Saving Souls, a Family at a Time

BETHLEHEM, Conn. â€”  If it weren’t for the Kettletown bathroom incident, we probably would have blown off Wellspring.

My wife, three kids and I are on a summer-long, close-quarters tour to check out the state of the American family. But we had been moving too fast. The night we arrived at Kettletown State Park, Ashley, 12, lashed out at her sister, then sprang the trip’s first “I wanna go home” leak.

I’m not always great at such moments. Sometimes patience evaporates before I can remind myself that Ashley got her temper from me. This time I found the strength to take my daughter walking, and frustration steamed into the star-filled sky, followed by heartfelt remorse.

Clearly, our family needed time to just hang out.

The interviews I’d set up at Wellspring were bound to be depressing. Our lazily rocking lakeside hammock was anything but. The decision seemed obvious.

But something changed my mind.

*

I first encountered the two girls in the morning, as they climbed railroad-tie stairs. “Janie!” screamed the younger child, who looked about 5. “The snake’s back.”

That cry was reveille for any child within earshot. Our daughter Emily, 10, had been bicycling in desultory circles. She came running. So did the girl’s sister, who seemed about 7. Within seconds, the sisters had their arms in the ground up to their elbows. Emily’s eyes opened wide in disbelief.

“Is it poisonous?” Emily asked.

“Dunno,” said the little one, rooting away.

“I wouldn’t do that,” I said, and the girls withdrew their arms tentatively, their expressions suggesting that such intervention was a novelty.

Perhaps an hour later, I stood in the camp bathroom shaving when the sounds of a ruckus came shrilling over the eaves. Despite my time on the obscenity-drenched playgrounds of Los Angeles, such foul language from such pipsqueak voices startled me.

I couldn’t decipher the nature of the battle, only its screeching slash-and-burn abandon and, finally, the pain-stricken voice of the vanquished.

“I hate life,” she wailed. Her tormentor just clawed harder at the open psychic wounds.

I slammed down my can of Barbasol hard. “Cut it out over there!” I shouted. “How dare you speak to each other that way!”

I stepped out in time to see that the combatants were the snake sisters. I watched them scramble down the stairway to their campsite, where an old sedan sat beside two tents, surrounded by clothes, toys and camp gear. A wiry, long-haired man in a muscle shirt snatched up the older girl.

“Now what have you done, loudmouth?” he bellowed. His face had instantly tightened to rage. “I could hear you way down here. I’m going to whup you!” Behind him, a woman puttered near the car.

As I approached, the man dropped the girl. She walked off, blank-faced. “I didn’t mean to scare your girls,” I said, “but I figured I ought to say something.”

“I appreciate it,” he said. He dropped his eyes and raised his foot, crane-like. “I was gonna go up there, but I broke my toe yesterday.”

He went on to vent a litany of child-rearing woes that seemed tied to financial failings. His humiliation hung in the air with the humidity. “Sorry they disturbed you,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’ve got two girls of my own. It’s tough. I know.”

I had planned to go back to their campsite to talk some more, but first the kids and I went fishing. Before we knew it, we’d been mesmerized by the lake’s mirror surface and the promise reflected in the tiny fish that Emily had hooked.

When we got back, our neighbors had vanished.

For some reason, though, I no longer felt comfortable shirking my rendezvous with childhood’s darker side.

For the rest of the day, we rocked in the hammock and rode bikes. But in the morning, we drove our rental RV to Wellspring, a nonprofit residential “family treatment center” set in the Connecticut countryside.

*

The quiet beauty of the place, with its converted farm buildings set before well-tended gardens and precisely built rock walls, belied the inner state of the residents. It is the prettiest purgatory you’ll ever find.

Our children were invited to sit in on the conversation, but Pam took them off to pick blueberries while I sat with a 15-year-old I’ll call Betty, and “Kelly,” who had just turned 18.

“I’m here for drug and alcohol problems,” Betty said softly. “And I have a violent temper.” Her freckled face was so sweet that I almost laughed out loud. But soon I saw the muscles clench behind the soft facade, and I believed every dark detail she dredged up.

With bluntness, she portrayed herself as a gangbangin’ doper--the child of a drunk and belittling father who left when she was 6, and a mother who failed to set limits (“if she said ‘no’ I could always talk her into ‘yes’ ”) until her daughter thought nothing of punching her in the face.

“I started to have no feelings but anger,” she said. But she pretended the rage wasn’t there until, by age 12, “I didn’t have feelings because I was always high.”

Then came the shoplifting arrests. Drunk in public. Loitering. And a wreck that destroyed the sight in Betty’s right eye and her mother’s new car. Finally, she tried to end the life she hated, but doctors patched her wrists before her pulse died.

The father who walked out of her life had called her “fat,” “ugly,” “stupid.” But he has stopped drinking now and is working hard to change, she said--something a Wellspring counselor confirmed.

“Now,” Betty said, “I just want a dad.”

Kelly listened respectfully to Betty’s tale, then took her turn.

“I guess it all stems from family stuff,” she said. “My dad left when I was 6. My mom started working three jobs.”

Her mother tried, in her own way, to be a good parent, Kelly said. “She would hand-sew us new Halloween costumes every year. But if I was upset, I couldn’t talk to her. I don’t remember her ever comforting me. . . . When I was 10, she moved in with a guy who was a severe alcoholic. He physically abused his kids. He verbally abused us--said stuff to us you just don’t say to a kid.”

For a while, Kelly moved in with her best friend’s parents.

“My parents don’t want me to come home, ever. That kind of stinks. This is the first time in my life I want to go home, and I can’t.”

*

By the time we finished talking, my family was back from berry picking. At the urging of Wellspring’s director, a couple of residents took my kids to the barnyard where they fed goats, lambs, rabbits and a potbellied pig.

“They were nice,” Emily said of their tour guides, as we walked back to our rented RV.

“They didn’t look like they had problems,” Ashley said.

I scanned my girls’ faces and struggled with my own--trying with limited success to fight back tears.

As we drove on, the day’s fathers and daughters came together in my mind. I found myself haunted by questions of which souls will be saved and which ones lost.

I’m not sure why, and I tried to resist, but for some reason my thoughts on all this kept tumbling out as a sort of prayer:

God, please take care of the little snake girls, and the big lost girls, and my own girls. Please give them all the chance to pick blueberries till their fingers match the sky. Please let them all swing gently on hammocks from time to time.

And please make us fathers stronger--give us the wisdom to fish more often with our daughters, and the patience to help them unhook a fingerling trout, wag it gently in water, and smile humbly as it fights back into the current on its own.

* Monday: Cosmopolitan Boston.

ON THE WEB

Visit the Sipchens on the World Wide Web at https:// www.latimes.com/trip/ for maps, journals and sounds from the family’s trip.