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

Though the sun has yet to make an appearance, a poreclogging, enervating heat has been creeping into the air. Catching her breath and suddenly looking fatigued, Shemeka whispers, "I want to stop now"--the first sentence I've heard from her. Shemeka is HIV positive, and I wonder if the medications she takes to boost her immune system don't sometimes tucker her out. As Chad helps Shemeka out of the boat, I realize that neither the drugs nor the virus have drained her spirit. She sits on the boardwalk, watching her friends and smiling, wan, but without a trace of wistfulness.

An hour's play discharges the kids' energy. Back up in the classroom they calmly review their "Look, See, and Touch" work sheets from yesterday's excursion, play math games, and even manage to hold still as I sketch them. The contented quietude lingers on the ride back to the Yacht Club, the spray from the boat eliciting only the most meager of squeals from the girls.

Shemeka, our passenger on the way home, dozes off nearly immediately after buckling in. I ask Kate what she thought of our trip. Her reply echoes the comments on the children's handouts, where each of the letters in the words Turtle Cove starts off sentences describing our day: the rain wasn't fun but everything else was just fine.

Despite being cooped up more than we'd planned, the kids enjoyed each other's company and ate heartily--something some of them might not do consistently. I'm disquieted by the thought. When my grandma, the daughter of Louisiana sharecroppers, speaks of her childhood, she often mentions the fresh fruits and vegetables her mother would put up and the filling meals they made. My late mother talked about the many eggs she sacrificed in pursuit of the perfect butter cake. Physical hunger was never the issue for them, only the desire for life without the fetters of an infrangible social order. When my mom arrived in California that opportunity seemed more possible to find. With the support of a community made up of migrants like her, and night school, she moved us out of the projects in three years. Now, as the decline of northern cities prompts some black folk to follow a south star back home, I wonder what the recourse is for those who never left.

How much ICO helps is a matter of perspective. The trips do not alter the fact that the Taylors, an extended family of ten, live on less than $400 a month and an allotment of food stamps. But the outings do add to the sense of well-being that keeps the Taylor kids on academic honor rolls. Kate tells me about two teens, Walter and John, five-year veterans of New Orleans ICO, who were recently invited by the Club to hike at its Clair Tappaan Lodge in the Sierra Nevada. They might one day evolve into environmental powerhouses, or they might not. No one in the ICO program presumes to perform miracles, but as Kate recalls her family's trips to the beach and the woods, and I think about a church trip when I drank with an elated thirst, from a mountain stream until I like to burst, it's honest to say that some events change your life by encouraging you to seek out your place in the world. Maybe some of the kids will remember the trips to Turtle Cove as explorations that helped them decide where to go.