The woman’s name is Brooke Estabrook-Fishinghawk, and she tells her son’s story with such glee because, she says, it just fits.
She was telling it as she shopped with her two kids, and, as usual, Austin, 13, had disappeared.
“It happens all the time,” she says. “Austin will go up to an elderly woman and ask if he can help with her bags. They give him the strangest looks, tell him they won’t pay him a cent, and he just smiles and helps them to their car.”
Austin Estabrook, you see, is a Boy Scout. Actually, an Eagle Scout, but that does not do justice to the boy or his story.
We will pick the story up 2 1/2 years ago, when Austin’s mother moved the family from Phoenix to land she purchased years earlier southwest of Walsenburg.
Austin was often sick. His mother cannot remember exactly how many times she’d taken him to the hospital. Finally, a doctor urged her to find a place that would give him relief from his severe allergies and asthma.
She quit her job as a tenured professor at Mesa Community College and moved with Austin and Madison, now 11, to Walsenburg.
They live 7 miles off the main road, Brooke says. “Out there,” she calls it. Still, Austin’s health immediately improved.
Just as quickly, Austin’s Boy Scouts dream rekindled. His mother began making calls.
Given the remoteness of their home, she could not find a troop for the boy. She finally called the Denver-area council and was to bring him to a meeting.
He would be a “lone Scout,” belonging to no specific council and charged with moving up the ranks by attending here and there.
Austin began plotting a two-year plan to make Eagle Scout. He attended camps in Pueblo, council leadership classes in Colorado Springs and, last summer, a camp in Minnesota to reach the rank of Star, the last before Eagle.
Now, he needed a leadership project. He had come up with it at age 11 on those days when his mother took him to the Walsenburg Public Library.
Kids there, he noticed, mostly watched videos or played music or games. Few actually read books, not the way he loved them. Over the next two years, he refined his Reading Buddies Program.
He raised $600 for books, snacks and prizes from businesses. He began the program in January for kids ages 4 to 17.
Every Friday, Madison read a book aloud. Austin would then pair the oldest and youngest kids. They alternated reading to each other.
“At first, I figured maybe 10 or 11-ish kids would participate,” Austin recalled. “Over those two months, we averaged at least 22.”
The library will continue the program in October.
In April, Austin Estabrook earned the rank of Eagle Scout, the only lone Scout in Colorado to achieve the rank and one of the youngest in the country ever to do so.
He credits his mother, saying it still seems incredible that she drove him every month to Denver to attend merit-badge and various other programs.
He is a kid who speaks with the eloquence of someone twice his age, simply saying of his reading program: “I just thought the kids of Walsenburg would benefit from it.”
He is off to summer camp, but not the kind you might think. In his backpack is his latest reading, a book on computer programming, which happens to be the type of camp he is attending in Fort Collins.
“I’m very, very lucky,” Austin says of his life. “And very blessed.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
