and anyone can visit the nearest town, if there is one, on weekends. But daily life for Corps members while in camp is run on a no-nonsense schedule with five inviolable rules: no drugs, no alcohol, no violence, no destruction of state property and no refusal to work. Enrollment is limited to one year, except for those hired for a second year as crew leaders.

To join the CCC one has to be between the ages of 18 and 23, a resident of California, and willing to work. Candidates sign a statement of consent, called the "nasty letter," which reads in part: "The CCC is a WORK program. You will do dirty, backbreaking work; and no one will thank you for it. ... You will work in rain, high winds, intense heat, snow, mud, ind cold mountain streams. Above all you must accept supervision. You must follow instructions."

Joann Payan, 21, was active in the Latin Queens "social club" in San Bernardino when she joined the CCC: "I've never done anything like this before, and I have my mind set on doing a good job."

Along with a curriculum of night classes and a requirement that everyone without one get a high school diploma, Corps members are also required to keep daily journals. Joann Payan had just finished training as a fire fighter and was on her way to action in Los Angeles County when she wrote: "The CCC is a pretty cool place if you like the outdoors and hard work. If you're looking for an air-conditioned room and no sweating, you're in the wrong place."

Kathy Hastings, 19, was employed cleaning houses for a developer in Riverside when she saw the following advertisement in the local newspaper: "Women and men-18 to 23. Fight fires, build trails, plant trees, fight floods. The California Conservation Corps has a

job for you (if you can handle it)." "I made more money in a week cleaning houses than I do now in a month," she told me. "But I wasn't having fun."

Most of its recruits leave less behind on joining the CCC than Kathy Hastings. Even the official statistics on youth unemployment in California show about 30 percent. As Robert Pope, a young man from Vallejo, puts it, "Dope, messing up, and stealing is all that my friends back home have going for them." The CCC has developed a credible reputation: businesses and state agencies hire its graduates.

I drive out into the San Joaquin Delta one day to meet a CCC crew sandbagging levees. There are 6,000 acres of McDonald Tract flooded, and I find the eaves of barns and houses barely visible above the water. The air reeks of hydrogen sulfide bubbling up from rotting crops, and the work of securing the levees with stakes, wire, sandbags and plastic is as dirty as any promised in the "nasty letter." Lunch break here is also a time to write, and an affable young man from East Los Angeles shows me his journal. The first entry reads: "My name is Ed Wallace and the reasor. why I'm

here is because I was out of work for six months and I found my life going nowhere. Every day I would get up at 11 o'clock and watch TV for two hours."

The most recent entry in his journal begins: "For the first time I actually saw the flooded Delta. It blew me away. It really is a disaster. We tied together phone poles all day to put them in the water, string them out, and anchor them where the water gets shallow. When the wind picks up and makes waves, the telephone poles should stop the wave action."

The first Wednesday of every month the Greyhound bus station in Sacramento fills with some 300 new Corps members arriving from around the state. After a day filling out forms and being measured for uniforms, these young men and women are bused again to the CCC Training Academy outside of San Andreas. Up in the Mother Lode country of the Sierra, in a former youth detention facility, they spend three weeks learning how to use hand tools, fight fires, and follow instructions from wake-up call at 5:30 A.M.

Author Thomas A. Bass is a free-lance writer whose article on the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory appeared in SMITHSONIAN last May.

until lights-out at 10 P.M. Those who survive this part of the CCC ordeal will be assigned at random to a "home" center, where life should seem friendlier, even if the schedule remains the same.

On "intake day" in Sacramento I see a white-haired, grandmotherly woman waving goodbye to her son, Bryan Rosetta. "I'm so glad to see him go," his mother says to me. "He's the youngest of the three and it's time he was off on his own. My brother was in the original CCC, and it made a man of him."

For many of these young people this will be their first job, if not their first time away from home. Friendships will make up a good part of their experience in the Corps, and letters from camp to camp often count as daily writing assignments. As one staff member puts it, "What happens when Watts meets Eureka in the dormitory is the story of the CCC."

Many of those registering are women, and the Corps is actively trying to recruit more. Women drop out less frequently than men, and Hispanic women fare best of all. Dormitories are segregated by sex, but otherwise the CCC insists on absolute equality in working conditions. Suzanne Anderson, director of training at the Academy, delivers a speech to new recruits. "The

roles are changing," she says. "It's time for women to step out and help. You can put on mascara and curl your hair, but you can also learn to use a pickax and a brush hook. It's OK to cry around here, so long as you cry and work at the same time."

There is much else that changes or is left behind on joining the Corps. Like cars. "My friends back in Harbor City are all low riders," says 19-year-old Eddie Soto. ("Low riders" outfit their cars with hydraulic levelers so that the bodies can be swayed or dropped to the pavement.) Soto himself owns a 1975 Cadillac with a "bad" paint job and wire wheels. "My favorite thing on Saturday night was to cruise Hollywood Boulevard dropping my ride," he says. "Doing classic moves, like pancaking, which is when you drop the car all the way to the ground and the sparks fly."

When a job at any restaurant or doughnut stand will give you enough money to keep a car on the road, why leave it behind and head for the backcountry of California to build trails by hand and clear logjams out of streams? As Eddie Soto puts it, "I want to get my high school equivalency and learn some skills. It's the only way I'm going to get anywhere."

The history of the California Conservation Corps reaches back to the administration of then-Governor Ronald Reagan, who in 1971 founded the Ecology Corps as an alternative service program for conscientious objectors. Soon after his election as Governor, Jerry Brown abolished the Ecology Corps and transferred its functions into the more broadly-based CCC.

The Corps foundered for a number of years between indecisiveness and political corruption. Accused of attracting drug dealers and hooligans, the CCC was facing calls for its early abolition when Brien Thomas Collins was appointed director in 1979. A hard-drinking Irishman from New York who had been disabled by a faulty grenade while leading a platoon through the Mekong Delta, Collins turned out to be an administrative genius with a knack for promoting talent and generating enthusiasm. "I do not care about you!" Collins would bellow at new Corps members during his monthly address at the academy. "I am not concerned with your happiness. I am concerned with the expenditures of taxpayers' dollars. I know I'm going to work you to death. And I know you're going to work hard or I'll fire you."

California's hard-working Corps

A bath in a cold stream helps Roxanne Strangfeld relax her sore muscles and wash away dirt and sweat.

Collins also excelled at turning arguments against the CCC on their heads. Attrition out of the Corps is steep. The average stay is five-and-a-half months, while only two out of ten recruits make it through an entire year. (These figures are slightly misleading; they neglect "positive attrition," which includes leaving the Corps for full-time schooling or a job.) Collins explained: "We made it something like the Marine Corps. We toughened up on the rules and just started firing them. It has become a status symbol to survive." Beyond Collins' leadership, it was actually a number of state disasters that catapulted the CCC into the news and helped to reverse its fortunes. In February 1980 the Corps fought flooding out on the levees of San Joaquin Delta and throughout the state. Wearing their hard hats emblazoned with "CCC" at every camera angle, night after night on the evening news Corps members appeared to bail out the sinking ship of state. The CCC made news later that year when it fought major fires in Southern California.

It was actually a more quixotic event that again mobilized the CCC en masse. The fame of the three C's rests on the three F's. The Corps had already performed heroically in fires and floods. Now came flies. In 1981 there were two major alerts against an infestation of Mediterranean fruit flies. Nearly 1,000 Corps members were mobilized and became involved in tree stripping. They slept in tents and public buildings until their work was finished. For weeks, laboring 11 hours a day, seven days a week, the CCC stripped 589 tons of fruit by hand in a 200-square-mile area.

New skills replace brown strokes

Later that year, John Dugan took over the Corps. Also a New York Irishman, he had walked a police beat in Harlem for three years before joining the Army, where he acquired, as an Air Cavalry commander in Vietnam, a Silver Star, the Distinguished Flying Cross and some Air Medals. Dugan had been second in command at the CCC. Now his program has moved forcefully into teaching skills. After one of his speeches to new Corps members at the Training Academy, he remarked to me, "You saw what was out there. That audience was fraught with failure. Their lives have been nothing but brown strokes. The state is filled with kids like that. But all you have to do is reach down, pull out their character, give them a little selfesteem and direction, and they'll flourish."

Dugan counters charges that the program costs too much. In six years the CCC has employed 17,000 young people and returns to the taxpayer $1.65 in benefits for every dollar spent. "CCC-type programs are an idea whose time has returned," he says.

Robert Burkhardt was a plumber and circus juggler

before he started work at the CCC, although he also held a doctorate in education. Now its chief deputy director, he is an irrepressible source of ideas and memos, many philosophical in nature and speckled with quotations from Rousseau to Roosevelt.

For years people have remarked on the collapse of public education in California and elsewhere. Even though two-thirds of its recruits have high school diplomas, Corps members, on the average, read at the seventh-grade level. The Corps expects everyone to raise this two grade levels in a year by taking courses or completing a high school diploma. Toward this end, Burkhardt sent out a directive: "Each One, Teach One," the idea being that Corps members who knew how to read would teach others who did not. But with many still having trouble reading, it became apparent that their real problem was an inability to write.

Burkhardt fired off another directive: "Everyone Writes, Every Day." Corps members were told to write daily and required to turn in at least 250 words a week to their crew leaders. "We set out," says Burkhardt, "to integrate writing into their daily lives."

At one point in my travels I find myself spending four days on horseback with Burkhardt, riding the High Sierra trails above Yosemite Valley. He is making a tour of the 60 Corps members who each summer provide the National Park Service with half of all its backcountry crews in California.

The skill of trail building, using only hand tools and muscle, is nearly a lost art. Mark Meleason and Myra McCracken explain the theory of it as we walk over some of their recent work. "To build this causeway," says McCracken, pointing to a corridor of rocks laid on a granite ledge, "required a lot of pissanting," which is the backcountry term for hauling rocks from point "A" to point "B." "We dug in this wall of boulders," she says, "and then secured keystones at the head and foot of the causeway, before pissanting another few tons of material to fill it up with alternating layers of crushed rock, sand and dirt."

The work should never show

"The trick in building something like this," says Meleason, "is that you want it to last 50 years, and you I want it to look natural. We spent nearly two weeks here, but we hope people walking down the trail won't even notice what we've built."

During a month traveling through California looking at CCC camps, I attract unsolicited testimonials from many people who have been helped by the Corps. Judith Alexander owns a house on the north coast of Marin County, which suffered torrential rains and flooding in January 1982. "Four feet of mud filled the streets," she tells me. "My neighbors were losing their

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