The Life of Woody

Woody Harrelson sits on a blanket near Jackass Peak, watching a bunch of teenagers smear peanut butter and jelly on pita and listening with growing impatience to their unappetizing stories. His pale blue eyes move from one narrator to the next as each waxes eloquent about a head-severing wreck or a face attacked by flesh-eating bacteria. Finally, Harrelson can't restrain himself. "In Central America," the actor says, "they have this insect that burrows into a person's head . . . " As the high school students stuff their mouths with gooey food, Harrelson brings life to the image of a bug metamorphosing beneath his scalp. "One thing you can do," he says, gesturing, "is lay a big slab of raw meat on your head and try to suffocate it. Or you can just let it grow and grow until," his face contorts and his fingers splay, "it explodes!"

"Urgh!" "Oooh!" The students shriek with sincere appreciation. But when a talkative young man named Steven follows with a tale of a worm that incubates in a human's mouth and makes impromptu appearances during conversations, even Harrelson is humbled. "OK, Steven!" he shouts, leaping up with outstretched arms. "You win the gross-out contest."

Harrelson is not a guy who has much trouble getting in touch with his inner adolescent. In fact, since the day in 1985 when he infiltrated the culture with his debut on "Cheers," people have been waiting for some semblance of an adult to emerge. On this chilly spring morning at Henry W. Coe State Park near San Jose, though, all anyone expects from him is another rippin' yarn and a bite of coconut.

The day before, Harrelson had hiked in four miles and set up camp at Poverty Flat with these students from San Francisco's Thurgood Marshall Academic High School. The kids came with their teachers and volunteers from the local Sierra Club's Inner City Outings, a nationwide environmental education program. Harrelson came to fulfill the community service sentence handed him for his scramble up the Golden Gate Bridge to protest the logging of an ancient California redwood forest.

Putting Harrelson together with a bunch of kids was not everyone's idea of solid judicial or pedagogic

judgment. State Sen. Quentin Kopp, still angry over the enormous traffic jam Harrelson caused, calls the punishment soft and Harrelson "a selfish, thoughtless, arrogant twerp."A Kentucky teacher who invited him to her class a few years ago to discuss the industrial uses of hemp--a cause Harrelson supports to the point of wearing hemp boots, pants, shirt, jacket and cap--was fired.