Oh, You Teenage Angst!

Four 13-year-old girls. That's it. That's all I was up against. I only had to take four 13-year-old girls through 20 miles of bushwhacking through catclaw mimosa and cholla cacti patches, climbing up to ridges and following fingers down into Cherry Creek and then up to Ash Creek. I had done it with a boys' band only four weeks earlier and only found the Friday hike to be somewhat challenging, mostly due to dehydration and repeated run-ins with rattlesnakes under century plants and non-rattler snakes in trees (picture: me, pushing away a branch to walk through a bush, only to realize up close that said branch not only had hypnotizing beady little eyes but was also slithering closer to my face, followed by yelping and hand-waving and flash-dancing backwards into the boys behind me). We decided Arizona might as well just introduce the Black Mamba to the Sonoran Desert to give us a new element of hard-core. The Black Mamba! That was our week's war cry: "Hey all! Shall we take this rock-ridden windy-as-hell switchback pack trail down to Cherry or sit on our butts and let the rock slides carry us wither-they-will?" "LET'S RIDE THIS MOTHER DOWN! FOR THE BLACK MAMBAS!!" And now I need new trail pants.

BUT. Black mambas are nothing compared to the death-breath mutterings and lip-pursed grimacing from 13-year-old girls on the rag. All I kept thinking throughout the week was how much I needed to call my mom to apologize for everything I ever said, thought, did, acted like I was going to do, whispered, groaned, moaned, or otherwise felt from 7th to 10th grade. Mood swings my eye. I could have bedded down with Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, El Niño all three before closing my eyes in front of those four little girls.....those girls, with their cute little grins and dimples one minute and those red-patchy cheeks and fangs with sassy little retorts the next. Or worse--the quiet "I-don't-even-care-anymore-so-leave-me-alone-it-doesn't-matter" clam-in-its-shell cop-out....(how many hyphens is it going to take in this post to get this point across?).

I remember feeling the way they do. The world was just barely unfurling for me and expectation and dreaming was everything. I envy them in a strange way, but mostly I pity them. They think they can have it all, they aren't going to end up like these weird adults in front of them, with all their insecurities and baggage--they are DIFFERENT. They are only 13, yet they can bag a 19-year-old man because they are more mature, more understanding, more grown up than everyone else they go to school with. I vacillated between supreme frustration at the constant bickering--"Emily! Brittany's taking the fire-poking stick to make a cat hole! WHY aren't you DOING anything?! Brittany! Brittany! Bring back the stick! Emily! Make Brittany bring it back! Omigawd, she's already half-way up the hill! EMMMALEEEEEEE! Cory keeps PUSHING me! I was NOT sitting on your food bag but even if I was maybe if you just put your own stuff away once-in-a-while you retard, I hate this stupid band, this place sucks so big.........".....I lost my train of thought with this sentence just recalling the incessant whining. Or when they sat. When they just decided, you know, they can't MAKE me hike. This is MY program. So they sit down, in the dirt, five miles in either direction to the closest source of water, at five in the afternoon. My shoulders sag, my jaw juts out with a peculiar twitching in my left eyelash, and I sit down with the girls to listen to their sad stories until they decide they are done breaking after all. Or I lecture first, wave my finger menacingly in the air, pretend to go on without them, come back, pace a bit, and then fall into the shoulder-sagging, fine-I'll-sit-down-and-listen-to-you stance and move from there.

However, I think mostly I worry. Frustrations aside, these are the little girls I caught Canyon Treefrogs with, admiring how good the sucker hands were at clinging to our hands and arms and laughing when I found out they'll play dead and sit in the palm of your hand if you put them on their backs. We caught and ate crawdads together, mutually grossed-out and excited about ripping off their heads and cracking their skeletons, smearing the green intestinal goo and tearing out the black poop chute for a ridiculously small morsel of real meat that smells like a real Red Lobster restaurant. These are little girls doing things at home I haven't even done. I want to neuter the male predators searching out junior high pre-teens on MySpace, I want to lock up the high school seniors and weird cousins and that-one-uncle that takes advantage of these girls, these girls with their young eyes with new long lashes and new high cheek bones and new noses less little-kiddish than the nose I still sport. These girls don't even have underarm hair yet. So what do we do. What can we do? What can I do except hike all day with these moody, puberty-stricken kids who think they are the Firsts, the Only Ones, the Newests and the Nexts, and when the sun goes down, what can I do except hike them on to water in the moonlight and starlight, pointing out the catclaw bushes that point themselves out at me by gashing long red lines across my arm from where they skulk in the shadows of the manzanita and the juniper? What can I do except take them to water, convince them to bust a coal and blow it into fire, cook a cup of lentils with lots of powdered cheese for the next day's energy? And all this in the hopes that they will want to talk, and that hopefully when they talk they will think, and that hopefully when they think they will become awake to the world, to themselves, to the space outside of making out in front of the lockers or having sex in his car in the middle of the night, to the space outside of tree houses and porn mags in those tree houses. That hopefully they will become awake to a space that's safe, that's real, because there has to be a safe place that's real for everybody, doesn't there have to be?

Even if black mamba snakes do get introduced into the Arizona wildernesses, it'll be a safer haven than what waits for these kids in their public school bathrooms. If only raising a teenager was as easy as reminding them to bury their poop and to drink six canteens of water a day. If only the most rebellion a mother ever saw from her daughter was her sixty minute refusal to hike up a hill. And thus ends my cynical approach to this past week's experiences. I am Clear Moon Full Night, and I have spoken.

Broken Wings and Cow Tank

Sorry it's been a while....I wish I could write several posts to record all my trail diaries here, but I won't make you few faithful friends wade through all the blather of it. In short: my first week back survival camping with at-risk youth was painful and terrible. I almost went back to my parents' basement, snake-ridden regardless. I pulled my groin, I fell into dehydration, I couldn't eat more than chicken broth at night, I felt fatigue for the first real time. I let someone else carry my pack up a mountain. My pride, my energy, my heart and my eyes were dim and flat. They made me leader and trainer, but I felt like I'd been put into the program as a patient, which maybe isn't necessarily a bad outlook on any week.

I returned home that week wondering whether I should be in Arizona at all. That week, Elder Holland spoke at my stake conference, my first Sunday in my new ward. It was the first time in over 15 years that an apostle spoke in a Mesa stake conference they said. It was his typical hellfire and damnation approach, and it left everyone in laughter and tears and hearts that swelled both heavy and light which is a horrible explanation but all I've got for you today.

He spoke of night journeys, of the lack of light and happiness, of sleepless worry and angst....I thought of many of you and wished you could have heard E. Holland shout at us with something like Moroni's anger for us not to dare to think God doesn't love us. Not to dare leave the church during those long nights, not to dare think God is unaware, angry, dismissing, or unfeeling. He said God loves broken things, that it takes broken clouds to get rain, broken earth to get grain, broken grain to get bread. He told us to stay calm if we felt God breaking our heart, to not dare bail when God is only halfway through. He promised us that God keeps the altar close, that after our heart has been broken and placed upon that altar, that He has promised to quickly return us a more powerful, better heart in return for what we trusted Him with. He told us again and again that God loves his broken things the most.

I don't have too much to say, I'll come back later this week and fill in this space with funny stories about the boy band I walked with a rotation ago, or the silly girls I ran around with this last week, but for now I'll just give one brief moment I had at a cow tank in Tonto National Forest last Sunday, while most of the rest of you were watching conference and the snow drift past your windows.

It was warm, I was sunning myself in the muddy banks around the cow tank after filling my canteens and dropping them with two drops Clorox bleach each. We didn't hike that day, but I sawed off a limb with a bent blade to coal-blow a juniper bowl that has already begun to crack. I don't care, I'm finishing it anyway, out of sheer stubbornness. I had just left a sitting with another staff member where we discussed all the world's great questions of soul and spirit.

For those of you unacquainted with cow tanks, they are man-made puddles of thick water meant for cattle and attractive to all other forest beasties, including javelina, cougar, rattlesnake, and the occasional band of at-risk youth. The worst cowtank water I ever had left green flecks on my teeth and tasted like expensive Asian tea, or so I told my band of girls last summer. We shivered as it went down and made sarcastic guesses as to how much money we could make off it to the posh elite crowds their own parents sometimes belong to. Sometimes cowtanks are dry as a bone, I've slept in dry cowtanks before, waterless and cold on the shit-filled hay bed bottoms. The cowtank I was currently at looked somewhat better than this one:



I noticed a butterfly floating along the surface of the middle of the murky water doing the dead man's float, and I wanted it. It was an Arizona Sister Butterfly, Adelpha bredowii eulalia; we'd seen them all week flying through the oaks and sucking moisture from between the rocks around the creekbeds and water pockets. I wanted to put her in my journal and keep her wings to remember the week by. So I stood, dusted myself off and grabbed a long broken limb from out of a nearby dying tree. As I pulled the thin parchment creature across the water to my side of the shore, I was sickeningly shocked to see the butterfly was still alive and stepped back to watch her stand up and begin to sun her tattered, broken wings in the 3:00 sun.

I sat beside her, which made her nervous, but she couldn't go anywhere so she stayed next to me, her wings at a perfect angle to the sun's light and heat. As her wings dried, she began to flutter them and slowly flap them forward and back, forward and back. I was enthralled, entranced.

I called my girls from my camp with two hoots, and they obediently came from between the trees, ragged, smoky, dirty, smelly, with twigs in their hair. I loved their sweet, ornery faces and almost laughed out loud at the sight of their scared faces, wondering if I found unburied poo or some other disgrace that would constitute a family pow-wow and lecture. Instead, I showed them the butterfly I felt I had saved from an untimely drowning and let them call her Mona. I let Mona walk along my hand, the three girls' heads bobbing all around my wrist, watching the butterfly's long tongue extend and feel all around the hair on my knuckles until, satisfied or confused, she rolled her tongue back up in an impressive spiral and let it disappear magically into her tiny face.

We took turns holding Mona and talked about how horrible it would be to spend all morning face down in a cow tank and how miraculous she could fly again by letting the sun dry all the cow dung and dirty water from her fragile wings. We talked about what it meant to have heavy wings and what kind of light in our lives can act as that healing warmth.

Unfortunately for my great metaphor, as soon as Mona had the strength, she flew from one girl's arm right back into the damned cow tank. As we grabbed another long branch to pull her back out, we laughing talked about how sometimes we need several new beginnings and how it isn't necessarily the end if we fly straight back into the cow tank.

I guess I don't have much more to say right now....I have to get ready to go into the office, I need to stop by the bank. My budget's tighter than it's been in years, but my heart feels stronger in contrast. My body has readjusted to the trail and I am no longer the slowest hiker. But I'm likewise becoming more and more aware of the cowtanks I'm dead-man-floating in, though I deny it and justify it most of the time. Well, I'm in no state to say anything real profound here and now, ......I figured I'd better post something though so you faithful friends don't just stop reading me altogether. Thanks for all the recent nudging comments, sorry I've been so absent. You should all come to Arizona. Snow is overrated.