Leap Of Faith

Gallery
Rough Terrain
Can eight days in the wilderness change anything for a group of troubled teens from a decaying D.C. detention center?

The behavioral gap between traditional camper's etiquette and what could be called the Oak Hill Maximum Fun-Minimum Discretion Policy follows the group down the canyon. The group descends in clusters of two or three, most of them searching for lizards to trap. Everyone moves more quickly than Jerome, though, who fears the cliff's steep bank. When a staff member walking with Jerome asks him to pose for a picture, sun-cast canyon behind him, he refuses to turn his back to the panorama, not wanting to risk a misstep. The sight of tourists crisscrossing the trail on the backs of mules puzzles him.

"Why you gonna trust a horse?" he says. "I wouldn't trust no horse. What if it goes all crazy?" As soon as the path narrows, peril to his immediate right, he asks his adult partner if he can hold her hand -- a request completely out of character for Jerome.

When he describes the neighborhood where he grew up and the life he led outside of Oak Hill, Jerome emphasizes one point: He didn't have friends. He calls the people he hung out with "associates," never to be trusted.

Jerome's parents divorced when he was 11. Before winding up at Oak Hill, he lived with his mother, grandmother and two brothers in a Brentwood apartment. Simple ambition, he says, drew him to life on the street. "Chasing that American dream -- that's what I called it," he says. "As a young'un, you want what you want. So I did it on my own. I wanted everything: cars, jewelry, dirt bikes, clothes, shoes. Any time you wanted it, you got it."

He's been shot once, he says. It happened when he was 14, behind the wheel of a car that he refuses to say how he obtained. He stopped at a red light. A person he knew was standing on the corner, pulled a gun and fired at him. He says he doesn't know why. A bullet penetrated the car door and struck Jerome's right leg, near his shin. For some time -- seconds, minutes, he doesn't know -- the pain and shock knocked him out. When he snapped awake, he drove to a hospital with his left foot on the gas pedal.

By then, Jerome's legal problems seemed so endless that his mother, Wanda Dukes, says she gave up on him, no longer able to manage the stress he was causing her. "He's got the devil in him," she says. "He got those horns that start coming out."

At the Grand Canyon, Jerome walks into a gift shop already wearing a blue baseball cap adorned with a Canyon logo that John had given him. A security guard spots him and questions whether the cap is stolen. "You crazy as [expletive], yo," he tells the security guard, and walks away without another word.

Yet Jerome is also a natural leader among the Oak Hill teens, with a sly sense of humor and an engaging personality. One afternoon, he spots a police officer patrolling the tranquil streets of Flagstaff, drops to the ground and pounds out 50 push-ups, just so the officer can offer an approving smile. Another time, he sees a group of 25 French teens pulling up to a Grand Canyon lookout point. He swings open the door to his group's van, allowing the high-volume bass beat of an R. Kelly CD to shake the parking lot. He demonstrates some dance moves, making the French girls giggle.

His mind cycles almost nonstop with clever phraseology, either his own or that of his favorite rappers, such as Lil' Wayne, whose lyrics he memorizes. Jerome sometimes spends minutes rhyming word after word. One morning, when the teens stopped at Four Corners, an underwhelming, sun-baked parking lot where Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado intersect and which offers free rein to a number of stray mutts with protruding rib cages, Jerome summarized his time there by rapping: "Came to Utah, won't shower for seven days/Saw that dog at the last stop, I thought it had AIDS."

Throughout the trip, Jerome is almost comically fastidious. Repulsed by insects and dirt, he cleans his tent twice daily. He fixes his own food, every piece just so, needing five minutes to make a turkey sandwich. And when he finally reaches the bottom of the trail at the Grand Canyon, exhausted and hungry, gasping for breath, facing air so hot that even his sweat is baking, he refuses to express any regret about wearing pants. It's making him stronger, he insists. Then he begins the trek back up, complaining about the searing heat.

For some of the teens, the last stretch of the hike turns into a labored, dusty hour. For Isaac, it turns into a sprint. He scrambles along a winding incline, over sliding rocks. A few who watch him take off don't think he has a chance at maintaining the pace. But Isaac, with the skeletal build of a sprinter, never pauses for breath. He reaches the top and awaits the rest of the pack, celebrating his accomplishment with a cigarette.

Two other Oak Hill residents, Jerry Williams, 17, and Maverick Miller, 16, soon crawl from the canyon and join Isaac on a bench, attracted by either the company or the nicotine. They sit, shirtless, and survey the landscape.