Bug Juice and Pancakes

As part of Customer Service Appreciation Week at my current job, the powers-that-be are rewarding us reps with little thank you's each morning. Yesterday, we got gourmet coffee and a pastry for breakfast. Today we received a single-serving pack of Crystal Light powdered drink mix, attached to a postcard featuring the head of the division on the fake postage stamp. Yes, it was pretty underwhelming. But, as I mixed up my raspberry-flavored packet with cold water from the Alhambra jug and took my first sip, I got an unexpected second gift - an express ticket to a recurring memory from my youth.

On our many Cub Scout and Boy Scout outings, one of the constants was Wyler's drink mix, or as we liked to call it, "Bug Juice," a name that I understand is common lingo in the military. Despite what you might think, that name actually made it more appealing to our adolescent boy brains. For breakfast we would usually drink Tang (it went to the moon!). But for lunch, supper and everything in between, it had to be Wyler's.

I don't think I ever saw Wyler's for sale in the grocery store. The only place we had it was in the Scouts. I can only assume that our troop had thousands of cases of it stored in some warehouse. And, since this was before the era of sell-by dates, it very likely had been there for some while. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the Wyler Company had gone out of business before the Spanish American War (it hasn't).

We could mix up a batch of Bug Juice in our sleep. That task was usually assigned to the least competent member of the patrol, since it was pretty hard to screw up. You simply took the biggest aluminum cooking pot we carried, washed it out perfunctorily, and mixed the packet according to instructions. Then your stirred it thoroughly with the ladle that had been used to serve soup the night before (and that usually hadn't been cleaned too thoroughly).

Of course, Wyler's came in a variety of artificial flavors (I think the only thing not artificial in it was the loads of sugar). The lemonade variety was the reason it was called Bug Juice, but we also drank it in fruit punch (my favorite), strawberry (my least favorite), and grape. The flavors encouraged us to stay hydrated and also improved the palatability of water that was tepid or that came out of rusty old campground spigots.

That's not to say we didn't like it; we did, and drank gallons and gallons of the stuff. I can still recall the sound of the ladle scraping the bottom of the pot and picture scooping out the dregs, complete with whatever dirt had fallen in, one of the facts of eating outdoors. You simply would let the leaves and other detritus settle to the bottom of your Sierra Cup, like so many tea leaves.

There were times when Wyler's was elevated to a level of taste certainly on a par with the finest of wines, and that would be in the High Sierras. In the era before the widespread infestation of Giardia (a nasty intestinal parasite), you could simply scoop water out of any stream or larger lake and drink it, pure and unfiltered. As far as we were concerned, there was nothing better than Wyler's mixed with ice-cold water from a lake that had only recently thawed. It might give you a headache, but it sure was good.

There was one time, I recall, when our Wyler's was put to rather unusual use. I was just a Cub Scout at the time, though a Webelo, which meant that I had almost achieved Boy Scout-hood, sort of Scouting bar mitzvah. Along with the other Webelos of Cub Scout Pack 33, we were invited to tag along with the big boys of Troop 33 on a weekend camping trip.

I was assigned to the patrol of my older brother, John, and we set up our tents in the Laurel Dell campsite, just down the trail from Rock Springs on Mount Tamalpais. On Saturday, we all went on hikes with our adopted patrols and learned woodsy lore. We also learned that camping with the older Boy Scouts was quite a bit different than we were used to. They swore a lot more, used knives and axes in a rather cavalier fashion, and demonstrated grooming habits that were questionable even by our standards.

My brother, in particular, was famous for arriving at a campsite in his newly laundered uniform, then somehow - only minutes later - reappearing covered in dirt. My father used to jokingly claim that John rolled in the campfire ashes. I think he just threw himself whole-heartedly into whatever needed to be done, with little disregard for his attire. (Now that I think about it, he used to do the same thing while working on his ill-fated Alfa Romeo. He had been given a number of blue button-down dress shirts from a family friend that he routinely wore while bleeding brakes and dismantling transmissions.)

Anyway, we Webelos were having a grand time and were even treated to a pancake breakfast on Sunday morning. Unfortunately, the milk that was to be used for the pancakes had run out the night before. But my brother, who even back then had the makings of a gourmet cook, barely skipped a beat in his preparations. After a brief conference with his other patrol members, breakfast proceeded as planned. The only change to the menu was that grape Wyler's had now taken the place of milk in the pancake batter.

Our Cub Scout eyes widened as purple pancakes were stacked on our plates. And, though they probably didn't need any extra sugar, we doused them heavily with syrup. Were they any good? Who cares? They were purple, they were pancakes, and they would live in my memory as probably the most unusual thing I ever ate in the Scouts.