The barn in Fairfield smelled thickly of hay and of the 45 cows that snorted softly while waiting to be fed, their breath visible in the cold predawn December darkness.

Brian Rawls, 16, of Orland showed off the newest addition to the animal nursery at the Good Will-Hinckley farm, a wobbly-legged calf that had been born two days earlier.

“They like to run around when they’re young,” Brian said of the newborn calf. “We have to teach that cow everything. That’s really hard to do.”

Brian, who wore frayed camouflage pants and a wide-open smile, looked right at home as he did his chores in the peaceful barn.

Home, and peace, have been a long time coming for the teen.

When he was 2 years old his mother, an alcoholic, put him up for adoption.

“She just couldn’t really take care of me,” he said matter-of-factly.

Place of refuge

Brian lived first with his grandfather and then bounced to two foster families, moving finally to Kids Peace, an Ellsworth residential home.

He did well there and three years ago was recommended for placement at Good Will-Hinckley, a nonprofit organization for children founded in 1889.

The organization provides homes, schools, counseling and support in a family setting for youths ages 11 to 21 on its rural 2,450-acre campus. It serves as many as 300 youths a year and has helped more than 6,000 since its inception.

“It’s easy staying here,” Brian said. “I like it a lot. I like my cottage parents – they’re really nice. I think the school’s good. I have lots of friends.”

Resiliency

In addition to academics and animal care, a visit to Good Will-Hinckley’s rural campus shows that the youths who live there also learn a strong sense of resiliency, empowerment and responsibility from the program’s adult mentors.

According to the youngsters, the mixture of love and respect works well.

Michael Ratcliff, 15, of Augusta was 11 when he came to live at Good Will-Hinckley. Life at home wasn’t working out, and he was getting into a lot of fights. The staff at Good Will-Hinckley helped him straighten out his priorities, he said.

“I used to have a bad reputation at school, in the streets, everywhere,” Michael said. “Getting in all those fights, now that I think about it, wasn’t the smartest idea.”

Many at Good Will-Hinckley can trace their struggles in a short, direct line to the problems of the adults who took care of them. One of the program’s goals is to break the cycle so the youths will have the tools to have productive, happy lives, the director said.

“Resilience, it’s what allows you to overcome these obstacles,” said Gregg Dowty, executive director of Good Will-Hinckley. “It’s easy to point to parents and say, oh, they’ve done a bad job. But everybody’s trying to survive in today’s society and do it the best they can.”

High hopes

The teenagers’ sad or tragic stories often seemed counterbalanced by a forward-looking manner, a tough practicality and a natural, teenage exuberance.

Brian, who said fishing is his favorite thing to do, spoke of his hopes for the future with a bubbly enthusiasm that belied the early hour.

“I want to go to college and become a game warden,” he said. “And if that doesn’t work out, I want to be a Maine Guide … I went on the Allagash, like, five times this summer. I did Chase Rapids and all kinds of stuff. I love it.”

The boys’ cheerful demeanor contrasted with a commonly held view that the youths of Good Will-Hinckley are somehow bad, and dangerous.

“These kids are no different than my kids or anybody else’s kids, if the circumstances had been the same,” said Rick Palmer, farm manager and former cottage parent. “A lot of people are a little standoffish, think they’re gangsters or something. It’s quite the opposite.”

Family photos

Paige Munster, 18, of Canaan seemed about the furthest thing from dangerous as she looked at family photos in her meticulously arranged room.

The teen, a tiny blond dynamo, had decorated all available surfaces with her collections of monkeys, stickers, Buddhas and cartoon figures of Bugs Bunny and SpongeBob SquarePants.

“It’s quite an eyeful,” she said.

Paige is a senior at Skowhegan Area High School, where she was chosen Student of the Month for November. She plans to go into child psychology, a topic she already knows too much about.

“My real mother passed away when I was 10,” she said. “She died of cancer … She had breast cancer and lung cancer, and it moved to her liver. Then it moved to her brain.”

Paige showed a photo of her mother surrounded by her six children, one of the last snapped before her death.

The haunting image shows a worried-looking woman, pale and bald from chemotherapy, her youngest child stretched across her lap.

She looks decades older than her true age of 30.

“She was really young,” Paige said. “Eight years later I still have a hard time with it.”

The snapshot also has a strange, dark shadow in the background.

That’s where Paige’s stepfather had been standing before a friend altered the picture for her.

“We don’t like him,” she said. “So we try to erase him from the past, even though it’s impossible.”

Breaking the cycle

Paige and some of her siblings suffered various types of abuse at the hands of her mother’s boyfriends and last husband, whom she described as a “real jerk.”

After she moved in with her father and stepmother, things settled down for her. Still, the family didn’t always get along and she ran away from home, staying at first with a friend in Norridgewock.

In August, Paige came to Good Will-Hinckley, where she has quickly assimilated into the community.

“I really like it here,” she said. “It’s a really nice, stable home environment. If anything goes wrong, I have a home to go back to.”

Paige’s road looks less rocky right now. She has a healthy relationship with her new boyfriend, a solid plan for her education, a part-time job in a bowling alley and friends around whenever she craves company.

Her future seems bright, though it can be bittersweet.

“The hardest part for me is thinking about graduation and not having my mom there,” Paige said. “I know my mom must be up there proud of me.”

Success

Ryan Lane, 27, graduated from the program in 1997 and is a Good Will-Hinckley success story.

He grew up in an abusive home in Old Town and ran away when he was 15, surviving six wintry months of homelessness on Bangor’s streets.

“It sucked,” he said. “It was the awfulest feeling in the world – loneliness, cold, tired, hungry, scared.”

After two social workers plucked him out of a street fight he eventually came to the Fairfield campus, where he found adults he could trust and a strength in himself that is still palpable, more than 10 years later.

“Hinckley? What didn’t it do for me?” he said. “It’s awesome. Such a great place. I was such a spaz and angry … I am blessed more than I deserve to have this place in my life.”

The program taught him to manage his anger and to want to give back to society, he said.

“Every kid here is a survivor to some extent. They’re resilient,” he said. “No matter how weird, or hyper, or different they are, they’re awesome, these kids.”

Lane expressed a thought that seemed common on the campus.

“I don’t regret anything in my life. Leaving, being homeless – I think it’s made me the person I am today,” he said. “I define resiliency as how high you can bounce when you hit rock bottom. That’s my definition of success.”