Here's an article that Deborah didn't mention:
http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine ... rness.htmlSentenced to Nature
More and more parents are sending their unruly teenagers to be tamed by wilderness. There's always the chance, though, that they'll come back wilder than before.
By CHARLES SIEBERT Photographs by ROBERT YAGER
We'd been hiking all morning with full packs, up and down the rough hills of the Escalante Desert in southwestern Utah. It was mid-May, and yet the noontime temperature had already reached into the 90's, the heat driving each of us further into our own thoughts and walking rhythms, a ragged, single-file brigade of capped heads bowed to the rugged terrain, the bright red bloom of an occasional springtime cactus flower only pointing up the otherwise hard-bitten cast of the flora around us: juniper, sagebrush, tamarisk and pinyon.
"So how did you end up here?" I asked the hiker in front of me, a 17-year-old boy from Colorado named Pat. This was Pat's 16th day in the Escalante. He had each one marked off in pen on the right leg of his khakis, pants that melded perfectly with the color of the desert soil and with his own dust-caked skin.
"I just stopped caring," he said, nervously rubbing dirt from the tattoo on his forearm. "I did lots of drugs, dyed my hair blue, fought with my brother. I slashed his car tires. He tried to kill me a couple of times."
"And who brought you here?"
"Well," he began indifferently. "I'm crashed out in my bedroom one afternoon, and my father comes in and says: 'Come on, get up. You, me and mom are going car shopping.' I didn't think about it. Just got in the car and crashed out again. When I woke up it was 3 a.m., and I'm looking around thinking, Who shops for cars at this hour? I tried smashing my way out, but all the doors and windows were on auto-lock. The next thing I know we're pulling up to some place in the middle of nowhere. My father tells me to go inside and get the papers for the car. As soon as I get out, he screeches off. Something, huh?"
Pat and my other hiking companions that day were all members of a group known as the Grizzlies, enrollees in the RedCliff Ascent Outdoor Therapy Program for wayward teenagers, a rigorous survival training and self-development regimen in the wilds of the Escalante: day after day of hiking for a minimum of two months, setting up and breaking down camp, gathering water from nearly dry stream beds and dank, shallow wells; starting fires with nothing more than sticks and rocks.
RedCliff's groups contain anywhere from five to eight students, male and female, between 13 and 18 years of age. Given neonative monikers like the Bobcats, the Coyotes or the Grizzlies, some consist of adjudicated kids, the bulk of these lower to lower-middle class, who, for relatively minor crimes like drug offenses or petty theft, have been assigned to RedCliff by judges in Utah's Department of Youth Corrections. The rest of the groups, kept separate from the adjudicated kids, are "private students," sons and daughters of wealthy parents from around the country who can afford RedCliff's $265-a-day expense - kids who have become so unruly that their parents felt they had no other recourse but to submit them to what might be called the pure rebuke of the wild.
Wilderness therapy has become an increasingly popular approach to dealing with teenage delinquency, with more than 1,000 programs nationwide. The industry's growth has not come without controversy. Back in the late 80's and early 90's, when there was none of the governmental regulation and oversight to which places like RedCliff are now subjected, three students enrolled in Escalante-based programs died from being driven too hard in extreme conditions by their instructors. All three programs were subsequently shut down and a series of laws passed, setting minimum health and safety standards and requiring regular inspections.
But despite these incidents and ongoing debate about whether this form of "tough love" behavior modification isn't, in fact, too tough on its subjects, wilderness-therapy programs continue to thrive. What they offer is, in many ways, a recapitulation of countless ancient tribal coming-of-age rituals, conjoining two timeless and universal struggles: to survive in the wilderness and to survive adolescence. But somehow in the modern civilized context, the phenomenon seems quintessentially American. Only in a nation with sufficient amounts of extant wilderness and societal anomie could the former be so regularly prevailed upon as an antidote to the latter.
Educational consultants and juvenile-court judges across the country now regularly turn to programs like RedCliff Ascent. So firmly established has this new avenue of rehabilitation become that there is now a cottage industry of private "escort services," professional abductors hired by parents to come into their homes in the middle of the night and whisk their children away to what are hoped will be life-altering turns with the wild's otherness.
Of course, these turns have the potential to be for the worse. Wilderness is, by definition, an uncultivated, often ungovernable classroom, one that can sometimes inspire the very wildness it's supposed to quell. Indeed, violent outbursts and panicked escape attempts are fairly common occurrences in wilderness therapy. Last year, in an incident that brought national media attention to this desolate corner of the Southwest, eight RedCliff students in a group called the Mustangs assaulted their counselors and then fled into the wilderness, setting off a four-day search-and-rescue operation in snow and near-zero temperatures. It was in the wake of that incident that I decided to head out to Utah this past spring to witness firsthand if and how modern-day teenage disaffection can be assuaged by timeless wilderness.
The Redcliff ascent field office in Beryl Junction comprises two single-story, cream-colored prefab buildings alongside Utah's Highway 56 in the middle of a vast sagebrush-filled valley. Except for the sign by the road, the only indication that you haven't arrived at a couple of abandoned farm-equipment sheds is the small note posted on the building nearest the road: "Parents" it reads, above an arrow that points up a stone ramp leading to a set of aluminum-sided front doors.
Inside there's a sofa-lined reception room decorated with Native American artifacts and weavings. A blackboard at the far end of the room is used for instructor-training seminars or for group sessions between parents and RedCliff psychologists. In a corner just to the left of the blackboard there is a small assortment of three- to four-foot-long tree limbs. Students find and use them out in the wilderness for digging fire pits. These, however, were wielded by students against their field instructors. The RedCliff staff keeps them around as mementos of the nature of their line of work.
"That one was used in the assault last December," Scott Schill, RedCliff's field director, said as he showed me around the office one morning. The place was humming with activity. It was a Wednesday, which is staff changeover day; fresh instructors were heading out to replace their counterparts in the field.
"Another kid came after me with this one," Schill said in his Tennessee drawl as he took the burnished limb in his hands. "He took a swing at me, but I was able to wrestle him down. After a local sheriff took him into custody, a judge told him, 'You're going to go back and finish that program,' and he eventually became one of my best students."
Making our way through a set of doors off the reception room, we entered a small staff kitchen and dining area, then turned down a narrow hallway leading to an opposing set of staff offices and, behind those, the RCA logistics office. It houses the main switchboard and radio receiver through which the staff keeps tabs on the groups - often as many as eight or nine at one time - out roaming a 560-square-mile expanse of high desert.
On the wall above the radio receiver is what's known as the board. It lists counseling assignments for the week, the names of the students in each group and, through a multicolored code of symbols, the details about the physical and psychological state of each student. The code applies to private and adjudicated kids alike. Call it the democratizing effect of duress. A red dot by a name, for example, indicates that a student has yet to get the physical and psychological evaluation required by the state of all enrollees before they can begin the program's curriculum. A yellow dot means students are still in the "polliwog phase," the mandatory 72-hour acclimation period during which new students are still adjusting to the Escalante's thin air and are restricted to only short hikes.
And then there are what can literally be called the trouble signs. A brown dot, for instance, signifies "a sitter," a kid given to bowing out of hikes altogether and generally resisting cooperation and advancement. A little hangman's noose means a suicide risk; a black dot means a kid is a threat to run, although in the Escalante, a black dot is just about synonymous with a hangman's noose.
I was sitting in the logistics office one evening when a new arrival came in, a 15-year-old named Lorena. Like those of many of RedCliff's enrollees, Lorena's parents are divorced. She lives with her mother, who opted for sending Lorena to RedCliff Ascent over a stay in a psychiatric ward, the only other alternative offered to her by a judge after a series of offenses - truancy, theft, drinking and drug use - eventually landed her in juvenile court.
She'd been dropped off by her mother only an hour earlier and had already been divested of all trappings of her former life. Upon arrival at RedCliff, kids are taken to the back supply shed and stripped and searched for any concealed drugs or weapons. Their clothes, jewelry and other accessories are inventoried and stored away. A few random items of clothing are kept aside in a separate sealed bag to be passed under the noses of RedCliff's hunting dogs should the need arise.
'When I went through the strip-search and then got put in the truck, blindfolded,' said one 16-year-old, 'I knew this was no Outward Bound.'
Kids are then given standard issue khakis, a T-shirt, a bandanna and a pair of hiking boots. They get a tarp, a wool blanket, 20 feet of parachute cord and 12 feet of strap, and from those items must learn to construct a backpack in which to store their sleeping bags and ground pads, water bottles, water purifier drops, enamel cups and week's supply of food: rice, lentils, raisins and oats. They get books that outline the survival skills they must master in order to graduate. And they get rules. Lots of them - everything from the straightforward (No. 7: "No intimate relationships") to the abstract (No. 13: "No questions pertaining to the future").
Lorena - about 5-foot-4 with long strawberry-blond hair clasped behind her head, a few stray strands falling forward around a flushed, cherubic face - stood in the logistics-office doorway, eyes red with tears, staring off as some last bits of paperwork were being processed. She looked like a prisoner of war, the legs of her ill-fitting khakis bunched atop untied hiking boots. On the upper thigh of one of her pant legs she'd already penned the words "I love my mother." I looked up at the board on the wall above her. She'd been assigned to the Grizzlies. Alongside her name were red and yellow dots and a hangman's noose.
As RedCliff drop-offs go, Lorena's was relatively painless. Schill told me about a girl who arrived at the field office one afternoon with her parents and her brother and sister. She'd been told that the family was going to Disneyland, but that her father just had to make a brief side trip for business.
"The parents are in talking with me here in my office," Schill said. "The daughter, meanwhile, is standing out in the hallway with her headphones on and this bored, can-we-get-the-hell-out-of-here expression on her face. Then she starts looking at the pictures and clippings on the wall about our program. All of a sudden she's saying, 'Hey, this is one of those places they send kids to!' And when she looks up, everyone in her family is staring at her. They all start backing away toward the door and she's freaking, cursing out her parents. She cried for hours after they left."
It was an hour-and-a-half drive from the Redcliff office to my drop-off point with the Grizzlies in the field: an unforgiving expanse of mountainous desert punctuated only by the occasional jeep trail and, along its far southeastern edge, a stretch of Union Pacific railroad track connecting the town of Milford with a long-ago deserted iron-mining outpost called Lund. It is, for wilderness-therapy purposes, a perfectly vast tract of nothingness, and yet for good measure, all RedCliff novitiates are delivered into it blindfolded. This prevents a kid from picking out any landmarks by which to negotiate an escape back out to what little semblance of civilization exists in the area.
"I remember planning my escape the whole ride out," a 16-year-old named Michael told me one afternoon as he stood proudly over the fire he'd just started with his bowstring, palm rock and fire stick. Michael's father, a market manager for an international shipping concern, had hired an escort service to get his son in the middle of the night from their home in Connecticut. A lithe, handsome boy with clear, curly-lashed blue eyes, Michael said he had already agreed with his father to go to RedCliff, though he didn't think he really meant to send him.
"I was so high on drugs and alcohol," he said, "I really didn't know what I was agreeing to. I thought it would be like Outward Bound or something. Next thing I know there's this strange person in my room holding the bag of clothes my father had packed and I'm being taken to this place. When I went through the strip-search and then got put in the truck, blindfolded, I knew this was no Outward Bound. The whole time riding out I was trying to calculate how far we were going and identify any sounds. The longer it took, though, I just sort of gave up. "
Hundreds have tried to run from RedCliff over the years, a common initial reaction to the program's sudden hard-core restraints. Most are caught within 24 hours. Within the first week of their stay, most also get past the urge to escape. "You're filled with hate for the first four or five days," Pat told me that first day on the trail. "Then you eventually settle in." The staff refers to this as "landing" - the point when kids stop resisting and get with the program. RedCliff's five-phase curriculum is like an extreme Boy Scout manual; to graduate from each stage a student has to master a set of ever-more-difficult survival skills. They also have to learn, through prolonged reflection, the writing of autobiographies and weekly therapy sessions, to master themselves and their emotions.
That, at least, is the plan. "This is hardly a perfect science," RedCliff's co-founder Steve Peterson told me as we sat in the field office one afternoon. A plain-talking Wyoming native with massive cattle-rustler's forearms, Peterson is a former treatment counselor in Utah's youth corrections system. He got the inspiration to start RedCliff after being granted permission to take eight kids from a Utah juvenile facility to the Wyoming ranch where he was reared, an experience that he felt changed the kids' outlook and attitude in ways no amount of intense therapy had ever been able to achieve.
"It's basically about trying to teach kids consequences," he continued. "Out here so much is based on what you do, not what you say. These kids know how to manipulate authority and blame authority. But you can't manipulate the wild."
Some kids, however, do find ways to flout the RedCliff regimen by going into a protracted "stall." They're no longer acting out violently, or making escape attempts - they're just refusing to get with the program. Laura, a 16-year-old member of the Grizzlies, was typical. At the group campfire, she recited for me with the dispassion of a recidivist criminal the details of her life: "From a split home. Father's a doctor. Parents fighting over who gets custody of me. Been kicked out of every boarding school on the planet. Tried to set one of them on fire. Pushed a kid down a flight of stairs at another. Did lots of drugs. Given too much leeway, I guess."
At one point, she undid the band that had been holding her long, apparently red hair up in a bun behind her head. It didn't shake down, but slowly swayed off to one side in a dirt-matted clump. "When I first got here," she told me of her days as a sitter, "I didn't do anything. I sat down during hikes and urinated in my pants and bag a lot just to annoy the staff."
Now, however, after 120 days in the desert, she had broken through. Laura and the others I had met all seemed to have become so oddly at home in their homelessness: enfants sauvages who, despite the deprivations of their lives in the wild, had found enough solace in the group rituals and predictable regimen of their RedCliff days that they'd grown reluctant to trade them for their former well-appointed ones.
"These are kids," said Dr. Dan Sanderson, RedCliff's clinical director, "who would be on their way to severe personality disorders and multiyear outpatient treatment if we didn't get to them. They are still walking around with their umbilical cords in their hands, looking to reattach them. But slowly we start to get them to participate in their own lives, and eventually they come to like the changes they see. They come to like the changes they see so much they don't want to leave the program; even their longevity here becomes a badge of honor."
More than 1,500 teenagers have graduated from RedCliff. Studies conducted by Sanderson have shown that six months after completing the program, 80 percent of RedCliff's graduates were still functioning at the high level of productivity and self-control they had been upon leaving.
Independent analysis supports his findings. "These programs do a good job of developing a kid's sense of self," said Dr. Keith Russell of the University of Idaho, who is currently completing the first comprehensive study of wilderness-therapy programs. Judge Joseph E. Jackson, of the 5th District Juvenile Court in Utah, agrees. "Programs like this teach kids that there's a bottom line," he said. "And most of them have a real awakening."
Early one morning with the grizzlies, a cloudless sunrise flaming the jagged stand of juniper in which we'd slept, Mike Petree, the 23-year-old head instructor, announced that there was to be a naming ceremony. He assembled the group around the morning campfire along with the rest of his staff, his 22-year-old wife, Bekka, and Jen Clemmens, 20. Ned, a 16-year-old from New York City, was the Grizzly who, because of his progress, had been singled out that day to receive his "earth name."
He was made to stand alone on the far side of the fire. The rest of us formed a semicircular observatory ring as Petree, standing opposite Ned, lit a sage smudge, held it aloft and, turning to each of the four points on the compass, began to recite a poem.
Petree then called out Ned's name. Bekka and Clemmens came forward and traced with their knives the outline of Ned's body, explaining that they were cutting away the old negative parts of his person and making room for the new positive ones. Petree announced Ned's earth name, Cloud Seeker, and made a short speech about why the name now suited Ned, who kept his head bowed the whole time, shoulders hunched, chin pressed into his chest, as though he were trying to fold up and disappear.
I had spoken with Ned a number of times in the course of my stay with the Grizzlies. A slight, olive-skinned boy with wavy, golden brown hair, he had that presumptuous maturity of so many privileged kids, occasionally sidling up alongside me in the course of our hikes to talk about the different newspapers he liked to read, depending on whether he's at boarding school in Boston, or at his apartment in New York City, or down in the Caribbean. When I asked Ned about what RedCliff was doing for him, he seemed to be feeding me a line. He was someone who figured to be impervious to the sort of staged display we were attending that morning.
Petree asked Ned if he accepted his new name. He nodded. Petree then stepped forward, holding a pawawka, or medicine bag, a small leather pouch that I'd watched him knit together with leather lacing as the two of us sat by the previous night's campfire. Inside, Petree had placed an old flint arrowhead he'd found, a specimen dating back to the late 1700's when the Oglala Sioux inhabited this corner of southern Utah. He put the pawawka around Ned's neck and gave him a hug. When Ned finally lifted his head, tears were running down his cheeks. He then ran to the top of a nearby knoll and shouted his new name four times, once in each direction of the compass.
Sitting at the campfire the night before, Petree had explained to me the purpose of the naming ceremony. He said it was to give kids a whole other person to report to, to take refuge in, when they return to their former life and all the attendant problems, shortcomings and bad influences that got them to RedCliff in the first place.
fter days of listening to kids telling their life stories, I could not keep from wondering about their parents. "I'll tell you what," Steve Peterson said to me at the RCA field office. "I'd like to get some of these parents out in the wilderness for a couple of weeks. I had this one dad who called me up saying the program didn't work, and he wanted to send his kid back. I asked him why, and he said, 'Because the kid stole my marijuana stash.' "
He paused a moment and smiled. "Another father once said to me: 'I can't have it on my kid's record that he was here. He's going to be the president of the United States.' "
'I can't have it on my kid's record that he was here,'said one father. 'He's going to be the president of the United States.'
RedCliff is paid an annual fee of about $500,000 by the Utah Corrections Department for treating adjudicated kids. The bulk of the program's income, however, comes from the parents of private students, parents whose behavior sometimes speaks volumes about the pathologies of their children. Some weeks after students assaulted their counselors and fled across the desert - they were rescued and expelled and then fined by a juvenile-court judge - one escapee phoned RedCliff asking for his original clothes back. He was told that the items couldn't be located but that a number of pieces of clothing had been given to the dog-handlers to be used with the bloodhounds in the course of the search. A short time later, the boy's father phoned demanding to be reimbursed for the clothes. The parents of one of the other boys involved with the assault, meanwhile, have threatened to sue RedCliff for negligence, claiming that their son was a victim and that the staff should have taken care to keep him away from bad influences in his group. They are also contending that RedCliff failed to protect him from harm, both in the course of the assault and in the subsequent search-and-rescue operation.
"It's pretty amazing," Peterson told me. "Maybe these people think I just fell out of the stupid tree, but here I am getting sued for negligence and their child has two felonies on his record for assault and robbery."
I asked Schill about this as we sat talking in the RCA office the evening I returned from the field. "Yeah, we get some pretty low-functioning parents," he said. "Sometimes we'll call the parents to come for the graduation ceremony and they'll say: 'Can you hold my kid for a couple more weeks? We're going to be on vacation.' "
Just then a young girl appeared at the door, a glazed expression on her face. She had on a pair of very low-sitting hip-hugger bell-bottoms and a halter top. She just stood there, silently, in the doorway, one hand twisting a strand of her shoulder-length blond hair.
"Yes?" Schill finally said. "Can I help you?"
"Don't you remember me?" she asked. "Julie. I graduated last year."
"Yeah," Schill offered tentatively. "I think I do. And your dad's a doctor, right? "
"Not for long he isn't," she said, twisting coquettishly on the ball of one foot. "He's up on assault charges right now for throwing me against the wall three times."
A nervous silence ensued. "And," Schill said, "what brings you here?"
"Me and a guy friend just drove down here - driving nonstop. He dropped me off here."
"Do you want to get back in the program?" Schill asked, at a complete loss as to what the girl was after.
"Well, no," she said. "I just wanted to check out what was going on, see the place again. Maybe I'll get a job here some time. You guys were always telling us we should come back and work in the program after we graduated."
"That's right," Schill said, smiling awkwardly. Julie was still there poking aimlessly about the field office when I gathered up my gear and headed for a hotel room in Cedar City. Schill told me the following day that her "guy friend" finally came back to get her about 10 p.m., and that was the last he heard of her.
Just before leaving Redcliff, I got a chance to watch a graduation, or a "run in" ceremony. One of the boys graduating that May morning was Daniel, an adjudicated kid from northern Utah. Daniel's parents and I were driven to a clearing in the middle of the desert. It would be from there, we were told, essentially nowhere, that Daniel would "run in."
We got out of the truck and stood in the bright desert sun, waiting, an occasional wind rattling the surrounding scrub. I thought of a conversation I'd had with Michael, of the Coyotes, a few days before, the ace bow-drill fire-starter from Connecticut whose father had hired an escort service to deliver him to RedCliff. I asked him if, having now gotten with the program, he was just seizing on the most expedient route out of it or if he thought his experience at RedCliff had already changed him in some significant way. It's the sort of question that would make a 16-year-old in any context want to run away, but Michael managed to muster an answer.
"I guess," he said, "I see how irresponsible I was. To my father. To my girlfriend. I'd make her cry all the time and not even care."
More telling than the words was the manner in which they were spoken, a kind of clear-eyed modesty. It was as if Michael had been reacquainted by the wild with a challenge far more significant than any of those that had landed him out there: namely his life, unadorned, and the fact that he alone was ultimately responsible for it.
For all its potential downfalls, RedCliff seemed to have at least awakened the students I met to that reality. They all seemed to walk around with a kind of stunned resolve, the bare-bones conviction that when they got back to their old lives and everything turned rotten again, they would at least know how to take care of themselves.
A message came over our driver's radio. Daniel was ready to make his run-in. His mother and father moved forward along the trail, ready to receive him. On the ride out that morning they'd told me they were excited to see their son again but were skeptical about whether he'd changed. "He's a master manipulator," Dan's father said. "He'll tell you exactly what you want to hear, say all the right things and then get right back into his old ways."
Moments passed. In the distance I could see plumes of dust rising and then a figure straining to emerge from them. Spotting his parents, Daniel picked up the pace, a broad grin appearing on his face as he ran into his mother's arms. He looked uncannily like the young Mickey Rooney in "Boys Town." His dad patted him on the back with his right hand, clutching his wife with his other as she cried. We all piled into the van, Dan and his parents in the seat behind me, Dan listing all the foods he couldn't wait to eat. At one point his parents brought up the possibility of moving to Idaho to keep Dan from falling into old habits.
"I'd love to move to Idaho," Dan said.
"Yeah," his father said, a faint smirk on his face. "We'll see."
Back at the RCA office, Dan and another boy reported to the supply shed to pick up the bags containing the street clothes and other personal items they'd deposited more than two months earlier. Dan's mother had gone inside the office to tend to a bit of last-minute paperwork. His father and I stood outside the supply-shed door, waiting.
Dan stepped out into the sunlight, placed his bag down at his father's feet then walked over to the back of one of the RedCliff pickup trucks parked opposite the supply shed. He pulled out what looked to be a gnarled piece of driftwood. He said he'd found it more than a month ago while hiking. His field instructor at the time promised he'd bring it back to base camp at the end of his shift and keep it there until Dan made end of trail. A smooth gray, wind-abraded section of juniper, it looked like a pair of deer antlers. Dan kept asking his father if he wanted to hold it but got no response. His young face went slack a moment. Then he steeled himself, picked up his gear, and walked away.
