On the Trail With the Rough Riders : VisionQuest’s Rugged Wagon Train Gives Teen Felons a Long, Bumpy Look at Reality

It’s daybreak. The covered wagons are visible through a shroud of fog, but the morning’s tranquility is deceptive.

Overnight there has been trouble: Runaways.

“It’s the jitters,” says VisionQuest staff member Tim O’Sullivan.

His wagon train has taken 45 convicted teen-age felons on a bumpy, dusty trip over 2,400 miles and eight Western states. Nerves are, indeed, frazzled. It’s a hard life, 10 months on the road. The boys are forced to live with tough counselors; long, regimented days, and brushes with the occasional Gila monster. The hope is that they will come to see VisionQuest as their family, and going straight as the way to a better life.

And now, eight of the teens have fled. It’s the jitters, O’Sullivan says again. The return to home base in Arizona is just weeks away, and for a kid going nowhere, going home can be terrifying.

A squad car pulls up. Local cops picked up three of the runaways. Bad news. They broke into a school and looted a vending machine. Wagon master Neal Ryness frowns: “We won’t be allowed in this area any more.”

VisionQuest depends on the kindness of strangers. The eight-wagon caravan--which also includes 26 staff members, about three dozen animals and a dozen support vehicles--pitches camp in a friendly farmer’s field or on a weed-choked city lot close by a freeway.

As the wagons edge along frontage roads at four miles an hour, truckers honk and tourists snap pictures. Covered wagons are a romantic notion.

But once people find out who’s inside, they think the wagon train’s great--”as long as it keeps moving down the road,” says co-founder and president Steve Rogers. “They think these kids are losers--forget it, throw them away. That’s scary to me.”

What seems scarier to others is the philosophy of VisionQuest, a private program, which is publicly funded. The program, based in Tucson, Ariz., eschews keeping teen felons behind bars. Instead, it says taking them into the wilderness to work with nature, care for animals, and rely on others and on themselves will help straighten them out. The goal of the program--which relies heavily on rigorous training and American Indian traditions--is to break the teen-agers of their criminal ways.

Critics argue that such nontraditional methods haven’t been proven to be effective. Los Angeles County, for example, does not participate in VisionQuest. It believes that confined supervision beats riding around on a wagon train.

But others are more favorable. “I know enough about the VisionQuest model to be convinced they’re on the right track,” says David Steinhart of the San Francisco-based National Council on Crime and Delinquency. “The (conventional) institutions are not designed to make human beings feel good about themselves.”

Indeed, on the road and in camp with VisionQuest for several days one sees boys learning to trust and learning to tenderly take care of animals. For some of them, it’s a rare chance to show or accept affection. But don’t be fooled.

Privately, many of the teens say they don’t buy the wagon train method of rehabilitation (although they respect and admire the staff); nonetheless, they say, VisionQuest beats sitting behind bars. The boys, ages 13-18, are, after all, realists--street-wise and tough, mostly from broken homes, mostly from California.

“These are not choir boys,” says San Diego Superior Court Judge G. Dennis Adams, a long-time VisionQuest booster. “They have records that would break your arm.”

The next day, the five remaining runaways return to camp.

Albert--a 17-year-old robber from San Bernardino--is angry. “I just walked around the neighborhood. I felt free, felt good.”

But he came back because for him, as for most kids here, it’s this or California Youth Authority.

Eager for an argument, Albert confronts staff member Regina Murphy-Darling outside the cook shack. He blames his problems on being Latino. She gives as good as she gets: “You tell me you got locked up because you’re brown. No. You got locked up because you did something.” She doesn’t flinch as he raves about the (expletive) this, the (expletive) that. He calms down.

Word of the runaways has reached Tucson. At Red Rock, the next campsite, a team of troubleshooters is waiting. Linking arms, kids and staff form a circle. VisionQuest borrows heavily from the Plains Indians for its rituals; its logo is an Indian Medicine Wheel. In times of crisis or celebration, circles signify unity.

Don Barnes, Western regional director, speaks, angrily. There are the runaways. There is gang writing on bathroom walls. A staffer has been fired for giving a kid cigarettes.

Right now, Barnes says, this wagon train is “a ragtag bunch of crap.” Unless it shapes up, he warns, it promises to be “a long road in.”

Earlier, the kids had toughed out a snow storm near Flagstaff. “Everybody who’s here was a hero that day,” says Ryness. “Every one of you showed more heart going through that blizzard than you’ve ever done in your life. You’re not losers. You’re winners.”

But then is then, and this is now.

Of the three runaways who broke into the school, the 18-year-old, is in jail. The other two, 16 and 15, are in juvenile hall.

Rick Zasa, who will get the younger two released to VisionQuest the next day, tells the circle, “Those guys left the family-- bing --they’re in jail the next morning . . . it makes me sick.”

Nobby Evenhus, regional director of program operations, speaks next: “All we’re trying to do is give you kids an environment to grow up in, to take responsibility for your lives. . . . “

Jitters or not, Tim O’Sullivan says he’s fed up. “If you’re standing in a pile of horse shit, either get out of it or scoop it up and get rid of it,” he tells the boys. “You stepped in it.”

Wagon train life can be boring--and not always friendly. In Idaho, hostile motorists made it a point to crowd the wagons. In Navajo country, beer cans and bottles were thrown.

Most of the teens have been on the road for six months. That’s six months of packing and unpacking. Setting up tepees, taking down tepees, going to school in a tepee. Showering about once a week. Jiggling on a mule-drawn wagon from just after sun-up to just before sunset. Trying to stave off boredom on the road during a ride that is rough, too rough, to read or write.

Ideally, the teens should be using this time to reflect on their lives, program officials say.

This can be a difficult task for any teen-ager, but for a boy with a felony conviction who comes from a dysfunctional family, this can be especially trying.

As the mules clip-clop along under a bright sun, Alec, 16, sits on a bare bench inside the lead wagon, petting Buckaroo, one of wagon train’s dogs. “They make it as boring as possible, so you have time to think,” says Alec, who has been convicted of murder in Stockton. He grins. “Sometimes I just think about committin’ a better crime.”

He is a chatty kid who talks about his hopes of playing pro football someday--slipping in a “Sorry, ma’am” with each expletive. He is describing the Stockton he knows, where kids “have to worry about gettin’ shot or impressing their friends by shootin’ somebody else.”

The kids in VisionQuest are a contradiction: Their pride in a task well done--perhaps designing a saddle--is apparent. Still, they play all the angles. They fake colds, for example, hoping for cough syrup with a jolt.

Before coming to the wagon train, the teens must make it through up to five months of basic training at Impact Camp, a 160-acre former dude ranch at Elfrida, about two hours southeast of Tucson.

There are no fences, no barbed wire, no guns, no dogs. The staff considers the rattlers more threatening than the kids. In an average month, two kids will “run.” (There are 134 in camp now.) The girls have a good chance of being picked up by a passing trucker. The guys may set off by foot across the desert, which is broken by the peaks of the Dragoon Mountains.

On the ropes course, a group is doing “trust falls.” Secured by a harness to a thick rope held by three companions, each teen must scale a 35-foot pole, jump off, catch a bar acrobat-style, grab the rope and slide down.

Louis stands shakily at the top, frozen with fear. “He’s wimpin’ out!” shouts someone from the ground. Louis screams, “Let me down! I don’t like this.” But staff member John Bruner doesn’t. “C’mon,” he urges. “Do it for yourself.” With a lot of help from his friends, Louis does.

Elsewhere, a few kids sit sullenly in the tepee called COA (Center of Attention). They talk about where they’ve been, where they’re headed. They don’t pretend to love it here.

This is not summer camp. There are chores that keep the kids busy. And there is daily school, where teachers at least don’t have to worry about the perennial problem they face when teaching on the trail: short attention spans and testiness from students and teachers alike.

“These are the kids who’ve been passed on, grade to grade, because they’re a behavior problem,” says teacher Connie Bruner. While in VisionQuest, about one-third of students will get their high school equivalency.

Bruner is compassionate, but not naive. “Leave your keys in the car,” she cautions, “and it’ll be gone.” These are hot-wire experts.

How did they get here? Some just “got in with the wrong people.” Next: petty theft, car theft, violent crime.

For others, the influence started at home.

Damoa says his father was his role model. “Before he got into church and stuff, he used to go in and out of jail, killin’ people, runnin’ his car through people’s houses, all kinds of crazy stuff. I just took after him.”

Byron Washington, a program director, knows what family can do to a child. “At home, Mother’s out there getting drunk. When she comes home, they steal money out of her purse to buy food.”

He adds, “But they still love Mom. They have real love-hate relationships with their dads. Most of them, their fathers beat their mothers.”

The first time Hasan met his father, he was 12. His mother was an addict and he was raised by his grandmother. Now he’s 18. He’s also a compulsive gambler with two gold teeth, one dotted with an “H,” the other with snake eyes. He says he started selling drugs when he was 11. “I wanted to have everything. That’s what paid for these teeth, drug money.”

But, he adds, “I never had to do anything crazy” to pay gambling debts. The drug money took care of that. He says he doesn’t do hard drugs.

VisionQuest, he says, is “so easy it’s hard”--it’s hard to deal with freedom, with trust. He adds, “I’ve been as honest in this program as I’ve been my entire life, honest with myself as well as with everybody else.”

Jzenita is 17. When she was 11, she says, “my mom and dad started doing drugs, messing up. My mom started selling drugs around the house. I started hanging out with gangs.” She tried being “Miss Good Girl,” she says, but that was boring “and if I’m not doing bad, my mom doesn’t love me.”

This day, Jzenita--among the 80 girls, or 10%, in VisionQuest now--has completed a wilderness hike in which a group of girls had to solo for three days. It is cold and rainy.

For Lucy, 17, a Latina, this was also a turning point: “I didn’t like white people. It showed me white people aren’t all the same.”

She adds “It was a white person that killed my dad.”

On the wagon train, things are heating up.

In one tepee, school is bedlam. One kid stretches out, contemptuously reading Louis L’Amour.

Ernest, the sincere middle-aged teacher, is being assaulted with verbal abuse: “You’s old, Ernest.” You sure wear funny clothes, Ernest. This lesson is boring, Ernest. A kid named Hooker ties a stuffed duffel bag to a rope and lets ‘er rip at Ernest.

Hardly skipping a beat, Ernest says he is going to read aloud a history of the Ku Klux Klan, at which point David, who is black, storms out of the tepee.

He sits off by himself, at a table, his head in his hands. He’s not interested in this all-for-one, one-for-all stuff that the VisionQuest people had been talking about, not interested in squealing and telling who’s doing what on the wagon train.

“We came here to get our acts together. We didn’t come here to be no cops,” he says.

Meanwhile, in the tepee, school remains in session. Sort of. There is a trivia quiz, in preparation for the competition at the congress of VisionQuest West and East in December. The teacher asks a trivia question: “Who married Antony Armstrong-Jones?” Silence. Finally one kid deadpans, “Some lady.”

Later, textbooks are thrown and an ugly fight nearly erupts between two kids. Within minutes, a couple of kids have jumped into the middle of the dispute as a staffer confronts one of the book-tossers.

Inside the tepee, John watches. “There’s a gang of racial tension here,” he says. He is black, 17 and from San Diego. He’s in for armed robbery.

“We can’t win,” he says. “There’s always a place for a white to go. The only place we can turn is to the streets, and we wind up in jail, or the penitentiary, or dead.”

He adds: “We don’t get a kick out of riding in with our heads high. We only care about time ticking. We can’t get freedom. That’s the only thing we want.”

Outside the tepee, a voice rings out. “They got ‘em back!” Jason and Gene, two more runaways have been returned by police. They are sullen and aren’t talking.

On Monday, the wagon train is supposed to pull into Elfrida.

In the end, two “problem” kids were sent back to Elfrida earlier than planned.

Six additional staff members were sent to bolster a tired crew and to quash the outbursts that come at the end of a trip.

Two wagons were added to give more kids something to do.

And the two remaining runaways? They haven’t turned up.

On the Road With VisionQuest

Moving at an average speed of 4 miles per hour, the VisionQuest wagon train will cover about 2,400 miles in mule-drawn wagons. The group left the base camp at Elfrida, Ariz., Feb. 10 and is scheduled to return Monday.