woods. They're useful tools, but that's not the
only reason we carry them. They're reminders that we've made it - that we've
learned how to survive in the whole world, not just the natural world.
These are the things we carry. And if there is one gift I could give my
friend's child, it would not be just these simple tools, but all that they
symbolize: not merely binoculars, but the patience to watch, the openness to
see and the attentiveness to learn. Not just a compass, but the confidence
to choose a path and the wisdom and courage to change it as circumstances
require. Not just a pocket knife, but Occam's Razor: good judgement and the
power to discriminate, to determine what is sensible and what not, what is
essential and what not; to apply the right tool to each problem.
Maybe we'll start with the knife.

This essay is respectfully dedicated to the memory of Malcolm "Mac"
McDonough, who gave me my first compass, and to my father, Harold Marks, who
trusted me enough to give me my first knife. Good thinking, Dad! I hope I've
earned it.

Eric Marks is a newspaper editor. It does take a village to raise a child, and he was raised in St. Martins, New Brunswick Canada