Volume six number Three, Two Thousand Ten | fa l l

Hope at the End of the Rope: Montana

Ranch Helping Kids No One Else Wants
Crow Tribe Bets on Its Future
Tracking Backcountry Bad Guys

Cowboy Cool: Kicking it with Zarzyski and Gustafson

Raising a Pint at Wibaux’s

Beaver Creek Brewery
 While adoption of
foreign children in the
U.S. generally goes well,
sometimes it doesn’t.
A ranch in the far
reaches of Montana
cares for those seemingly
unfixable children,
offering understanding
amidst a firm daily routine.
Joyce Sterkel runs the Deep Springs
Ranch for Kids in Eureka. Her clients are
adopted children, mostly from Russia,
whose behavior patterns indicate alcohol
abuse on the part of their biological
mothers and abuse and neglect from the
orphanages they were born into.
6 M O N T A N A Q U A R T E R LY
Hope at the End
of the Rope
By Scott McMillion | Photography by Thomas Lee
LOVE CAN CURE A LOT. BUT IT CAN’T FIX EVERYTHING.
Joyce Sterkel learned that lesson the hard way, tending to scores of children and teenagers
born with big problems served to them in the womb. Others were saddled with more afflictions a little
later, in the cradle. For some, the insults
and injuries kept coming for years. She
has become a specialist in helping the
poisoned, the neglected, the lost.
Sterkel runs a nonprofit organiza-
tion called Deep Springs Ranch for Kids
in the stunningly beautiful Tobacco
Valley just north of Eureka, Montana.
She and her family and staff tend to
adoptees from foreign countries, mostly
Russia, that can’t cope with family life
in this country, usually because of what
they suffered as infants or even earlier.
7
 In many cases, their birth mothers filtered
alcohol into their fetal brains, twisting the tiny wires.
In many other cases, the babies languished in orphan-
ages, sometimes for years, where they seldom if ever
felt a human touch inspired by affection, an absence
that can chew forever at the human core.
Often they are cold, distant and defiant. They can
be violent or cruel. Sometimes they threaten to kill
siblings or parents or pets. By the time their parents
reach out to Sterkel, they’re at the end of their rope.
Working with these kids has washed away illu-
sions. Sterkel is pretty blunt about it.
“You can’t love away a child’s genetic founda-
tion, his pre-verbal memories, or his prenatal expo-
sure to alcohol,” said Sterkel, standing in the ranch
Vanya, 17, spent eight yard, surrounded by pines and overlooking bunk-
years of his life in a
Russian orphanage.
houses, a playground and horse corrals.
“It was horrifying,” And while love can’t fix everything, sometimes it
he says. He plans to can help. Sterkel knows this, too. That’s why, at the
start a landscaping
company with Jenya,
age of 62, she spends most of every day with a 1-year-
whom he works with old girl named Lilia glued to her hip, hoping to fend
at Sterkel’s ranch. off what often befalls babies when they aren’t held
8 M O N T A N A Q U A R T E R LY
and cuddled at an early age.
Neglected or ignored babies can suffer what
psychologists call Reactive Attachment Disorder,
which Sterkel called “a nice way of saying anti-
social behavior disorder.” When you’re unloved as
an infant, love and trust don’t come easy later in life.
As adults, they can become what Sterkel calls socio-
paths: unhappy people who lack empathy, men and
women who don’t seem to comprehend, let alone feel,
the pain of others. The stress of raising children like
that, especially if they suffer common side effects
like lowered IQ or other psychological disorders, can
ruin families, rip marriages apart.
Sterkel doesn’t want the same tortures to rain
down on little Lilia and that’s why she’s keeping her
so close. The baby’s birth mother is a former resident
at Ranch for Kids, who had been living in Salt Lake
City and using methamphetamine and drinking even
after she became pregnant. Sterkel talked her out of
an abortion and offered to take the baby, which the
birth mother had no interest in raising. She’s now the
legal guardian.
“She’s my constant companion,” Sterkel said of
Lilia. “And she will be for a while.”
And even if love doesn’t mend everything, it has
a way of making echoes.
Little Lilia doesn’t know her own circumstances,
but other kids at the camp know their own histories
very well. And they know how Sterkel — most of them
call her Baba, which is Russian for grandma — helped
them deal with those histories and face a future.
“Even though I have a mother, she’s like my
second mother,” said 21-year-old Jenya Davidson, who
lived at Ranch for Kids as a teenager then returned to
be an employee. “I’d do anything for her.”
“I feel the same way,” added his roommate, a 17-
year-old named Vanya Klusyk. Without Sterkel and
the ranch, he said, his future looked sour.
“Prison,” he said. “If I didn’t come here, that’s
probably where I’d be.”
Vanya still has a Russian accent. He came to
this country at the age of 14, adopted by a California
couple after spending eight years in a Russian orphan-
age, where he had to fight for food, attention, every-
thing. Frustrated, confused, unable to speak English,
at his California home he often flew into rages he still
can’t quite explain, upending furniture, bashing holes
in walls, tearing the carpet from the floor.
His adoptive parents sent him to Sterkel after
just a few weeks.
At the ranch, the anger persisted.
“I couldn’t control myself,” he said. “But over
the years, I changed my attitude and went to the
right path and kept on going.”
“I got lucky,” he added.
Vanya and Jenya now share an apartment over
Sterkel’s garage. They both work for the ranch, tending
to the younger children, landscaping, raising animals
and gardens, cooking meals and whatever other chore
beckons. They’re hoping someday to open a landscap-
ing business together. predictability are crucial if they are to cope with their “I’ve made a lot of
But not yet. ailments. poor choices,” says
Paige, a client for nine
For now, Sterkel and the young men agreed, they “Anything that’s out of the ordinary really messes months after being
still need the stability the ranch offers. The sons of the kids up,” explained Bill Sutley, one of Sterkel’s six adopted by a couple
alcoholic mothers, they still need a structured life children (three adopted from Russia) and the ranch in the state of Georgia
from her native
“where somebody can act as your external brain for manager. Something as simple as changing plans country of Russia.
you,” Sterkel said. from a soccer game to a gardening session can cause
The roommates help each other with that. a ruckus.
And that’s not how most American families live.
“Families live spontaneously,” Sutley said.
PIZZA RIOTS In most households, a sudden decision to go out for
For people with fetal alcohol syndrome disor- pizza feels like a celebration. For some of these adopt-
der, an attachment disorder, or both, stability and ees, it can trigger tantrums that seem to last forever.
9
 “I thought, ‘hey, I’ve got a houseful of kids, why Joyce Sterkel has
custody of 1-year-old
not start a program,’” Sterkel said. “It was an act of Lilia, the biological
faith.” daughter of a former
She and her husband, Harry Sutley, had owned client at Deep Springs,
and carries her every-
land in the Tobacco Valley for years, so that’s where where. Below, teenage
they started Ranch for Kids in 1999. girls work in a vege-
“We have to do what we can where we’re planted,” table garden at the
school, where self-
Sterkel said.
sufficiency is a priority.
Most kids stay for a few months. Some stay for
years.
Seventeen-year-old Sophia, born in Paraguay, is
one of them. She’s looking forward to her 18th birth-
day, when she’ll join the U.S. Army for training as a
bomb specialist. The structured military atmosphere
will be a good fit for her, she hopes.
“I’m nervous, but at the same time I’m really
excited,” she said. “And it’s a little scary to be leaving
the family.”
She meant her family at the ranch, not her adop-
tive one in Pennsylvania. She’s seen them only occa-
sionally in recent years. Going back to live with them
isn’t really an option.
“I love my (adoptive) family but there’s not an
exact connection,” she said. “I never really attached

Sophia, 18, pulls So at Ranch for Kids, routines don’t vary much,
weeds from around
a rose bush at the
with a strict routine of school, chores and group meet-
ranch. Sophia, like ings, where people evaluate each other’s behavior.
many Deep Springs Bad behavior means a loss of privileges like televi-
kids, will head into
sion or dessert. Good behavior means the retention of
the military after
graduating from high them. There are rules about behavior, hygiene, cloth-
school. The struc- ing, a lot more. All of it is designed, first of all, to
tured, disciplined make the children feel safe.
life of the military
is a great option for As Sutley explains it, managing the kids has a
kids from the ranch, lot in common with training horses.
Sterkel says. “You make it hard to do the wrong thing and
easy to do the right thing,” he said. That can involve
a lot of power struggles, with the primary goal of
creating both the reality and perception of safety for
the kids.
“We’re alpha dogs, most of us,” Sterkel said of
her 15 staffers overseeing about 30 kids at a time.
“The way the kids see it, if you’re not strong enough
to control me, you’re not strong enough to protect
me.”
UNDERSTANDING THE COST
While the ranch is a nonprofi t, it’s not cheap.
Tuition runs about $3,500 a month, about what
you’d pay for a tony boarding school. But even at that
price, the ranch has a waiting list for its services.
Sterkel, a nurse and midwife, began learning
about Russian orphans in 1992 when she began a
two-year stint at a hospital at Nizhny Novgorod, a
city that had been closed to all foreigners until the
collapse of the Soviet Union.
“It was very primitive, third world, the way babies
were born,” she said. While the Russian doctors had
“great hand skills,” they didn’t have much else in the
way of tools. Some birthing rooms didn’t even have
oxygen or curtains between the beds.
She got interested in placing Russian orphans
in homes in western countries, adopted three of them
herself, and, after she returned to the United States,
began taking in problem children in an informal way.

10 11

Jenya, 21, came from
Russia to Honolulu,
and eventually lived on
the streets for several
months before his
adoptive mother found
him and sent him to
Eureka. “These people
really do understand
us,” he says. “They
really are trying to help.”
12
to them. So I think occasional visits are better.”
Sterkel held up Sophia as a success story. She’s
stable, learning to cope with a world with a brain that’s
wired a little differently, and staying out of trouble.
For most of the kids here, Sterkel defines
success as “employed and out of trouble.” The
younger kids sometimes go back to their adoptive
families and some go on to new families. The teen-
agers, most often, join the Job Corps at 16 or stay at
the ranch until they complete high school.
“They aren’t going to Harvard,” Sterkel said.
But hopefully, they won’t go to jail or a state
institution.
Sterkel is blunt but honest with the children.
To deal with their afflictions, they need to under-
stand them.
“I don’t believe in lying to kids,” she said.
“It is because you have brain differences,” she
told a group of teenage girls. “It doesn’t mean you’re
stupid. It doesn’t mean you’re retarded. It means you
have brain differences.”
The camp is not a wilderness experience. The
kids stay in houses, they eat at tables, they get hot
showers. But it’s definitely in the sticks, which is a
big adjustment for some of the kids, most of whom
come from urban or suburban environments. But
the rhythms of working outdoors, doing ranch work,
are part of the treatment.
The kids learn to feed livestock and harvest
eggs. They pick up some practical skills, from house
cleaning to carpentry and masonry. Some of them
are learning for the first time what it means to accom-
plish a task. And they learn that having an affliction
does not grant them license.
“In spite of my differences, I still have to learn
to make good decisions,” Sophia said.
DIFFERENT APPROACHES
The Ranch for Kids philosophy has some critics,
people who advocate for intensive medical or psycho-
logical therapy. Without that treatment, a stay at the
ranch — one month for every year of age is a rule
of thumb — is little more than a respite from the
complexities of family and social life, critics say.
Sterkel counters that, by the time the kids arrive
at the ranch, most of them have already undergone
medical treatments, psychological work and medi-
cation, yet they remain troubled.
The vast majority of foreign adoptions turn out
just fine and, in most cases, the adoptive parents
showered their children with love and attention.
But sometimes, families see their love repudiated,
spurned in violent ways.
That’s where the Ranch for Kids comes in. The
kids there were served a raw deal: poisoned in the
womb, ignored in the cradle, beaten or brutalized or
tortured in youth.
“Medicine hasn’t solved the problem,” Sterkel
said. “There’s no cure. It’s permanent, lifelong phys-
ical damage. I’m talking about coping, life skills.”
And that’s what the ranch is about. It can’t fix
everything. But sometimes, it can help.
And that’s something.