“Hi, I’m Matt and I’m a drug addict.”
“Hi Matt,” the others respond.
I sit with them as the 12-step meeting unfolds around a campfire, and I can’t pretend this is just another day with another group of kids in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The air feels prickly, the people and struggles and emotions so very more real than anything else I’ve experienced in these woods.
I’m surrounded by 17- and 18-year-old guys — kids? — their mustaches and beards shadowed and patchy with a deceiving youthfulness. In truth, they have experienced more life in not even two decades than I could ever fathom living in my nearly three.
This week I’ve been placed with the teen drug addicts. They are striving for sobriety.
~ ~ ~
I’m standing with Cole, a 17-year-old with long blonde hair. He lives in Charlotte, too, and we trade some stories about the Queen City.
Cole is a father. His son was just born a couple days before I got here — while he was still trapped in these woods — and he shows me the mailed hospital picture of his newborn and girlfriend.
“I wanted to be there for the birth so bad,” he tells me one afternoon while digging a latrine for the group. “But now that it’s happened, I can focus on being here and getting better.”
Cole and his girlfriend have offered their baby up for adoption in hopes of giving him his best chance. Cole hopes to maintain visitation rights. So long as he stays sober.
~ ~ ~
I’m mentoring my second student this week, Matt. Unlike the effervescent, ever-poppin’ Duncan of last shift, Matt is a quiet one. He does what he’s told, and though he doesn’t say much he gets along great with the group. He’s far from being a problem, but I get the sense that Matt doesn’t want to get too attached to the other guys.
Matt’s focus is his family.
“I’m a twin,” he tells me. “And I have a pair of younger twin siblings, too. A brother and a sister.”
“Really?” I ask. “That’s crazy.”
“Yeah, it’s interesting for sure. My twin is the golden child, and I’m the problem child. I’ve been addicted to cocaine since I was 13. I was only sober a week before I got here. Tomorrow’s my one-month sobriety.”
Unlike most of the other guys who are still minors, Matt is 18. As such, Matt can leave the program whenever he chooses. We can’t keep him here. It’s a dynamic I’ve yet to experience as staff — until now.
“I think I’m going to be here at least another week or two,” he tells me. “I want to be different when I go back home. I want to be a better brother, and I want to be a better son.”
~ ~ ~
“Can I get a standing group?” Jeff asks.
We circle round him before diving into our bountiful breakfast of GNO (grains and oats). We’ve only been awake for twenty minutes.
“So, I’ve called this standing group because I’m leaving the woods today.”
The other staff exchange confused glances, and I don’t entirely understand what’s unfolding either.
“Before I got here,” Jeff the 18-year-old continues, “I signed a contract with my parents that I would stay here at least 35 days. At first I was crossing off every day from my calendar, and then Sonia [his therapist] suggested I be more present and stop doing that.”
More exchanged glances. An increased understanding of what’s about to happen.
“Well, this morning I woke up and realized it was my fifth week of being out here. 35 days. And I feel like I’m ready to leave.”
~ ~ ~
The morning is a flurry, the other staff scurrying to convince Jeff to stay. There’s still more you can learn out here, they say. You need to think through this more seriously, they plead. Is your family even ready for you to come back?
But Jeff is decided. He gathers his things, and he gives what little food he has left to the other guys. They’re all smiles and jokes, and nobody seems overly phased by the decision. Almost like they already knew. Cole the resident father scrawls a quick letter for Jeff to deliver to his girlfriend in the “real world.”
Jeff is ready to leave the woods, and nobody but staff is beckoning him to stay.
An hour later, Jeff walks out of camp. Jeff is gone.
Photo courtesy rjackman, Creative Commons.
“Fuck you!” Sonia shouts with an extended middle finger toward the group. “That’s basically what y’all said to Jeff as he walked out of here. A big fat fuck you!”
The group is silent, absorbing the weight of their therapist’s words. She only visits the group two days a week, and it’s now been three days since Jeff walked. He lives in Kentucky, several hours away.
“If you’d have really cared about him, every last one of you would have been begging him to stay. And you’d have told staff that you knew!”
In the last few days it’s come out that several group members indeed knew Jeff was planning to leave.
“His father is out of the country and his mother is leaving for a work conference,” Sonia continues. “Nobody could even pick him up!”
Silence.
“What’s the opposite of addiction?” Sonia asks.
“Connection,” a student softly responds.
“That’s right. And y’all just let him walk clear away from connection. Cole, you were more obsessed about getting a damn letter to your girlfriend than his own well-being!”
More silence.
“Y’all are supposed to be a family out here. Where the hell is the care in this group? Where did it go?”
~ ~ ~
“So, where are you at with Jeff’s leaving?” I ask Matt. He is now the only remaining 18-year-old left in camp.
“I’ll be honest,” he says, “when he announced that, part of me wanted to jump in and say I was leaving with him.”
I nod. I can’t imagine being in Matt’s shoes — the drugs, the family drama, sure, but particularly his current situation.
He’s been in the wilderness for three straight weeks now — three weeks of pooping in holes, eating the same grains and oats every morning, interacting with the same farting guys all day long, suffering spontaneous rainstorms, and desperately missing his family with every chilly breeze and bead of sweat.
And he can leave whenever he wants.
I have no idea how much more time Matt needs. He seems to think it’s only one or two more weeks. But what if it’s more? What if he needs months out here?
“Try to give the group and your family a little heads-up before you do leave,” I recommend, and he nods. I look him in the eyes. “I think this group could use a leader right now. You have a quiet strength about you, and I think you have what it takes. I know how much your family means to you in your fight for sobriety — but maybe these guys can be like your family, too.”
I have no idea if I’ll ever see Matt again. Whether I’ll return to this same group next week or if he’ll walk in the meantime. I wonder when he’ll eventually have enough of these woods and do what Jeff did.
I only hope Matt walks when he’s supposed to. That his group rallies behind him in all the right ways, and that he learns to rally behind them. That his family will welcome him back, a changed person no longer defined by his addiction.
A kid — a man — walking a freeing new path.
_____________________________________________
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