THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, September 30, 1996 TAG: 9609280040
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JUNE ARNEY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 220 lines
FOR DAVID AYERS, the image of the black-robed judge sentencing him to probation and warning him never to come back to his courtroom remains vivid even though more than 15 years have passed.
``Mr. Ayers, if I see you again, you better bring your toothbrush,'' Ayers remembers then-Juvenile Judge Frederick P. Aucamp telling him.
In those days, Ayers was angry, arrogant and defiant - a 15-year-old Kempsville High School sophomore looking for thrills.
``I was experimenting with everything that was illegal,'' Ayers said in a recent interview at his home in Midlothian, near Richmond. ``My strategy was to hurt the people I loved. I was quite successful.''
He and two friends skipped school one hot, sticky afternoon in late September 1977 and got in trouble. Four days later, police caught up with them, and they landed in juvenile court. Aucamp sentenced Ayers to an indeterminate term of supervised probation.
Months later, Ayers walked into the office of probation officer Bob Callahan and saw walls covered with posters of snow-capped mountains. It was a meeting that changed the course of his life. He didn't know it then, but he had just found a soul mate.
A year later, when Ayers completed the Sierra II Wilderness Adventure Program, Aucamp was there again. This time, to congratulate Ayers and hand him his signed release from probation.
Fast forward to 1996. Ayers is director of Blackwater Outdoor Experiences, a licensed outpatient program that provides adventure-based counseling for youths with abuse and behavioral problems. Some of his clients are referred by the Henrico County courts. Some were heroin addicts; others are felons. Many bring the same attitudes, problems and vices to the trails that he brought as a teenager.
Yet most of them know nothing about the former juvenile offender's past.
``It's very rare that I tell anyone my history,'' said Ayers, now 34. ``I think it's a shortcut. There are no shortcuts to trust. By being there and doing it, they open up. We just have a really intense classroom. We can do in 20 days what it takes years to do.''
Ayers, athletic, 6 feet 3 inches tall and 210 pounds, is a genuine adventurer.
He recently drove to Virginia Beach to go hurricane surfing in his white- water kayak after Hurricane Fran churned up the Atlantic.
His library walls are covered with photographs of past conquests of Mount McKinley, Mount Ixta in central Mexico, and snow-topped peaks in Ecuador, Argentina and Bolivia.
His house in an upscale development in Midlothian is easily recognizable from the outside. It's the one with the kayak on top of the cab of the Toyota pickup. In the garage, the latest model in lightweight backpacks is ready for a tryout on his next trip. This one weighs all of 3 pounds. Nearby is a collection of freeze-dried foods - such delicacies as chicken a la king, stroganoff and lasagna.
He and his wife recently left for a three-week vacation in Africa, where they will take six days to climb 19,130-foot Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, then travel on to Kenya to go on safari.
Bob Callahan, now 46 and an experienced wilderness program leader, was a young probation officer in Virginia Beach when Ayers first stepped into his office. Even then, Callahan was passionate about making a difference. And his Marine Corps training set tough standards for excellence.
``The first time I met David, he had an attitude you wouldn't believe,'' Callahan said. ``He was a bad kid. . . . He was big and strong and angry, and nothing was sacred. He was so hard-headed and hard core.''
One of Callahan's goals was to show Ayers how to get high on endorphins rather than drugs or alcohol.
Yet, of the hundreds and perhaps thousands of youths Callahan has worked with over the years, he never would have predicted that Ayers would be one of the success stories.
``The love of the outdoors grabbed him so deep that he's made it his life's mission,'' Callahan said. ``He's the genuine thing, and he's very good at it.
Callahan's passion for his job is obvious. He's power-packed - always pushing to make things happen. He touches people as he talks to emphasize his point, as if to transfer enthusiasm through his fingers.
Callahan has worked with juveniles in adventure-based counseling through state programs since 1975.
He and partner Tim Robinette, a former probation officer from Chesapeake, now operate Adventure Alternatives Ltd., which provides services to youths on probation and parole through the Department of Juvenile Justice. The program handles about 10 youths at a time in three-month to six-month programs. About 60 to 65 youths, with problems ranging from petty assault to family dysfunction to burglary, go through the program each year.
Adventure Alternatives also does corporate team-building and trips for the general public.
Among the topics covered are anger control, life and coping skills, and behavior intervention taught through sea kayaking, canoeing, rock climbing, cross-country skiing, caving, backpacking, biking and rope courses.
Callahan, like Ayers, is a true adventurer. For instance, he has been to Africa four times.
Wilderness programs succeed because they use adventure as a gateway into nature, he said.
``The outdoors is real attractive to people at the beginning,'' Callahan said. ``It shines. . . . If you can learn things while you're having fun, you'll remember them.''
Ayers said his life began to unravel after he, his parents and two sisters took a 2 1/2-month-long cross-country trip in a van in the summer of 1976, what he described as ``the perfect Brady Bunch vacation.''
He and his father even hiked the Grand Canyon together.
Soon afterward, his parents called him and his two younger sisters together and told them they were getting a divorce. The parents had married young, and they realized in their 30s that the relationship wasn't working, Ayers said.
``You get angry,'' he said. ``You don't know what you're angry at. . . . Now, I look back at it and think it was the best thing my parents could have done.''
His father, who taught geology at a community college, left less than a year later to earn his doctorate in gas and oil exploration.
``We were really close,'' Ayers said. ``After he left, there was a huge gap. There was nothing but Virginia Beach and looking to get some thrills.''
That was just what he was doing the day he and his friends got in trouble.
``We did it for the sheer thrill of it,'' he said. ``I needed some kind of excitement. . . . We were bored.''
Months later, after Ayers' conviction, he joined Sierra II.
``We were angry, questioning authority,'' he said. ``You start taking all the bad things that happen in your life and focusing them back at you.''
But each time Ayers and his group went out in the wilderness, the challenges were greater.
And the lesson Ayers carried away has changed his life.
``Our ability level and what we can attain is what you put your mind to,'' he said.
The idea behind such programs has nothing to do with teaching kids to like the outdoors, Ayers said.
``We're trying to teach them they can do anything they put their mind to,'' he said. ``You can learn that at Harvard or you can learn it on the top of a mountain. If you can teach a kid that, then when they come back, no matter what the obstacle, they can push past it.''
The state of Virginia has long been ahead of its time in using wilderness adventure therapy, Ayers said.
``It has touched a lot of kids and still does,'' he said. ``It's proven that it's beyond play.''
The programs used to be irreverently referred to as ``hoods in the woods.''
``But these programs work,'' he said. ``It's documented.''
They work because they help show the direct consequences of actions, he said. In the woods, youths learn such valuable lessons as how to excel in adversity, how to get a job done when you don't have the right tools, goal setting and how to plan ahead. And those lessons go home with them.
Those lessons then are reported to parents, teachers and other significant people who help reinforce the messages.
``When you're 15 years old, the world revolves around you,'' Ayers said. ``You are the life force of everything. This shows you there's a power greater than you.''
Halfway through Ayers' stint with the Sierra II program, another participant hanged himself in the Virginia Beach jail.
Ayers, who was on probation and not supposed to go anywhere without permission, fled to the Appalachian Trail in November 1978 to gather his thoughts after his friend's death. In a twist of fate, Callahan sought solace in exactly the same place.
Ayers was sitting in the Maulpin Field shelter near Waynesboro. He and other hikers had just finished rock cornish game hens and vegetables cooked over the fire. Night had fallen. He was just about to tip back a bottle of Bacardi's white rum when he spotted his probation officer coming up the trail.
He left in the pouring rain before Callahan realized who he was.
``I saw him walk away from the shelter, but I didn't know it was him,'' Callahan said.
Ayers spent the night sleeping under a car in the rain. Later, when Callahan confronted him, back in Virginia Beach, for leaving the area without permission, Ayers was honest about the violation.
``I felt like anybody who would sleep under a car in the rain, that was worse than (Tidewater Detention Home.)'' Callahan said.
Callahan was forced to examine whether his plan for Ayers was working.
``When I came back, I could have had David locked up in a heartbeat,'' Callahan said. ``He was stumbling over school, the law, family, everything.''
But Callahan concluded that Ayers had been honest and was making progress.
A few years later, Ayers became a program volunteer. And within five years, Ayers had applied for a job with Callahan and been hired. Ayers became course director for the wilderness program, working side by side with three former probation officers.
The two men, whose paths have converged many times over the years, one day hope to climb Mount Everest together.
In June, Callahan and Ayers happened to be climbing in the same spot - Seneca Rocks, a 1,000-foot vertical sheer rock cliff in northeastern West Virginia - as part of separate groups.
Ayers found himself hollering over the rocks to Callahan: ``These kids don't believe I used to be on probation. They don't believe you were my probation officer.''
At the top, the men hugged, and Callahan assured the youths it was true.
After that chance meeting, Ayers realized he would need a skilled climber and counselor to accompany him and a group of juvenile offenders to Seneca Rocks in August for a summit climb. He knew just who to call, and even offered to pay Callahan to do the climb, which requires rappelling. Callahan agreed.
``The image of Seneca is the ultimate challenge,'' Callahan said. ``If you can put your emotional and physical stuff together to do this, you can do anything. All those lessons of counseling come together at a place like this. It's a formidable obstacle in life, and there are all kinds of obstacles in life.''
Without fail, anytime a group pulls up to the cliff, at least some members announce that they can't do the climb, the counselors said.
But they do. And at the top is a metal can containing a register for them to document their accomplishment.
When Callahan's turn came to sign, he wrote: ``On top of the world. Doing what I love the most, with a young man who's made it to the top. All my love Bob.''
This summer's reunion trip of former probation officer and client stirred strong emotions in Callahan and Ayers.
``I was almost in tears, because he put his arm around me and said 18 years ago, it was you and me,'' Callahan said. ``The picture doesn't show the misty eyes. It doesn't show how proud I am of him.''
For Ayers, the emotions were equally powerful.
``When I saw Bob, the feeling that was going through me was, I made it,'' Ayers said. ``I hope one day I can have one of the kids from my program standing right there.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photos]
Associated Press
David Ayers, left, turned his life around after being introduced to
the wilderness by probation officer Bob Callahan 18 years ago.
Snapshots courtesy of David Ayers
Ayers, left, and Callahan recently met while climbing with separate
groups at Seneca Rocks.
Ayers, right, then 16, backpacking with a fellow offender as pasrt
of a wilderness program in 1979. by CNB