After 12 days in the woods, missing Lake Stevens boy returns home

A 13-year-old Lake Stevens boy who disappeared from home nearly two weeks ago, apparently to test his adventure skills, called his mother Saturday night from a pay phone to say he was ready to come home.

When his mother picked him up, Nicholas Clark was tired but fine. He required no medical attention, and was taken home.

Nicholas called his mother from a pay phone at a gas station in Granite Falls. He told her he'd spent the past 12 days camping and wandering in the woods between there and Lake Stevens.

On Oct. 13, Nicholas slipped out of his Lake Stevens-area home before dawn, having left a rolled-up bundle of clothes in his bed. It was the day he and his 15-year-old brother were supposed to start attending public school. Nicholas had previously been home schooled and was nervous about what lay ahead.

When he called his mother Saturday night, Nicholas had apparently come to grips with any trepidation he was experiencing, said Rebecca Hover, spokeswoman for the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office.

"He had plenty of time to be by himself, and to think, and he decided he was ready for public school," Hover said Saturday night.

The boy's mother, Vicki Clark, was interviewed earlier Saturday, before her son called and asked to come home. She told a reporter that as far as she could tell, Nicholas had left without taking his sleeping bag, canteens, a jacket, weapons or very much food.

He did take his compass, flint, Camelbak water carrier, carved walking stick and two big packages of cookies.

"I know he was trying to live off bugs and berries, but I'm afraid he's surviving on cookies," said the 56-year-old mother of four.

Vicki Clark reported her son's absence to police immediately, but the case was not publicized until Friday, when the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office issued a news release.

The Sheriff's Office usually does not release information on runaways, according to spokeswoman Rebecca Hover, but "this case is a little different because Nicholas isn't a typical disgruntled teen upset with his parents."

"Detectives believe he thinks he's on the adventure of a lifetime," Hover said Friday in a news release. "However, he has probably overestimated his survival skills, and detectives are worried he might not have enough warm clothes or food. They're also concerned he might run into people who will harm him instead of help him."

Vicki Clark said she is a staunch advocate of "unschooling," in which she tried to encourage her children's curiosity through informal and unstructured education.

However, she said, it had not been working for the last year.

She and her husband, a mechanical engineer at Boeing, had separated after 29 years of marriage. She felt that the whole family was in turmoil, and all four of her teenagers were giving her attitude.

None of them was doing what she wanted, schoolwise.

"I couldn't take another year like that," she said.

According to Clark, Nicholas is passionate about the wilderness and has often talked about traversing the country by foot or by rail.

He pored over Tom Brown's field guides for survival, animal tracking and plant identification, and last summer proposed moving himself outside.

When he left two weeks ago, he left his mother a note telling her she "did a great job as a mother" and that he would call her in a few months when he reached his "destination."

Clark, who has a bachelor's degree in humanities and Greek, understands the lure of the road. When she was 15, she went off to live in Puerto Rico with an older sister.

Christine Clarridge: 206-464-8983 or cclarridge@seattletimes.com

The information in this article, originally published Oct. 26, 2008, was corrected Dec. 4, 2008. Tom Brown is the author of Nicholas Clark's favorite field guides. A previous version of the story incorrectly reported Brown's first name.