Happy Campers

To find the poor and needy, the underprivileged children, whose bodies are undernourished, whose thoughts are clouded by fear, whose hearts are heavy from lack of love and understanding . . . to find and rebuild them into healthier and happier generations of Americans.”

--Robert M. Pyles, Founder, R.M. Pyles Boys Camp

For almost 50 years, the underprivileged teenage boys from Southern California who have come to summer camp in this mountain basin have slept under star-sprinkled heavens featuring the Milky Way sprawled across the night sky.

By now more than 20,000 boys have spent free two-week sessions at Pyles Camp and heard the camp’s trademark slogans of “setting goals” and “personal responsibility,” among the values the camp’s founder believed could help boys lift themselves out of poverty. Anyone, he believed, could reach for those stars that shine so brightly here.

“I thought it was going to be fun, but it was better,” said Noel Rodriguez, a quiet 13-year-old from Pacoima who recently spent a session there along with 70 other teens from the San Fernando Valley and East and South Los Angeles.

“They teach you how to believe in yourself and that you have choices,” Noel said. “There’s more to life than gangs.”

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Founded in 1949 by Pyles, a Huntington Beach oil businessman, Pyles Camp is a nonprofit, volunteer organization--still largely sponsored by the oil industry--based in Valencia but with its campgrounds 200 miles north in Sequoia National Forest.

Pyles, who had his ashes scattered around the camp when he died in 1969, was inspired by his own modest boyhood to build the camp.

Pyles’ father left his family when Pyles was 3. At 11, Pyles moved with his mother and younger siblings to Bakersfield from Texas, after the family store was destroyed in a fire.

He went to work as a “mop boy” in the Kern County oil fields, cleaning up gooey spills, to help support his family. In time he rose through the ranks at the camp near the Forks of the Kern River, an area where he frequently camped.

Still a remote area 45 minutes away from the nearest gas station, the peaceful basin is surrounded by towering granite peaks and lush green meadows where only the whisper of the wind blowing through the ponderosa and sugar pine trees breaks the evening silence.

Today, campers typically come from poor neighborhoods, where drugs and gangs are as much a part of their lives as single parents and public assistance. They cope with dangers far greater than those faced by the boys in Pyles’ day, said Roman “Bravo” Gutierrez, 37, the camp director who himself was a camper in 1973. (And to this day, like other camp graduates, he carries the nickname he got in camp.)

“At that time you had a fistfight to settle things,” said Eddie Calderon, 63, an oil worker raised in Watts, who helped select Los Angeles boys to be campers from 1953 to 1993. “Now they need an Uzi to level everything.”

Like Calderon, school and law enforcement officials and community members also select 12- to 14-year-olds whom they believe are essentially “fence-sitters” who may be rescued from drugs and gangs with a positive wilderness experience.

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The counselors and staff, most of whom were campers too, live or have lived in the same neighborhoods as the teens they now counsel and can talk from personal experience about defying gangs and drugs to become college students or professionals.

“Camp is like a time capsule,” said David “Derby” Dayan, the camp’s assistant director. “We take them out of the city and for two weeks bring them into a perfect environment where they can think about who they really are.”

The recent two-week visit by Noel’s group started off by shaking off the last bit of the city: a standard bag search to confiscate guns or other weapons.

As with the 500 other boys who come from Orange, Ventura, Kern and Tulare counties every summer, no weapons were found. Cigarettes and lighters are usually the questionable items confiscated, Gutierrez said.

At first the Los Angeles campers were particularly distrustful of one another, and a few scuffles broke out on the buses as they headed up the mountain. Two boys were eventually sent home for fighting.

“I thought it was going to be like a regular camp, where you just have fun,” said Edwin Larin, a 14-year-old from Van Nuys. “But then they start telling you how you have to respect other people and clean your cabin before you can play.”

Atypical day at the camp begins at 7, with a military-style cabin inspection long before archery lessons or dips in the creek.

The boys--separated into nine groups of about nine each--haul the metal bunks out of their cabins to sweep, mop and dust everything, even the cabin’s rafters. Other chores before breakfast include hosing down the showers, scrubbing the toilets and raking pine needles. The boys wait outside their cabin during inspection, peering in through the windows while Dayan critiques their work.

“Look at this,” Dayan told a group, running his finger on a bed frame. “I could write my name on here. It’s so dusty.”

“It’s hard to keep the dust out,” Marcos Prieto, a 14-year-old from Pacoima, said apologetically. “You wipe it down once and in one minute it’s dusty again.”

“Attention to detail makes a good worker,” Dayan replied.

Some moments later, Marcos confided: “At my house I work a little bit but not this much. I usually leave my bed messy.”

The campers’ growth during the two-week session is best measured in their attitude toward work, Dayan said.

In the first week, when Dayan asked a group about who did the poor dusting, the finger-pointing reply was: “He did it.” The next week the boys embraced responsibility, promising to do better next time: “We all did. We’ll get it tomorrow.”

Said Luis Polanco, a 13-year-old from Pacoima, rake in hand and a couple acres waiting to be cleared of pine needles: “It gives you character. You’re supposed to work in the city, too. That’s the way you stay alive.”

The camp’s recreational activities--such as a course where the boys walk on ropes 35 feet above the ground or a demanding weeklong backpacking trip--are meant to instill teamwork, a foreign concept to some of the urban teens, Gutierrez said.

“When we went to ‘out camp’ we had to work together to cook our dinners and survive,” said Will Shannon, 14, from Van Nuys. “At home I don’t really leave the house that much. There’s too many gangs. If you try to do teamwork, they’ll think there’s something wrong with you.”

After breakfast, counselors stand in the front of the mess hall before an attentive audience and deliver what they call “Thoughts for the Day.” One morning Gutierrez shares a poem called “Wings Are for Soaring.” The story goes something like this:

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One day an Indian boy finds an eagle egg in the forest and, not knowing where it came from, puts the egg in a prairie chicken’s nest.

The egg hatches and the baby eagle starts acting like a chicken, learning to flap its wings just feet above the ground.

One day, the young eagle sees a powerful bird circling high in the blue sky. It asks an older chicken what kind of bird that is. It’s an eagle, the chicken says, the strongest and most beautiful bird in all the land.

But don’t you worry, the chicken reassures the young eagle, we are chickens, meant to scratch the earth for food.

So, the young eagle lives and dies as a chicken, never knowing its destiny was to soar near the sun and to live in the highest mountain peaks.

It’s a simple moral, but the boys take it seriously, and sit quietly--as they do every time they hear the “Thoughts for the Day.”

“I didn’t know about all these thoughts of the day before,” said 12-year-old Albert Guardado of North Hills. “We learned that you can do anything if you make goals. I’m going to try harder in school when I get home.”

Although the staffers will visit the boys’ homes for the next year to check up on their grades and remind them of the camp’s lessons, Pyles Camp does not keep hard numbers on what happens to its alumni. But it counts lawyers and doctors among its former students, as well as professionals of all sorts. Many become part of a growing family that connects one generation to another.

“My counselor told me you have to set goals and look for the people that can help you achieve them,” said 19-year-old counselor and college student Jose “Breeze” Oliva from Northridge, remembering his camp experience in 1991. “Most of the time I feel I can relate to the kids because I know the streets where they come from.”

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Reginald Gillens, project director at the San Fernando Valley Boys & Girls Club who still remembers cabin inspection as a camper in 1975, said: “It seems elementary, but when an individual is held accountable for his cleanliness, it leaves an impact.”

Said Fernando Ortiz, 27, a camper in 1982, now a PhD candidate at UC Riverside: “Everybody talks about setting goals. But it’s another thing to hold someone responsible for taking steps.”

He remembers a life lesson he learned from his counselor who told him on a backpacking trip that every step taken was a step closer to the top of the mountain.

But the camp can’t save everyone. Gutierrez recently got a telephone call from a former camper, now in prison, who said he remembered being told at the camp that taking the easy road in life would land him in jail.

On the last evening of their two-week session, Noel Rodriguez and his new friends zipped up their jackets against the cold before heading off to the final camp fire--as the Milky Way began to look down on them for the night.

“I’m going to do everything I can to come back next year,” Noel said. “I just have to keep my grades up and don’t get in fights at school like I used to.”