A Newsletter for Friends of Rick Riordan's Mysteries

Skeleton Time

Winter 2003

In this issue:

Cold Springs Arrives -- Apr. 29 -- Q&A with the author

The Girl Who Vanished -- A True Story

Tres Navarre Arrives on Audio

A Taste of South Texas

The World of Wilderness Schools

Riordan Receives $10,000 Master Teacher Award

Visit the MAIN RICK RIORDAN WEB SITE

The new Riordan standalone tackles the controversial world of wilderness schools. Below, some Q&A with the author about troubled teens, writing, and death in the wilderness.

A lot of authors seem to be doing standalones. Why a standalone for Rick Riordan?

When I signed my present contract with Bantam, my editor left me the option of trying something different for my fifth book if I wished. At the time, I had no intention of setting down my series character, but then an idea seized me in a way nothing has since my very first book, BIG RED TEQUILA. The idea for COLD SPRINGS just wouldn’t let me be. The catalyst was the huge amount of media coverage wilderness schools have been getting, but it’s an issue I’ve wanted to explore for a long time anyway, because I’m personally affected by it. As a school teacher, I deal with adolescents every day. I see what works and what doesn’t work with emotionally troubled kids. I’ve had some of my students picked up by escorts in the middle of the night and taken away to wilderness programs. (See accompanying article “The Girl Who Vanished.”) I decided to tell a story from the hired escort’s point of view – making a hero out of someone the media tends to portray as a sinister presence. At the parents’ request, my protagonist Chadwick unwittingly snatches a girl who is wanted by the police, and by a killer, because she may have information about a particularly gruesome murder. The police want her back, the parents want her kept away, and the killer wants her dead. The school, Cold Springs, has to decide what is best for the child, and to do that, Chadwick has to discover the truth about the killer.

Does this mean you’re abandoning the Tres Navarre series?

Not at all. I’m working on the next Tres Navarre novel right now, and it should hit the bookstores in early 2004. Tres will be back in his native San Antonio stomping grounds with old friends like Ralph Arguello, Erainya Manos, and of course Robert Johnson the cat, as Tres tracks down a dangerous fugitive who has a score to settle against a certain PI. Readers who don’t want to wait until 2004 can also expect to see Tres Navarre make some short fiction outings during the course of 2003.

How was writing COLD SPRINGS different from writing your series?

COLD SPRINGS was a major growing experience. It’s told in multiple third-person viewpoints, in a very different voice than the Tres Navarre series. The subject matter is more personal, because I’m drawing directly on experiences from my fourteen years as a classroom teacher. The book forced me to decide whether or not I could live with the idea of wilderness schools. I decided I could, under certain conditions, for certain kids. It’s also my first book set partly outside of Texas . About half the action takes place in my home away from home -- the San Francisco Bay Area, where I lived for many years and began my writing career.

I think it’s safe to say COLD SPRINGS is darker than the Tres Navarre series. The story is also more of a nail-biter. The nice thing about a standalone is that you can pack a huge amount of intensity into it, because you are encapsulating all the seminal events of the characters’ lives. With a series, you are running a marathon. You can’t put your characters through quite as much personal hell in one book and expect them to still be functional human beings in the next.

Rick Riordan in his middle school classroom

            She was a student in my eighth grade English class when she ran away to join the circus.

Laura – as I’ll call her – was rebellious and smart, quirky and opinionated. As her English teacher, I had a hard time not liking her, because she was a voracious reader. She loved to irritate her peers by giving away the endings of our class novels. She spent every recess absorbed in science fiction novels, and decided I was cool only after she learned I liked Star Trek.

Laura rarely made any grade above a C because she lost everything. Her locker was a disaster of books and papers and old lunch bags. Details, like turning in homework, were for lesser mortals. Besides, who had time to do homework when her home life consisted of screaming matches?

Laura’s parents had divorced when she was very small. The year I taught her, her dad had just given up on her, told Laura not to bother visiting anymore if she couldn’t behave.

At home, Laura and her mother had no one but each other, and the mother depended on Laura for all her emotional needs.  I imagined the air in their apartment was poisoned with anger and guilt.

Aside from reading, Laura’s only escape was gymnastics. She’d taken a circus arts camp over the summer, and something about the high wire, the trapeze, the dizzy feeling of working fifty feet above a net had completely captivated her. She dreamed of becoming a professional acrobat. In her happier moments, she would set down her sci fi book, kick off her shoes, and do cartwheels across the basketball court -- handstands, back-flips, contortions that made the other kids stare in amazement.

Over the course of the year, Laura’s fights with her mother grew worse. Her mother wilted and cried; Laura turned into a red-faced tyrant. She called her mother every imaginable name. The mother accused Laura of not being a real friend. And these were just the fights we saw at school.

In class, Laura became increasingly confrontational. Her grades took a nosedive. We worried about drugs and suicide.

Finally, she ran away from home. The police found her several days later, down on the Peninsula , hitching a ride with an adult male stranger, trying to get back to circus camp. The cops brought her home, got a social worker assigned to the family. But it was clear that Laura would run away again, and her mother simply did not have the capacity to stop her.

As her teacher, I felt helpless. I was watching a student I cared about self-destruct.

Not that the school didn’t try to help. We were a small community. We prided ourselves on knowing every family, meeting the needs of every child. Our philosophy stressed creativity, openness, and an easy-going, child-centered environment. It was the kind of nurturing education I would’ve wanted for my own children. And we were failing Laura utterly.

The day after the police brought Laura home, her mother tried to bring her to school, but Laura wouldn’t get out of the car. Several of us, including the headmistress, came down and tried to coax her out, but Laura kept locking the doors, screaming, kicking the seats, while other parents dropping off their children watched in horror. Finally, Laura won the battle. We adults backed down. Her mother took her home, but not before telling us, “I can’t take much more. I have to do something. I have to.”

Her tone scared us worse than Laura’s behavior.

The next day, Laura failed to show up at school. Her mom didn’t return our phone calls.  For all we knew, Laura had simply vanished.

It wasn’t until a week later that her mother finally told us Laura’s fate. At the advice of a new therapist, the mother had called a professional escort agency to take Laura away to a lock-down program for extreme discipline problems.

Laura had been shaken out of bed in the middle of the night by two burly guys who had forced her into a car, still in her pajamas, driven her to the airport, and escorted her to a wilderness school in Utah .

How long would Laura be gone? Would she be finishing eighth grade with us?

Her mother didn’t know. On the phone, her voice was dead, drained of emotion, and strangely relieved. She said that after the men had taken her daughter away, she’d gotten her first good night’s sleep in almost a year.

As word spread through the school, the kids and teachers acted dazed, then angry. The reaction was similar to hearing that someone we knew had just been hit by a car.

“This isn’t fair,” Laura’s peers said, regardless of the fact they’d never liked her.

“Was she really that bad?” a lower school teacher asked.

“What was her mom thinking?” another griped.

It was easy to criticize the mother. She should have done a better job with Laura in the first place. She’d sent Laura away for selfish reasons, abdicating her responsibilities as a parent. The girl needed support, care, parenting, and her mom had used the emotional equivalent of a sledgehammer.

Maybe being angry at the mom let us avoid wondering if we could’ve done something differently, too.

But secretly, I thought: “Thank God someone did something.”

I felt guilty thinking that, but I truly believed Laura needed more help than any of us could give her. She was a prime candidate for self-destruction -- drugs, teen pregnancy, cults, suicide, you name it. She raised every red flag I’d ever been taught to recognize in at-risk teens. Being the last line of defense between her and all of that scared the hell out of me.

I understood the relief in her mother’s voice. But I’m not sure I slept any better.

Laura’s absence left a hole in my eighth grade class. Her empty desk made me wonder where she was, what she was being subjected to in the wilderness school. What could they do that we couldn’t? How could a strict behavior modification program help her?

It was six weeks before we saw her again.

She was simply there in my classroom one morning before school, checking her email on the class computer.

At first glance, she looked no different, but her demeanor had changed. She wouldn’t talk about Utah . Her voice was carefully controlled, and when she spoke, I could tell she was monitoring herself, censoring her thoughts, as if she were walking a balance beam.

The other kids steered clear of her, but Laura didn’t seem to mind. She still read her novels at recess, found a sunny place to sit in the courtyard by herself at lunch.

She also did her homework. She kept her locker pristine. She never gave away the endings of stories in class anymore, or did spontaneous cartwheels on the basketball court. When her mom yelled at her – and yes, her mom did still yell at her – you could see Laura retreating into some safe mental hideout, trying very hard not to respond.

At first, I saw the changes in her as a high price to pay for stability. She seemed . . . brainwashed. Rewired, the good and the bad of her personality leveled out to some safe, middle level.

But as the last months of school went by, I came to grudgingly admire Laura’s new foundation. Whether I liked it or not, whatever they had done to her at that wilderness school in Utah seemed to be holding solid.

The remainder of the year, Laura never lost control. She held on to some secret memory, some trick of restraint that kept her on the balance beam no matter what happened. I’m embarrassed to admit I kept waiting for her to fall, kept expecting an outburst when things didn’t go her way.

As we approached our annual end-of-year “camp week” at a YMCA retreat in the redwoods, there was serious discussion about leaving Laura behind. Could we be sure she wouldn’t run? Would she be okay with the other kids in a cabin for four nights?

Laura sensed our unease. One day before class, she asked me if she’d get to go on the class trip, and I told her honestly that we hadn’t decided.

“You think I’ll run away,” she said.

There was no anger in her voice, no accusation. She understood I didn’t trust her, and the look in her eyes told me it didn’t matter. She trusted herself.

She ended up going on trip, and she was a model student.

At graduation day, as was the custom, the eighth graders released homing pigeons into the air. Laura released hers, along with everyone else, but I think she kept her eyes on the bird’s flight a moment longer, as if she alone understood where the bird was flying.

Laura went on public high school, studied gymnastics, did well in her English classes. Her home life still wasn’t great. Her mother was still unstable, and very likely, Laura had the seeds of that instability inside herself.

But the last I heard, Laura was steering a steady course.  

I hope she became a professional acrobat, or a science fiction writer, or an extra on Star Trek.  The point is: I’m confident she had a shot at whatever she wanted, and I know in my heart that if she hadn’t been shaken out of bed by those two escorts in the middle of the night, taken away to Utah for six weeks of undisclosed hell, Laura would’ve spun out of control. She would’ve died, or worse.

On that basis alone, I made my uneasy peace with the idea of wilderness schools. I set out to understand what they did, and how they changed a child’s life. I wondered what it would like to be that escort in the middle of the night – riding the crest of every crisis, being an immovable object to every rebellious teen, doing what the parents and teachers could not, saving lives that were about to be lost.

When I think of Laura now, I think of her at YMCA camp, the week before she graduated. It happened to be the same week my first mystery novel was published, BIG RED TEQUILA.

Laura was sitting cross-legged on a picnic table in the dappled light of the redwoods, reading my book. In fact, she has the dubious honor of being the first person that I ever saw actually reading one of my novels. The fact that the book was wildly inappropriate for a middle schooler didn’t seem to faze her a bit.

As she finished the last chapter, she looked up at me with a secret smile, as if she knew something I would never know – as if fiction was all very nice, but it couldn’t frighten her, couldn’t unbalanced her.

Nothing could ever scare her worse than what she’d gone through in wilderness school – those private demons she’d wrestled with for six long weeks.

Could I ever understand where she’d been? What she’d gone through? Could I ever put that into writing?

Here it comes, Laura -- my next book. Here is my trip to Cold Springs.

From my year of research into wilderness school programs, one thing became clear: making a general statement about all wilderness programs is as dangerous as making a general statement about all mainstream classrooms. Each is as different as its instructor, its students, and its curriculum. However, there were many anecdotes and statistics that helped shape COLD SPRINGS – some encouraging, some frightening.

The Stats:

• Over the last ten years, there has been a tremendous boom in the number of alternative programs for troubled youths. These include therapeutic boarding schools, emotional growth schools, day treatment programs, residential treatment programs, wilderness therapy programs, and wilderness boot camps. According to Woodbury Reports, there are now over 700 wilderness programs alone nationwide, and more open each year.

• In the past, most residential intervention programs were funded and controlled by governmental agencies. A court mandate was required for placement. The juvenile would be ordered to take part in the therapy program as an alternative to a traditional correctional facility. The majority of new programs, however, are privately owned and operated. They rely on tuition rather than government funding. No court order is required, and the admissions decision is between the parents and the program. Some programs aggressively market to worried parents.

• According to one Center for Disease Control study, there are approximately 26 million adolescents in the United States between the ages of 12 and 19, and 4 million of them have emotional problems severe enough to require treatment. One out of every twelve high school students tried to commit suicide during the year of the study. The rate of adolescent suicide has tripled in the last 30 years.

• Most researchers draw a distinction between wilderness therapy programs and wilderness boot camps:

• Wilderness therapy programs have their roots in the Outward Bound program of the 1970s. They stress self-reliance and esteem-building by placing students in a harsh environment outside their comfort zone, and require students to complete a series of team-oriented wilderness activities where the perceived risk is high, but the actual risk is low. 

• Wilderness boot camps are often just boot camps in the wilderness. They draw on the military model of breaking down defiant behavior through strict discipline and use a behavior modification system of rewards and privileges to encourage correct action. Boot camps for kids began as a court-ordered program in the juvenile criminal justice system. The first was opened in Louisiana in 1985. Since then, many states have experimented with them, and the model has been adopted by numerous private alternative programs.

• Some researchers see wilderness therapy and wilderness boot camps as completely incompatible approaches, but it is not uncommon to find programs that mix qualities of both.

• Wilderness programs can be found in almost every state, but tend to be most numerous in the West, where there are large tracts of rugged terrain. There are at least eleven wilderness camps in Utah alone. Texas has more than a dozen.

• Each state reviews and licenses its own wilderness programs, though many programs have branch facilities in more than one state. Several have international locations in places like Mexico , Jamaica , and Western Samoa . In Texas , wilderness programs are overseen by the Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services.

• Average tuition for wilderness programs ranges from $6000 to $20,000 depending on the length of stay. Programs can run as short as three weeks or as long as three months. Some longer-term programs offer a mix of wilderness therapy and a self-paced secondary education. These programs can retain students for several years, and tuition can run as high as $50,000.

• Because of cost, clientele for private alternative programs tend to be either reasonably affluent or have excellent insurance coverage. Most programs cater to students 13-17 years of age. Boys make up approximately 60% of the student base. Most have disruptive behavior, mood disorders, or substance abuse problems.

The Success Stories:

• A report in April 2000 analyzed statistics from four short-term wilderness therapy programs and found that the inherent risk to students in these programs was about the same as cross-country skiing, and 18 times less risky than high school football practice. The programs reviewed were not boot camp schools.

• A Nov. 2001 report measuring the severity of behavior in students before and after their stay in wilderness therapy programs found that about 55% of discharged students had behavioral and emotional symptoms in the normal range. Over 90% of the students made significant improvements. Eight different programs were studied.

• Another study tracked students’ recidivism by polling their probation officers twelve months before admission to a court-mandated wilderness intervention program, and twelve months after discharge. The study found a substantial drop in repeat violent or disruptive behavior in 91% of the students.

• Anecdotally, the most common comment I heard from graduates of good wilderness programs was: “If I had not received this intervention, I wouldn’t be alive today.”

The Horror Stories:

• In October of 2001, a 17-year-old died of asphyxiation in a Texas wilderness program when staff members used an illegal restraint. This was the fifth youth to die in Texas since 1988 in schools run by the same private company. The company operates 21 schools nationwide. Its seven facilities in Texas are still open. The three staff members involved in the incident were placed on administrative leave with pay. The school’s admissions materials make no mention of the program being a “boot camp.” It is described as an “innovative outdoor education” and “therapeutic adventure.”

• At least two deaths occurred in wilderness therapy programs in 2002, one in Utah and one in Oregon . Both were girls, one 17 and one 14. Both programs were found not at fault, and are still in operation. In an earlier case in Utah , 1994, one wilderness program was shut down after criminal charges were filed in a student’s death.

• According to a report by the Koch Crime Institute in 1998, state mandated juvenile boot camps had recidivism rates that were just as high as other correctional facilities. These programs were cheaper to operate, but no more effective. Anecdotally, staff members complained that some of the street-tough kids actually enjoyed the violent aspects of the program. Rather than building self-esteem, the programs affirmed their students’ most aggressive qualities. The report studied only state programs for incarcerated juveniles, not students admitted to private boot camps.

• In 2000, a 17-year-old boy in El Paso , Texas committed suicide at home when his mother tried to implement follow-up “tough love” discipline ideas after the boy returned from a 32-month stay at a boot camp school. In the middle of the argument, the boy put a .32-caliber gun to his temple and fired.

• Some alternative programs refer a majority of their students to facilities outside the United States , where U.S. and state laws cannot regulate the treatment of American adolescents. In 1996, a facility near Cancun , Mexico was closed after local police learned that some students had been locked in rooms for up to four days.  In 1998, another facility was closed in the Czech Republic after police found that students had been handcuffed, isolated, and denied food. Some youth activists warn that parents can have difficulty getting their children out of an overseas school should they become dissatisfied with the program.

So what is Cold Springs?

The novel’s fictional school Cold Springs is not modeled after one particular program, but does embody the research – many good aspects of wilderness programs, and some of the bad. Cold Springs is run by people who truly believe they are saving the lives of adolescents, but their methodology, like the wilderness school trend in general, is controversial.

The real question: What happens when such a school admits a student who has been involved – perhaps marginally, perhaps intimately -- with a truly horrendous crime? What happens when a killer decides it is too dangerous to leave the girl in the program, where she might confess what she knows?

from left to right: Ralph Howell (upper school), Jamie Fox (lower school), Peter Holt (board chairman), Rick Riordan (middle school), Suzanne Weaver (Montessori)