These kids are up the creek

I started watching the ABC-TV reality show “Brat Camp” because the setting looked so romantic: a tepee on the Oregon tundra under blue winter light. But the impression didn’t last.

The Brat Campers -- delinquent teens sent to a wilderness therapy camp -- wear identical gray caps that make them look like rejects from a Peter Jackson movie. Their expressions run from tormented to enraged as they collectively slog through mud and blizzards.

The constant snow is “a bitch,” says one camper.

“I feel like I’m in the ‘Blair Witch Project,’ ” says another.

At Brat Camp, wilderness is punishment. Nature is the ruler that stings the palms of bad kids, and the goal of the campers is to escape this punishment. They are always looking for a chance to run away (typically during a bathroom break) or, if they’re lucky, graduate and return to the suburbs. Fighting with Mom and Dad is better than fighting the high desert, it seems.

Those who stay must succumb to professional bullying and rappelling off a 300-foot rock face. Often burbling and crying, they strap on comically huge packs and lurch 10 miles through rotten snow, falling down frequently and begging the omnipotent counselors for a reprieve.

This is wilderness as adversary, a blueprint that prevails not only in so-called “hoods in the woods” camps but also in our most popular adventure books and films. But the question raised by this model is whether Brat Camp could just as easily be replicated in a high school gym with freezing showers, tainted cafeteria food and bullies in the hallways.

The campers could be anywhere. They have no relationship to the brush country where they spend 40 days and nights. Instead, they relentlessly relate to each other and to their counselors, who sport New Age names like “Glacier” and “Little Bear.”

Most of the time, there’s no chance anyone will connect with the Oregon turf because they’re too busy talking about adversity. The counselors insist every experience be turned into a metaphor for struggle. In hiking, for instance: “You carry the troubles of life on your back.”

Now and then it looks as if someone is about to contact something outside him- or herself. In one episode “Mountain Wind” absentmindedly petted a tree as she counseled a kid, and one time the violent teenager Frank praised the winter sun warming his chest.

But the moment of kinship never lasts, and the plot quickly reverts to nature-as-intimidator. The adversarial strategy appears to work at times. After many frustrating efforts to make fire, the dyslexic hooligan Nick gets a spark from a stick. Giddy, he spins off into the night roaring about his conquest of cold and darkness. But it seems unlikely his rush will last longer than a latte. In this setting, transformation only persists until the next foe presents itself.

(As if to prove the approach doesn’t work, two of the real-life Brat Campers have returned home and already are facing criminal charges -- one for a boating incident, another for allegedly painting racial slurs outside a home.)

While I was glued to the Brat Campers on my TV, another type of wilderness school came to mind. Its approach, espoused by naturalists and eco-psychologists, has nothing to do with opposition -- being against the cold and the night -- and everything to do with “being with.”

When Green Beret medic Doug Peacock returned from Vietnam unable to speak to anyone, including his parents, he exiled himself to the Wind River Range in Wyoming, where he found himself sharing his neighborhood with grizzly bears. In the course of his stay (described in his book “Grizzly Years”), he learned to communicate again.

But he didn’t do it through opposition. He met up with the Bitter Creek Grizz and began spending more time entering the bears’ lives (from a respectful distance) and less revisiting corpses he’d met in reeking tunnels in Vietnam.

His affiliation with something out there was what helped him regain his life.

I’d like to see the Brat Campers take a lesson from Peacock. Lexie, let the rhythms of the Oregon winter get under your skin. Nick, get to know the patterns of the mud as it seeps across the coulees.

The same might go for all of us runaways and angry punks: Be with. Join up.

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Ann Japenga is a writer living in Palm Springs. Some of her essays have been anthologized in “True Tales of the Mojave: From Talking Rocks to Yucca Man.”