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.