What I Did for Summer Vacation : City Camp is an opportunity for inner-city kids to experience nature and the world of possibilities.

When Rayana, 10, first got to Big Bear, she didn’t much like anything. She didn’t like the wide-open sky, the winding road, the soar and arch of the hawk. She is from South-Central Los Angeles, where the natural order isn’t fresh air or camp fires or toasted marshmallows.

So when Kingston DeCoeur, a volunteer camp counselor like me, told Rayana it was time to plant a tree, she slapped on an irritated face and hated the idea instantly, making no apologies for her sullen expression or the grumbling and mumbling under her breath. “I don’t want to plant no tree. I don’t want to do it. It’s stupid,” she said, high-tailing it to the sanctuary and safety of the indoors.

“She was the child who didn’t like to be touched,” observed Norma Stafford, a Brentwood manicurist and one of the founders of Los Angeles City Camp. “Then all at once, it seemed like the child melted. She responded to authority, she even liked planting that tree. She even gave it a name.”

City Camp was created in May, 1992, by Stafford and KCOP news reporter Wendy Walsh, in direct response to last year’s turmoil. It operates under the umbrella of Cities in Schools, a nonprofit group devoted to keeping kids out of gangs, off drugs and in school. City Camp is a way of showing inner-city kids that all of L.A. belongs to them. It usually takes them on day excursions; past “camps” included trips to a recording session, a movie studio, art galleries, museums, beach parties and sporting events.

This was the first time City Camp tried a three-day event for some 50 kids. It was also the first time City Camp teamed up with another nonprofit organization, Colors United, to provide each City Camp child with a teen-age mentor. Colors United is a high school-based theater program, created four years ago by actor Phil Simms and operated by Simms and DeCoeur, a musician. Both men are noted for unconventional methods of reforming gangbangers and getting them into college.

So, along with City Camp and Colors United kids, I climbed onto the yellow school bus at 112th Street Elementary School in Nickerson Gardens for my own personal first. I had never been to a summer camp, ever. I wasn’t sure what to expect. When I was growing up, the San Bernardino Mountains were just some faraway scenery. Though I was born in South Gate, I grew up in a cramped Bunker Hill apartment in Chinatown. Camp was something for other kids.

At first blush, camp fit my preconceptions--the swimming hole, the scavenger hunt, the cookie concoction know as “s’mores.” I made sure kids didn’t wander off into the woods. I tried to answer the question, “Do rocks grow?” I listened to Rosie as she talked about a certain cute boy.

But sitting around the campfire? This was not Andy Hardy. This was real life. There were no ghost stories, no silly songs. Just Rosalie and Oscar, both Colors United teen-agers, telling about life in South-Central: stories the younger kids could relate to--parental beatings, shootings, gangbanging. Oscar even showed the scar where he’d been shot in the shoulder.

“Oscar is a remarkable, amazing young man” with an insight for working with children, Stafford said. One of the camp activities involved balancing on a tree limb, walking on a high wire and leaping onto a trapeze. It was part of a course by the wilderness organization Challenge by Choice. “Diandra had climbed high up in that tree, and she wouldn’t come down,” Stafford recalled. “She was too embarrassed. I was the hysterical grandmother, shouting, ‘Come down, I can’t visit you up there.’ But Oscar had the presence of mind to ask her if she wanted everyone to leave. And after they did, she just came down herself” to the waiting arms of Stafford and Oscar.

Bob Fulton, co-owner of Challenge by Choice, planned the tree-planting with saplings donated by the U.S. Forest Service. The kids, including Rayana and a handful of like-minded petulant city slickers, trudged up the dirt path on their final day at Cedar Lake, whining all the way about the uphill climb. The temperature was at least 90 degrees, definitely too hot for getting dirt under the fingernails.

But to my surprise, Rayana deigned to get dirty. She and I planted a sapling, and later, she was to plant another with Walsh. In between, she, Rosie and I visited a nearby stand of pines. Rosie promptly hugged a tree. Rayana, however, peeled off a section of bark and smelled it. Suddenly, the angry and indifferent eyes of Watts disappeared, and the bright wonderment of a sweet child came through. “It smells like vanilla,” she said as she held the bark to my nose. And then, without provocation, she hugged that old Jeffrey pine. I watched as she fixed the bark back onto the tree. And then, she reaffixed her indifferent expression and drifted off, pretending not to know me.

No matter. I hope there will be more times like the vanilla moment for Rayana and Diandra and their generation, when these children who have seen death and despair and hopelessness can return to their true natures--sweet, fun-loving and innocent.