An Uphill Hike to Self-Discovery

Everything seemed ready that bright morning. The sub-zero sleeping bags, the fluorescent orange fleece jackets, the double sets of heavy-duty long underwear and the baggies of spare tinder - all that 13 teenagers and four adults would need for five late October days of primitive camping - waited in the school yard, set to go.

But where were the kids?

Several, it seemed, had fled the grounds of Hampden's Independence School to forage for butter cream doughnuts, cigarettes and other necessities they feared might be scarce in the West Virginia woods.

Another boy was hiding in a classroom, prostrate on a table and whispering, "I don't want to go; I don't want to go," over and over into his folded arms. Still others ran willy-nilly through the halls, shoving and cursing at their teachers and slamming doors and howling like wild things.

Michelle DeBruin surveyed her riotous charges with the serene smile that is her trademark. Such behavior was precisely why the children needed the woods, why she was about to lead a class most teachers wouldn't take to the Maryland zoo into the wilds of the Monongahela National Forest - and why she had helped make camping part of a public school's curriculum in the first place. This group, the 10th grade, was by far the most challenging in a school for challenging children: they were hyperactive, defiant, even occasionally violent - one 10th-grader was stabbed near his home not long ago. Most were new to the school this year and hadn't been on a trip before, and the young teacher knew that the camping program would be a triumph if they made it through the week.

If.

"I just wanted to let you know that I saw wool sweaters and long underwear in the classroom," she calmly warned the students, who, a few minutes before departure time, had at last been rounded up into a ragged circle on the school lawn. "It'll be 27 degrees tonight, and it will feel colder."

Several trudged back inside.

It was hard to help them understand the outdoors. Like many low-income city kids, they'd barely been outside Baltimore. The extent of one boy's travels was a tenderly recalled trip to Six Flags, and Michelle had met some who'd never left the neighborhoods where they'd been born. Most hailed from the school's working-class Hampden surroundings; others took buses from the city's worst areas. Many had never seen a night sky not obscured by urban lights, or heard total silence. Nature was simply

Recently, she had asked one of her classes to plot out the milestones of their lives, and they'd come up with a grim timeline stretching from birth to death, and punctuated by events like growing a beer belly and developing wrinkles. Experimenting with sex and drugs came before learning to drive.

What she and the other teachers wanted for these children was a rite of passage, and that's what the year-old camping curriculum - called the Wilderness Art Initiative - was designed to be. After five hard days on the trail, kids accustomed to failing returned jubilant, and with the sense that the rest of the world was conquerable, too.

She wasn't worried about the forecast. In fact, things were going better than planned. All 13 students - 11 boys and two girls - had shown up on their own and obediently relinquished their medicine and inhalers so Michelle could administer them as needed. The kids kept complaining, but nonetheless helped the teachers pack the gear into two minivans and a pickup truck, then climbed in themselves.

They were headed for a place called the Dolly Sods, a windswept, heath-like region where birch and mountain ash grow. Some consider it one of the loveliest parts of the East Coast.

That first night, there was even the promise of light, transforming snow.

The Journey

The 4 1/2 -hour drive - plus four pit stops - into the mountains went beautifully. Sure, the children had stunned the patrons of a Keyser, W.Va., gas station by buying snacks with their ski masks on, then leaping up and down on one of their minivans until it bounced to the beat of Usher's "Bad Girl," and freak-dancing in the parking lot.

And true, at one point a boy had blasted his safety whistle in the ear of one of the minivan drivers, who somehow managed not to veer off the road, though it grew increasingly narrow and treacherous as the little caravan wound over the Appalachian foothills, and the snow began to fall.

But the kids were abuzz with the boundless energy that was part of why Cranston Dize - a loud, towering 28-year veteran of the city school system who was behind the wheel of the pickup truck - likes teaching troubled students best, and why three years ago he'd helped to start the Independence School .

The school, an alternative program affiliated with Samuel L. Banks High School, caters to kids with behavioral problems who haven't fared well in traditional classrooms, and often are on the verge of dropping out. Instead of taking tests, they learn arithmetic by riding the Light Rail, and study pollution by hiking around the Jones Falls. Real-life applications are key. "Knowledge is power only for those who can use it to change their condition," a sign near the entrance reads.

The 42 children have six teachers, who do everything from answering phones to scrubbing toilets. They encourage students to call them by their first names, and try to never give up on a child: If someone skips class, he is tracked down and hauled in, often by Cranston.

When there is a student whom no one seems able to reach, the case is analyzed at a staff meeting.

"Gotta take him to the woods," Michelle always used to say, before the outdoor program began.

She had come to the Independence School after several years as an instructor at a wilderness therapy camp for privileged but disturbed children in the woods of western North Carolina, where - after months of hardcore backpacking - she'd seen silent children start speaking again and suicidal kids decide to live.

The staff members thought a similar program would do wonders at the Independence School. With funds that would eventually include almost $50,000 in Open Society Institute grants and some school money, they created a program of three weeklong trips per year per class - an annual total of 12 for Michelle, who took on the curriculum as her main responsibility. The days leading up to the hikes were filled with preparatory lessons - including experiments with homemade raisins, trips to Druid Hill Park to gather tinder, and visits to the field across the street to practice setting up the group's makeshift tents, which consist of a tarp strung between two trees and held down at the corners by rocks.

All the kids complained at first, but slowly the culture of camping infiltrated the school. "I wish you'd fall down a big hill and keep rolling," the kids began to say each other, and "pooh bag" - what Michelle called the baggies where the students stored used toilet paper - became a popular insult.

But the transformation was more profound. Every trip involved a so-called "vision quest" - a period of solo contemplation based on Native American rituals - and some of the students, their teachers believed, returned from their trips fundamentally changed. One boy quit smoking for a while. Several signed up to work for Michelle on other expeditions she led over the summer. They showed a willingness to help one another that continued in the classroom. And they spoke of themselves like heroes.

The city students had taken to the woods so well that the staff was hoping for a backpacking trip through Nicaragua before long. Kids who'd barely left their front steps would see the world.

"We Can Make It"

The caravan rumbled into the trail head parking lot late in the afternoon. In the mellowing light, the woods were lovelier than anyone could have hoped, dark green and brown with splashes of butterscotch foliage, deep thickets of rhododendron bushes with their tear-shaped leaves, and soft snow sifting over all of it.

There were the predictable setbacks, of course: Danell Freeman, the strongest boy in the class, briefly refused to leave the minivans because he forgot his gloves; stylish Cheresa Crowner panicked on a steep hill, then sat down and cried. Everyone whined about the cold. Yet despite the slippery conditions, the class made it the two miles to the campsite in record time, clamoring up streambeds and through thick mud and over wet black rocks now patched with white. Even little Mia Davis, who weighs less than 100 pounds, shouldered a pack that looked twice her size.

As they walked, the girls made up a song.

"We can make it; we can make it," they sang.

But it kept snowing.

The Dolly Sods region is a Mid-Atlantic anomaly. In the summer, it's a popular destination for hiking and huckleberry picking. But in wintertime, it's so cold and blizzard-prone that snowshoe hares, practically nonexistent in the South, thrive there. Its ecology closely resembles northern Canada.

The school had never camped there later than September.

The ground was already white as the students struggled to put up their tents at the campsite, a clearing beside Red Creek. By dinnertime, it felt colder than 27 degrees, and as it grew dark - by 7 p.m., the sky was black, the stars hidden - it grew colder still. The campfire, once it was finally coaxed to life, thrashed in its circle of stones, and its column of thick gray smoke swung like a tornado. The wind roared.

That's when the grumbling began in earnest.

"Can you believe we have to stay here for five more days?" Jeremy Ralph said.

The weather wasn't the only problem, not by a long shot. The stove suddenly wasn't working, so dinner - a pot of macaroni and dehydrated spaghetti sauce - had to be balanced on a rhododendron log in the fire. The bear ropes, needed to keep food bags out of the reach of animals, had been left in the minivan, and in an attempt to suspend food in a tree using a rock and a rope, Michelle broke her glasses. Cranston had fallen on the hike, and his knee ached. Several kids had forgotten gloves and hats, and though the adults offered theirs, more and more gear was disappearing in the deepening snow. Bangs and bootlaces froze. Children put wool socks on their hands to keep warm. Everyone crowded the fire, where red-hot sparks spiraling upward battled the snowflakes sailing down.

The worst moment came when someone bumped a burning log and the eagerly anticipated macaroni toppled into the dirt.

Then there was cursing the likes of which the Dolly Sods had never heard.

"‹Expletive›, I'm going to bed," one disgusted boy said.

And yet the kids were still game as they crawled into their shelters. This was the wilderness, the magnificent challenge their teachers had foretold.

For an hour or so after bedtime, there was shouting and swearing and whistle-blowing as the kids squirmed into their sleeping bags.

And then, the promised soundtrack: Silence.

The Tribe Has Spoken

The next morning the makeshift tents bowed beneath the weight of the snow. Although less than three inches covered the ground, it was still falling fast.

Close to the fluttering breakfast fire - soon to be extinguished by another fallen pot of boiling water - the mutinous talk among the students began again. There were wistful references to Madden football games and warm beds. One boy was hiking back to civilization with a teacher that morning because he had a court date. Suddenly, the others wanted to go with him.

"I say we take our tails back to Baltimore," Tarrell Sykes said. "Who's with me?"

"I say we jump Cranston and get the keys."

"I say we cook Cranston and Michelle. That's meat for days!"

A few dozen yards away, the adults held their own conference. It was much colder than they'd thought, gear was going missing at an alarming rate and they had their hardest day's hike ahead. Everyone's spirits were low. But they'd camped in the snow last year, the teachers reminded one another. Michelle had no doubt that these conditions were survivable, even enjoyable with a few adjustments. And all the teachers worried what retreating would mean to the kids, after they'd built up the significance of this hero's quest for so long.

In the late morning, the two groups joined together. In the woods they were, above all, a community, and the kids were demanding their say. The teachers had decided to call a vote.

But first they'd make their case one last time.

"This is probably the hardest thing you've ever done," Michelle said.

"YES," the children chorused.

"I think we should get $500,000 a piece," Cheresa added.

"If you can do this, you can do anything," Michelle went on. "And you can do this. This is the faith I have in all of you. I've seen people change their lives by being out here."

Then Cranston spoke, his voice trembling.

"We're trying to create an experience for you," he said. "The reason we do this is so that people who are not successful in life can do something really hard and have people trust them to do it."

By now tears spilled down his cheeks, and Michelle's.

"I'm just afraid that if people fail to do this, they'll fail to do other things," he said. "You don't have to be defeated doing this. You can just endure. And I think if you can turn it around in the woods, you can turn it around in life."

The kids glanced at one another out of the corners of their eyes as they raised their hands.

It was nearly unanimous: They were going home.

In the moments after the vote, the children seemed stunned at their own power. Some ran around gleefully, suddenly eager all to do the chores they'd ignored the night before. They pitched snowballs and wrote their names in the snow.

Others, though, stood silently by, and would remain quiet during the hike out, as the snow gradually stopped and the skies began to clear. Some of these had wanted to stay, others to go. Now an uncertain mood overcame them. After a long night in the woods they did feel somehow transformed, as Michelle had promised they would, and a kind of rite of passage had taken place.

The wilderness had beaten them, but they'd won out over their teachers, who had already retreated to pack up the camp: Michelle trying to smile over the dying breakfast fire; Cranston stuffing gear into his framepack, his gray hair flying around, still somewhere close to tears.

And for a moment the children's victory was tinged with something like regret.

"Cranston may be a bitchy old man, but he really do care about us," David Nelson said to another boy.

From a distance, they watched him fold up his tent.

Copyright © 2006, The Baltimore Sun