Camp hope
Site for troubled boys takes them back to the basics
SUMMERFIELD–One could almost mistake the gathering for a scout camp–minus the uniforms.
They sing camp songs and rousing hymns at mealtime gatherings.
They build fires, play card games and learn to carve wood.
But their stay on this ridge, in this remote corner of nowhere along the Monroe and Noble county line, will last much longer than that typical weeklong leisurely adventure.
Many could be there for up to two years.
Two years, without access to electronics.
Two years, living in tents with pine frames.
Two years, where they only see their parents once every 90-day session and only go home for 4.5 days every 5.5 weeks.
But the Ohio Wilderness Boys Camp is many of these families’ last hope.
“Many of these boys have destroyed the family life with their behaviors,” said Joe Thompson, director of the private, nonprofit, therapeutic wilderness camp which has been in operation since 2009 and is licensed by Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. “Or they come from such disrupted lives that their outbursts, actions or aggression is too much to handle even when they’ve been adopted into a model two-parent home.”
The camp is one of a network supported by the Mennonite community based on a model of lay-person therapy and immersion under the Wilderness Road Therapeutic Camping Association.
And short of turning over custody to the local children services agency as a means to prevent juvenile detention, some Ohio parents have turned to the camp to help their sons.
The camp takes on the charge of caring for boys between the ages of 9 and 16, to teach not only life skills but also emotional maturity, including how to take responsibility for their own actions and feelings.
It uses parameters of positive peer pressure, structured timing expectations, modeling and little personal victories to help each boy take ownership over modifying his own behaviors.
And yet the 27 boys sleeping in tents are just as invested in the progress that gets them back home as they are in helping their peers along their own journeys.
“These guys are truly my brothers, they’re my friends and I want them to get to go home, too,” said Laine “Longtimer,” who at 15 is one of the oldest campers. Camp officials requested the last names of the boys not be used.
But success, in a form that sticks, takes time, said Thompson.
“Each boy can come with his own set of problems or behaviors but they each generally go through the same stages while they’re here,” he explained. “What we don’t do is give them an end date. Anybody can stick it out and toe the line if they can see the end of the road. So we encourage parents to stick with that, with the knowledge that the only true way this kid is going back home is if he actually does the work to become better.”
Under that loose timeline, and a rolling admission as beds become available, a boy who stays through success will experience four stages of behaviors and emotions while on the ridge.
Honeymoon
At first, a boy experiences camp through the rose-colored glasses of camp songs, fun activities and getting to be away from his parents.
On Friday, these boys were the ones who looked a little lost during the songs at meals but still found getting to build a fire and sleep in a tent exciting and different.
“There may be some issues, but for the most part it’s still fun here,” explained Thompson. “They’re liking the activity, and being around a bunch of guys their own age.”
Boys go along with the fun of it all during this stage–they get to play with fire, they get to fish often for the first time.
They’re still getting the lessons taught in school from math– balancing a play checkbook and allowance at the camp’s trading post– to biology and physics– learning about the animals they’re surrounded by and the plants they come across in the woods.
They build their own sleeping structures with pine posts, tarps and other supplies, and maintain them as well.
It’s fun, until it’s not.
Manipulation
Then the homesickness starts to set in, as does the discomfort of having to stop and address behaviors each time a toe is set outside of the line.
“We don’t have any form of negative punishment, like dropping to give 20 push-ups,” said Thompson. “But we operate under a model of having to talk constantly about what is going on, at the moment. Why you’re mad, what upset you, how that reaction may have been inappropriate and let’s develop a plan to better handle that next time.”
Boys at each 90-day stage have to assess, with their peers and their parents, how they are progressing on their goals.
“And it provides an avenue for them to hold each other accountable for what they told the group they were going to work on,” Thompson said.
That accountability works in a form of peer pressure, explained Laine, who has been at camp now for 22 months.
“Today we didn’t want to bring a bad feeling into lunch,” he explained after his group, called the Discoverers, missed a hot lunch prepared Friday because of an issue within his group of nine campers.
They instead picked up peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from Chuckwagon, the camp’s mess hall, and hiked out into the woods to discuss why an argument had occurred.
“We had a guy who didn’t like how another guy was talking to him,” he explained. “But we found out his brother is getting ready to go into the army and he’s worried about him.”
That conversation wasn’t a comfortable one to have, Laine noted, but was one that created more understanding in the group for the outburst.
But it’s in this stage when boys begin to revert to the manipulative behaviors they used at home to break down their parents’ expectations.
“They know how to pull on mom’s heartstrings, they say they’re cold, that the other boys are being mean and they want to come home, they promise they’ll be better,” Thompson said. “But this is where we encourage the parents to stay strong.”
Parents are in constant contact with the camp’s two family workers who are giving updates on the successes and challenges facing their child at camp.
“And often parents need the coaching that they need to trust this process, and work on getting their own lives back in order too while we help their child,” the director continued.
Supervisor Tyler Kauffman, 27, has served as a camp chief directly over a group of boys and now facilitates each group’s activities.
“The thing about how this works,” he explained over lunch at camp Friday, “is it’s a whole culture of camp. And these boys are learning more from the successes and failures of each other as they are from their leaders.”
Kauffman said by the staggered admission of boys, immersion into that camp culture allows for boys to witness and model the successes of others.
Despondency
But what successes are happening at camp can be hard to recreate at home.
There are different triggers, from inconsistent paternal access to the same neighborhood or home peer influences of drug use that set up a boy’s own form of relapse.
“And many mess up, this creates an identity crisis where they don’t believe they can really change, they don’t believe they can be anything but what everyone has always told them they’re going to be,” explained Thompson. “This is our opportunity to give them many opportunities for little successes.”
Successes like properly making the hospital corners on their bed in the morning after flipping the mattress, planning and executing a meal plan in a weekend, building the sleeping tent with space for the wood-burning furnace.
“It gives them the opportunity to also identify success in each other, and encourage or bolster their brothers in camp for accomplishing those successes,” said Thompson.
Normalcy
What results, if the boy and his parents stick to the method, is a boy able to handle the transition with emotional awareness, a boy who is able to maintain a generally calm demeanor when faced with situations where things aren’t going his way.
It’s also a boy who can take criticism without starting a fight, who choose to be honest and a man of his word and who sees the value in his work toward those goals.
“And graduations are a big deal, by that time these guys are thinking more about just getting to go home, they have faith again that they can be someone,” said Thompson.
Laine, who is hopeful for graduation in the coming months, can now see an outlet for creativity as well as a career path.
“I want to go into welding so I can work with my hands,” he said. “But I also want to build peg cabins, as we’ve built here –there’s a growing market for that that I could maybe build into a side business.”
Outcomes
Justin Miller, 24, of Newcomerstown, said camp did him so much good as a child that he wanted to go back.
“I grew up very angry with life,” Miller explained.
He noted he had been adopted out of foster care as a toddler but by adolescence was aggressive, kicking holes in walls and having other outbursts despite a loving home.
“But what camp gave me is the self-confidence I never had that I could do things right,” Miller continued. “What’s special about camp is when you have an issue, everything stops. Everybody takes the time to care for you and love you and accept you for who you are and it taught me to voice how I feel in a constructive way.”
Miller returned for a two-year stint as a camp counselor, called a “chief” between March 2016 and April 2018 because he wanted to help cultivate that confidence in another generation of impressionable boys.
“Camp doesn’t fix your kid, it teaches your kid how to deal with the problems that will come up in his life,” Miller said.
How to help:
• The Ohio Wilderness Boys Camp is a nonprofit financially supported through business and church donations and the proceeds of nonprofit thrift stores in Holmes County, and now Marietta, which provides approximately one-third of the funding.
• The Trading Post Thrift Store is located on Pike Street across from the Holiday Inn Express in Marietta.
Hours:
• Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
• Thursday: 9 a.m. to 8 p.m.
• Saturday: 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
• Volunteers welcome, call 740-371-5468 for more information.
• Donations may be dropped off 24 hours a day at the barn behind the building, located at 1001 Pike St., Marietta.
• Proceeds benefit the Ohio Wilderness Boys Camp.
Source: The Trading Post Thrift Store.