Graduation
By Jay Cohn, Woodbury Reports
 
    As new to me as the students who suddenly found themselves knee-deep in this wilderness program, I privately questioned if a 6-week intervention program in the North Idaho mountains could have a significant affect on changing lives as I had heard it had.
  And if it really worked at all.
  I needed a first-hand look at this thing with an outsider's eyes.
 With little experience at how therapeutic interventions impacted peoples' lives, I hiked back through a trail on Ascent's 220-acre campus in January's deep snow to observe my first "graduation" of four students to see what this was really all about.
    As a former writer for several newspapers who has covered everything from the dark side to the good, I thought I could not be noticeably moved anymore by things that go on in this world. You learn to either block them out or stuff them somewhere to get through another story and then another.
    But not this time.
   This one--this graduation that linked a circle of people deep in the woods--had to do with finding paradise lost, reconnecting the wires that once made families whole and rekindling a child's self-esteem with the brightness of the North Star. It seemed like a hefty order to fill on any level regardless of who was running the program.
   It began like this: After climbing the imposing 50-foot Alpine Tower that had students and parents supporting each other in the air by ropes, a single-file procession solemnly hiked to a quiet spot in the forest. Encircled by family, our counselors and other students,and the four graduating teens stood straight and looked out with remarkable clarity and deep calm while a wooden staff was passed around the circle. Those who wished to speak to the students--from what they had gone through to where they are now--could do so when the staff was in their hands.
   I do not know what the students had been like, or what difficulties they were going through before coming to these woods. Whatever they had been, the teens now looked absolutely radiant, beaming with sense of purpose, pride and accomplishment. Their eyes were all aglow, and each one of them--two boys and two girls--possessed an almost extraordinary ability of staring unflinchingly at each individual in the circle with such absolute assurance. Rarely have I witnessed adults capable of looking at the world with both conviction and sureness as these four students.
   It is not easy to stand quietly and listen to people give their assessments of us, especially how they viewed our past behaviors. Hearing the counselors express such sincerity and candor at how far these students had come in developing new inner strengths and a sense of self is one thing.
   But listening to heartfelt, and at times, tearful outpourings from their parents--some whose pain was so overwhelmingly raw it hurt to hear their voices crack with wrenching sobs that occasionally overtook them--who felt they had lost their children forever, were perhaps the most convincing knot in this entire loop cemented by embraces and tears that gripped a piece of your heart.
   They connected again as one; found their way back through a circle in these woods when even the remote semblance of something like this ever occurring was as likely as touching the moon.
  
Jay Cohn, A recipient of the New York Times Financial Writers' Association Scholarship, he has written for the Boston Globe, the Boston Record-American, the Patriot Ledger, the Capital-Journal and several newspapers in North Idaho. A graduate of Northeastern University, he has won numerous awards for excellence in writing from Idaho Press Club and the Associated Press.