Trip Triggers Metamorphosis of Tough Kid, But It’s Limited

Early one recent morning, as I prepared for a long drive up to Sequoia National Park to write about a group of men planning to climb Mt. Whitney, a handsome 15-year-old named Pete settled in next to me and introduced himself as a gang member.

The drive was going to take five hours, and I was more than a little unsettled that this boy, one of seven adults and teen-agers who were planning to hike the 14,494-foot mountain, had chosen to sit next to me. He seemed, however, not to notice my fear.

Wearing a white muscle shirt and immensely baggy shorts, Pete contemplated a long drive without cigarettes and a long week on the trail without girls. He told us about his gang in Hawaiian Gardens and different fights he had been in with its rival gang. Without my asking, he pulled up his shirt to reveal stab wounds from a couple of fights he had endured.

Although it wasn’t clear why his gang held deep-seated hate for its rival, it was evident he had a need to hate someone. As we moved north along the highway, his enemies changed from neighborhood to neighborhood, city to city and then from Southern California to the central part of the state.

“Hey, nortenos !” he would yell and gesture at drivers in Bakersfield, the city that divides the south (friend) from north (enemy) in his mind.

The trip was arranged by the Youth Guidance Center in Santa Ana to show such youths another way of life, to give them a challenge that they could look back on, to show them they could accomplish what they think is impossible and place them in the middle of Mother Nature, away from their homeboys, gang signs, graffiti and danger.

Pete was aggravating. The drive was getting to be too long. The gray sky didn’t offer a clue to the park or trees we were bound for and the heat from outside was beginning to overtake the cool air in the car. And there we sat with this intense and tough-looking young man, a product of a pieced-together family of half-sisters, stepbrothers and divorced, sometimes absent, parents.

He continued spewing out his declarations of hate against one gang or another, relating a history--real or imagined--that told of a rivalry’s beginnings in San Quentin decades ago that today is carried on by young soldiers who owe their allegiance to the neighborhoods in which they were born. Hate has staying power.

He drew letters on his fingers like on a crossword puzzle, showing us the tattoo he wants to have needled in to declare his loyalty to the gang and his family name.

“That’ll stay with you for a while,” I said, wondering if he could picture himself as a 40- or 50-year-old with darkened letters on his fingers.

“For the rest of my life and then some,” was his response. The foreboding was repeated when he talked about the danger he faced being in a gang. He knew well that his chances of an early death were high but dismissed it as something we all have to do.

I couldn’t wait until the end of the drive, when I could take a quiet walk in the woods and marvel at the giant sequoias--the wonders that have weathered thousands of years.

As we rounded the curves leading higher into the park, we came across those awesome trees that prompted gasps from everyone in the car. Pete went a step further and hung his head out the window, yelling at each red, thick-trunked beauty we approached. This tough kid who had us all exasperated was finally impressed by something other than the homeboys of his local turf. He even noticed the change in his own behavior.

“I can tell already this trip is going to bring out the kid in us,” he said as he grabbed for tall bushes and weeds growing on the side of the road. He pulled in stems and leaves, put them to his nose to smell and passed them around to the other passengers.

Out of three juveniles in the car, he was the one to point out the first cloud in an otherwise hazy sky. And by the end of the drive, he had figured out nicknames for all the hikers. Despite his leaning toward the grave in speech and lifestyle, this boy was alive.

I pictured him in a white satin-lined coffin, arms folded deliberately to show off his tattoos, then I looked over at him next to me, squirming in his seat every time he pulled in more leaves and looked up at the clouds.