Into the outdoors - getting urban children involved with nature through the Sierra Club Inner City Outing project - The Next Generation - Cover Story

Sierra, Nov-Dec, 1997 by Tracy Baxter

Bob has watched many kids evolve from fearful to exuberant after a few outings. "At first they think they'll see lions and tigers and bears. When they've assured themselves that there's no significant danger, they want to look and see. We don't teach them how. They teach themselves."

Danielle suddenly breaks out from behind, giving me one alarmingly unsteady moment along the swamp's edge, and scampers up to Paul with a request. Soon she's riding on his shoulders and chatting as brightly as though it were high noon at the playground. The clouds have cheated us out of starglow to light the way, yet--but for our voices and the bump and shuffle of feet--we still have the gift of silence. No speeding cars, no popping that could be the report of gunfire, and, by specific restriction, no personal radios. It's enough, really, to make you want to sing.

"Stop--in the name of love," Danielle pleads with a high, light tremolo, "bee-fore you break my heart." The other girls earnestly coo the refrain, "Think it over, think it over."

Someone calls out a dare to touch the weather station, a windmill-like apparatus connected to the boardwalk by a beam five feet long and no more than six inches wide. Ronata and Nikia are tonight's daredevils. A lance of light in front and behind her, Nikia scoots out, touches the structure, and scoots back to cheers. Ronata, whose round face has been placid all day, dashes out, scores, and returns in seconds. Caught up in the clapping and congratulations, she steps off the boardwalk and into the swamp.

I awaken at six a.m. to shrieking, as piercing as the hoots accompanying last night's slide show of Turtle Cove's greatest moments, but with a note of theatrical terror. The girls, sleeping together on the bottom of a bunk bed, are now up and swiping at their arms, ants taking hot nips on their skin, lured into the bed by a forgotten lollipop. "I like to died, " Ronata exclaims. Danielle sweetly disavows any knowledge of who left the candy out.

A mammoth breakfast of hotcakes and strawberries fuels our last outing to the flooded backyard. By the time I arrive downstairs, the kids have collected a menagerie of water critters in a pail by dragging long-handled dip nets through the turbid, shallow water. Danielle walks primly up to the bucket with a look of immense satisfaction. In her hand is a piece of flashing quicksilver scarcely longer than a grain of rice. She drops the minnow in with the diving beetles, grass shrimp, and quartersized crabs, takes up her net, and rejoins Nikia in pulling through the muck and examining the catch.

Bob has unhitched the pirogues from the dock and Dexter and Lucretia quickly claim one of the flat-bottomed canoes. Evidently Lucretia has forgotten her somber mood of last night. With rolled-up jeans soaked well past her knees, she is an arm-flailing engine of gaiety as she pushes the vessel off. I notice Shemeka, a petite girl with dreamy looks, alone in a pirogue and hop in behind her. My modest paddling skills would strand us in open water, but here in the cove, aided by Shemeka'a faint but insistent stroking, I maneuver us out of vegetation nearly as fast as I steer us in. We manage to pull out ahead of the Kuss boys: an obvious invitation to a race. Chad gives the signal, and we're off in a contest where the object seems to be who can go the slowest while expending the most energy. Shemeka tightens her shoulders to stroke quickly, determined to pull us through to victory, and a fortuitous piece of driftwood blocking the boys' path gives us a win by inches. Puffing hard, Shemeka grins proudly.