Parent Visit--Extended Version

(begun Friday, 5 June, in the food court at the impeccably clean and efficient Salt Lake City Airport, complete with piano player providing relentless soft-jazz styling ambiance)

As I mentioned, my emotions leading into the PV were mixed: my biggest dread was that we would see no fundamental change, or that my psychobabble-bullshit meter would redline. All through the drive and flight and drive I struggled to stay in the moment, and keep from going too far into the disconnected watch-yourself-walking mode that I guess I downshift into when I am emotionally overloaded. I found myself hyper-irritable about the rental-car smell, but A/C was necessary in the heat as we drove through the enormity that is the SLC freeway system and eventually got onto US 6 below Provo / American Fork and climbed into the mountain-and-high-desert landscape reminiscent of East Side Sierra, coal mining country with the brain-fry of wind and dryness, ending up at our motel in Price, the commerce hub of Carbon County, right next door to the CastleView Medical Center where Alex got his physical. We kept thinking of what he might have been experiencing as he was escorted by the kind but firm Interventionist Jim A [we later learned that Alex had not registered our remarks that fateful morning, but said that he had been woken up by Jim and Jorge instead, and that Jorge had said the camp was 2-4 weeks. We don't know whether the Reality Distortion Field is working overtime or not, but Jorge had told me that Alex had been quite voluble on the drive to Oakland Airport, whereas Alex told us he hadn't spoken at all].

Both of us took a short nap and then attempted a jog along the Price River Parkway, a bleak but game attempt at Civic Pride that took us a mile and a half or so along the freeway and past the city corporation yard; the nearly-6,000' elevation gave us that you-are-so-out-of-shape feeling right out of the chute, but it was the right thing to do. No sign of a water shortage here--great showers guilt-free. We had a quite passable dinner downstairs, deciding not to try our chances in town, and turned in early with fitful sleep. Then it was up early for the drive to Huntington, and the headquarters of Elements Wilderness--we were early and hung out outside Maverik's Gas, the only place to buy coffee, watching the high-desert fauna drift in to browse the prodigious junk-food selection. Then it was back down the improbably wide main street to be greeted by Dagney, the Parent Visitor Coordinator, who ushered us upstairs to be oriented and told what to bring (little) and what to leave (lots--no electronics, food, gifts, sharps, jewelry, journals, watches, or reading material; the last three were about the "staying in the moment"). There were two single dads heading out to a different (mountain) site, along with a post-nuclear-family couple (at least that was the vibe I got from them) who were going with us but then to a different desert site, to transport their son to a therapeutic boarding school in New Mexico.

With our valuables locked away and tiny knapsacks packed with non-phone camera, our own layers, and Elements-issue booties (more on that later), we hopped in the tank-like Suburban and were off quite quickly onto well-graded BLM roads outside Huntington. Again our thoughts kept returning to Alex's experience five weeks before. The roads got narrower and bumpier, we saw an antelope and jackrabbits, we crossed washes that had flooded a week before, the landscape changing with unexpected quickness from lush green to gray moonscape to red-rock sculpture.

This is the San Rafael Swell, known mostly to locals, since tourists stick to the big well-known canyon National Parks. After 45 minutes--and a very short detour to show us the cliffs where rappel practice had taken place a couple of weeks before--we took a turn at a red-ribboned track, pulled up to a bit of meadow, and it was time to get out. The silence was overwhelming--no airplanes overhead, no sound of humans, just a light breeze in the stunted junipers and pinons that scattered their way up a gentle ridge.

While Dagney unloaded PV gear from the back and put a couple of empty 5-gallon "blueie" water containers in, we were met by staffer Mike, a tall leathery 28-year-old in sandals and sunglasses, along with two campers, Z- and C-, who would be our guides up the hill to the camp. Out came our Elements bandanas, and I found myself spazzing the knot as I tied on my blindfold.

Then we grasped sticks held by our guides--one was Alex's fire-making bow--and the boys quietly led us away. Alex had written things for Z- and C- to say to us at various points as we went up ("Mom, our relationship is like a piece of music... Dad, think of us as a four-part essay, with intro, argument, rebuttal, and conclusion"), and our tears were falling already as the boys quite competently warned us of rocks and steps--trust walk indeed.

At the top of the ridge we stopped and took off the blindfolds. That was a long long hug. Here and all through, I was struck by the totally different time sense out here.

There was no hurry, no shuffling of feet. The five boys and three staff let us have our time with just that wind rustling the branches. Amazing.

Alex is taller than I am, has lost probably 20 pounds, and is looking much leaner and stronger than when he left (he was over 230 and was barely getting out of bed). The boys are all dusty and tanned despite rigorous sunscreen drill, they have similar sun hats, T-shirts, boots, and convertible shorts, and they moved in amongst the brush and little cacti with confidence and ease. They all looked us straight in the eye and shook hands, and we moved over to a shady spot and sat down for group--along with therapist Robb who'd come down for his couple of days in the field, we parents were the only ones with Crazy Creek camp chairs (though achieving a set number of benchmark skills can earn a camper a chair, we had read)--as a campfire burned a few yards away. That first group showed all of the qualities of the work they do out here: there's a set structure, a respect for process, that is both memorized and internalized. Mike turned to Alex and he convened the group: each person would introduce himself, with age, hometown, how long he'd been there, and why he was there, along with a "fun fact" that Alex had chosen the category for, in this case, "favorite sports player, and why." Before we began sharing, there was a mindfulness check--we were to take a moment, breathe, and when we were ready we would put our hands into the center to begin; only when everyone was ready would group get started.

I don't think I can do justice to this without boring you with details. But there was something incredibly moving about all of it. Though short, the boys' intros were often laceratingly honest; though this wasn't a heavily drug-y group, there were some gulp-worthy moments. Because this was a "formal group" we were also expected to practice a five-phase "I feel" statement technique, with the template kindly provided for us on a laminated card in the pocket of our chairs! The boys were amazing, showing us the way and seconding a sharing with their newly learned reflective-listening techniques (acknowledged by "Thank you, I feel heard") and starting to demonstrate a profound shift in the ways that emotional cortex and language centers could communicate, something that brain science is revealing as a key developmental feature / gender difference. One of the most experienced boys, C-, shared his excitement about Alex's parent visit by recalling his mother's visit (his parents had visited separately), when he had been able to recognize an old activation pattern, use the techniques he'd been learning, and keep the conversation from going off the rails. I realized that right there was one of my most fervent hopes for our visit, and I said so in my check-in with the therapist later. Alex's check-in acknowledged his depression and withdrawal from school, which I was glad for, since earlier in his stay he was saying things like "I was happy for the last year" and "My parents were mad at me because I was texting my friends too much"--yet part of what the group was doing was holding Alex accountable for the discrepancies between his version of events and ours (as reflected in the intervention letters from us, that he had read aloud in group). Group closed with the Serenity Prayer, which in this setting was so appropriate that I could barely get out the words. So much of our work is in changing what we can change, accepting what we can't change, and knowing the difference....

One of the decisions made in group (via the "Hunger-meter"--you put your hand in the middle with your thumb up if you were really keen on eating, to side if you didn't care, etc) was to break for lunch, after which one of the boys would go off for a therapy session with Robb. Dagney had packed some lunch stuff for Amelie and me, including cheese, snack mix, and a packet of tuna, but the other boys had their own stuff. C- was on cook duty and stoked the campfire, asking for takers for "tort chips"--a sort of fragmented churro-like concoction of torn-up flour tortillas heated up with brown sugar and cinnamon.

We went for it and found it quite tasty. I got a kick out of the linguistic bond that defines and confirms any group like this: there were dozens of abbreviations and coinages, from AP (Adventure Programming, like rock climbing) to billies and blueies (billy-can pots and the water containers) to "G and O" (granola and oatmeal) to "sani" and "screen" (hand sanitizer and sun-screen, the former religiously used to avoid "piss-butt," their term for the dreaded Montezuma's Revenge, very understandable when you consider that they were practicing low-impact camping and pooping in a bucket that they had to carry back to where it could be trucked back to base). One of the boys admitted that he had been on "run watch" for more than a week, because he had spoken of "running" for a road (evidently at times one could see lights of "hillbillies" (non-Elements people) in the distance) so he had slept "burritoed" between two staff members with a tarp over him.
After lunch Mike herded most of us down the hill to the flat and relatively non-cactus-y area for a game of "Dog," a combination of competitive Hacky-Sack, tag, and dodgeball (the staffer Lila hung back to keep track of H-, a newbie on "Acclimo" (Acclimation, observing group activities and doing preparatory homework without lots of expectations) and Robb-the-therapist doing a session with another of the boys.

I was wondering how this was going to go (it being a loooong time since I tried to keep a little beanbag in the air with my knees and feet, and being fairly sure Amelie had never done so), but I was pleasantly surprised not only that the boys took it easy on us oldsters but that they were patient in explaining the rules. For them though, the game was highly competitive: after three exchanges one could catch the sack and either tag another person or underhand-toss it at a person to get them "out," at which point they became "vulches"--a vulch had to hang around the periphery and try to dart in to steal a catch, but couldn't hang too close or he could be tagged and rendered ineligible for that round. Sometimes the action was a blur, sometimes we struggled to get three legitimate hits to get started and we would all crack up, but there was no trash talk, which I found incredibly refreshing. Once I got into the swing of it the boys quit going easy on me, which was nice, and the game ebbed and flowed for more than half an hour until only two were left, the same time the boy who had been with Robb was sent down to fetch us up for our session.

We ambled upslope, found a sheltered spot under a juniper, and took our stations for therapy group. With check-ins Robb got to work, and both Amelie and I got another chance to see what had been going on. All sorts of stuff that had long been under the surface or unspoken was now part of the conversation, and as with the other group if you spoke, you removed sunglasses so your eyes were visible, which helped in prompting quick checks on what was going on, not in an accusatory way but in a gentle but firm way. One of the things we had been coached about was that the boys are nearly all concerned with how long they would be in the field and what would happen afterward, and we knew already that Alex was anxious about "being at Tahoe for Fourth of July with the cousins" as well as "not wanting to be sent to boarding school after Elements." Sure enough this was Topic A. Robb patiently watched as we danced around this minefield and only occasionally had to deftly steer things. As before there was no sense of hurry--silences lengthened or tears fell and time just happened, it was truly unusual for all of us. Mike joined us and hung around the periphery but paid attention I could tell, and both Amelie and I were encouraged to see Alex starting to use the tools he was learning. Both of us struggled a bit with the formulas (I feel ____/ I feel this when ____/ I feel this because ____/ My hope (in my control) is ____ / My hope (out of my control) is ____ ) but these struggles themselves had been put in a positive context by Robb earlier in the day, as he told us it was important for the boys to see parents struggle and "make mistakes" too--yet even here the interaction was beautifully different from what might have gone before: there was no downshifting to "Well, you're not perfect either" that we were used to. It was clear again how conflicted Alex was about Berkeley High: at the same time he said he couldn't stand going there, he talked about liking the teachers and the people and even the place itself. Very strange.

By then the afternoon shadows were beginning to lengthen and after a quick sunscreen and hydro check Mike led us back down to the flat to pick up our PV camp gear: a big duffel containing sleeping bags and liners, sleeping pads, two small pillows, plus tarps and a mesh bag of cooking gear plus some big pieces of trucked-in firewood. We would be setting our camp about 30 yards from the others, and would be cooking in an area about the same distance away, but in a slightly different direction. This meant that we would be setting up multiple tarps: one to protect the cooking area and firewood, and then three more in the sleeping area, since if a lightning storm came in (as had occurred frequently in the past month) everyone had to have a place to retreat to, for "lightning drill"--sitting on a pad legs and arms crossed). Setting tarps is not one of my strongest suits, and though Alex had more experience he was not completely engaged. Still I was very willing to defer to him, and there was little conflict until we were slightly separated (working on different shelters) and he started in on Amelie about the 4th of July / boarding school questions. She led him over to me and I didn't quite understand what was going on until he repeated himself, and I had this sinking feeling of "here we go again." Though the interaction didn't have the obscenities that would have characterized our conflicts over the past year, it was heading rapidly downhill, with the same bargaining ("Honest, I'll do anything you say") and mock resignation / badgering ("It probably won't matter what I say, but...").

It was so weird, to have my mind going a mile a minute trying to remember all the techniques for "holding boundaries" and "reflective listening," trying the "mirroring statements" ("Yes I can tell this is important to you"), and somehow not coming unglued. I honestly have little recollection of those minutes before Mike arrived back on the scene with Amelie, but she says that already Alex was calmer and more resigned about staying, and even more accepting of the notion of a therapeutic boarding school as a bridge to practice skills and get academic credits before he returned to Berkeley High. With some very quiet comments by Mike we wrapped up the shelters and moved over to the cooking site, continuing the conversation.

Experiencing his work with Alex left me in awe: again, I don't remember exactly how it all happened, but there was about a 45 minute stretch where Alex enhanced his too-thinly-covered firepan with more sifted dirt, gathered tinder for his fire nest, and re-dug his "sump" for rinse water (all part of the low-impact camping they were practicing); Mike retrieved his "busting kit" (their term for starting a fire is "busting"), Alex tried several times with his own spindle before Mike loaned him his, and absurdly quickly the bow-drill had generated an ember that Alex could drop into his nest and (with the aid of the wind) conjure into a full flame, cradle in his leather-gloved hands, and place on the dirt-covered trash-can-lid so that in a matter of minutes there was a perfect little campfire burning away to coals for cooking.

But this was only part of what went on: somehow there was this quiet but focused thread of conversation involving all of us--"Now let's check this. John, can you tell me what you are feeling right now?" or "Amelie, what was that? Can you let Alex have that emotion without having to explain it away?" or "What's the difference between sympathize and empathize" or "What are you trying to fix?" There were challenges for Alex too--"Alex, I told Robb I've only seen you get really emotional, really vulnerable, a couple of times: the day you read your parents' intervention letters to group, and then today. This is the work, man, you're doing it. Now keep doing it." Alex said something about "Before, I would have just shut the door. Or slammed it. But maybe I can open it." Somehow, before Alex had started making dinner he was saying "I think I can handle not being with the cousins for 4th of July." and (once I had told him about what his music teachers had said, that they wanted him back, healthy) he even acknowledged that "If being at a boarding school for a few months means I can get back, yeah I can handle that." As before, what struck me all through this was the sense of time stretching out, of not being hurried through anything, of being OK even as I was struggling for words or for the acceptable format or whatever.

Once Alex started making our dinner we were in for more surprises, blessedly pleasant. Mike drifted back and forth between his other charges and our group, and eventually ate with us, since there was plenty of food.

Alex did a beautiful job: after inspecting the contents of the bag that'd come in with Dagney, he chopped up fresh vegies and some pre-cooked meatballs while boiling water for macaroni, then added a couple more pieces of wood and started sauteeing, adding canned diced tomatoes and half a can of coconut milk along with some spices from a little 8-pack container.

As we'd been advised by Robb, much of our conversation was not "doing therapy" but instead just enjoying each others' company. What a gift--and the food was a huge cut above my usual run of Glop du Jour backpack food. After we ate, the sunset continued to get more and more beautiful, and it was great to just enjoy it as a family, something we hadn't done since two summers ago on the section of the John Muir Trail we hiked.

Mike also conducted a pretty thorough "foot check" on Alex, which like the hand-washing and sunscreen-applying and tooth-brushing requirements are a great way to make sure that everyone stays healthy; again, there was no argument or objection, which given the circumstances was beginning to be unsurprising to me.

A formal "Feedback Group" was convened around the main campfire, and several boys pulled off their boots and toasted their feet.

The feedback was for Alex, and included positive strokes as well as "constructives," and each of the boys and all the staff had something worthwhile to say. Amelie and I had a chance to practice the techniques that the kids were using, and I think Alex got some useful stuff to work on. My mind was still reeling a bit from the dodged-a-bullet feeling from earlier in the afternoon, and I said so, remarking on how grateful I was to see progress in the ways we were reckoning with conflict.

Though it was barely 9 PM we headed off to our respective bedsites, the boys trooping away to theirs a little further up the ridge. As we'd been warned by Dagney and had noticed all day, the rule of "sound off when you are not with the group" created a mini-cacophony reminiscent of barnyard animals, as every seven seconds a "Zaa-aack" or "All-ex" wafted through the scrub. These were the reminders that these kids were not here completely on their own, and when I remarked on seeing the lights of a power plant in the far distance, Mike pointed out that they had an informal rule that they didn't call attention to the lights of civilization out there--some kids would be renewed in their temptation to "run." Another way that running was discouraged was that the boys (and Amelie and I) surrendered our shoes / boots to a staff person for the night--hence the booties in case we needed to do our business, but with the warning that they wouldn't protect against the ground-hugging cacti.

Though there were some clouds on the horizon we elected to sleep under the sky--the full moon meant the stars were not as prominent as I'd hoped--and soon Alex was snoring gently a few feet from us. Sleep came slower to me, even though I was emotionally drained and physically a bit tired. The quality of the silence was impressive, with absolutely no machine sounds of any kind, and we weren't even under airliner flight paths the way we frequently were in the Sierra. I barely needed the sleeping bag at first--the flannel liner alone was sufficient until several hours later, but eventually the chill came and it was great to have the bag, my favorite aspect of sleeping out being that sense of a cocoon of warmth. I woke up multiple times but always was able to go back to sleep, enjoying the gray pre-dawn and then the glory of a desert sunrise, then the burst of sun on bags coming just a little before Mike returned with our shoes. Breakfast was just a couple of cereal bars and some water and trail mix, after a flurry of packing and tarp-striking.

The 4 x 4 would be coming for us around 9 I guess, and after a short group, at which I found myself unnervingly almost wordless (trying to explain how I was both relieved and grateful but also admitting that I had been dreading what might have happened), Mike led us over to the ridge crest where he'd built a little medicine wheel of rocks, along with a couple of portals made of poles lashed together: we stood in the center with Alex, and Amelie and I exited through one portal, Alex back through the other. Simple and beautiful, this little ritual, and there were tears and handshakes for the other group members and staff before we headed down the hill to the Toyota and were driven by a staffer named Bree back along the same roads we'd arrived on barely 24 hours before. An amazing sense of time compression I must say, and in between talking we let the silences expand.

Back at headquarters we showered, had a cup of coffee from the kitchen, and reclaimed our gear, before driving off in our little rental car. The boys would be moving to their higher more mountainous range that afternoon, though they were not forewarned about it ("All will be revealed in good time," Mike had said when C- had asked if today was a hiking day), so we elected to drive over the mountains to Fairview, through incredibly beautiful forested canyons, one side of which looked to have had an epic burn a few years back. The pass was almost 10,000' and there was still quite a bit of snow, and by the time we got down to town we were ready for some food, still in a strange zone of not-quite-sure-what-we-had-just-experienced.

So I hope this gives a flavor of what the Parent Visit was like. In the days since we got back to Berkeley we have continued to turn things over in our minds, and we'll have another conference call with the therapist on the 11th. Soon we'll have to decide what is next, but meanwhile, we're relieved and thankful that we have chosen well, that Alex seems to be thriving, and that our family will someday be back together again.