. . . the gifts these people were giving us would help my family grow . . . because of the love with which they were given . . .

Writing - Sierra Club

The Baby Shower's Lessons

The surprise

When my wife, Hope, and I first joined the Sierra Club's Inner City Outings (ICO) program, we envisioned leading groups of city kids up mountain trails and through pristine forests. We knew we'd have to worry about renting vans for transportation and making sure we had enough food for twenty hungry kids and volunteers. We understood that checking permission slips and conducting head counts would be vital to the success of our trips. Those things we expected.

There was no way we could have expected this.

It was six o'clock on a Friday night in late February. Outside the one story, brick building in which we found ourselves, a bitter winter wind swirled dead leaves and trash around the cold East Boston streets. In the warmth of the room, lit by leftover Christmas lights strung from the ceiling, Hope looked at a huge pile of presents and tried to convey her thanks to the people who had thrown us the surprise baby shower. A Mexican woman came up and held Hope's hand, murmuring something softly in Spanish. Unable to understand the words but fully cognizant of their meaning, Hope squeezed the lady's hand and, with tears in her eyes, repeated "Gracias, gracias."

Our ICO experiences

Along with a dozen other Sierra Club volunteers, Hope and I had been working with ZUMIX, an East Boston based youth group, for almost a year. We had hiked Mount Wachusetts in the winter's cold, futilely searched for Walden pond in the summer's rain, gotten two thirds of the way up Mount Monadnock in the face of an October Nor'easter and gone ice skating during a spring storm that left the rink more pool than ice. We'd worried about vans and permission slips and food and keeping stragglers from dropping too far behind. As a reward, we'd seen our familiar trails through the eyes of kids who'd never heard the wind whistling through the trees overhead, who had never skipped stones across a slowly moving river and whose idea of a Saturday outing was going to the mall. It was a gift of perspective that bagging all the four thousand footers in New England could not provide.

I thought back to a trip we'd taken in the fall, hiking through a hilly, wooded area not too far from Boston. One of the kids, a 14-year old named Miquel, I believe, had seemed a bit quiet so I struck up a conversation with him. Miquel enjoyed soccer and his dad was an engineer. He'd never seen the tops of trees waving in the wind before, nor had he ever seen deer and peacocks and foxes as we had at the Park's zoo. Back in Mexico City, he said, the air was so foul it could be tough to breath, much less enjoy a breeze blowing through the trees. Our hike, he told me, had given him a glimpse of another world, someplace where nature, with all of its gifts, appeared relatively unsullied. So why was he so morose, I asked. The other kids were skipping and shouting back and forth, actively enjoying their day in the country, yet he was quiet and introspective. Miquel sighed sadly. It was his last Saturday in the United States, he said. That following week, as a result of new federal immigration laws, his family was returning to Mexico City. He would not see these trees or breath this air again.

I knew I would probably never see Miquel again, but many of the kids who had been on our first outing had never stopped coming. Month by month, outing by outing, Hope and I had become friends with kids from East Boston, Revere and Roslindale. We had met families who'd moved to Boston from Columbia only a few years before and ones whose Italian roots went back generations in their East Boston neighborhoods. We had learned that real people actually live in the neighborhoods near Boston's Logan airport, neighborhoods where airplanes roaring in low overhead are more common than geese winging their way onto a quiet country pond. And we'd learned that these people, too, could enjoy the natural world as much as we do, they just need some help.

ICO's tenuous future and wonderful potential

Today, the Boston ICO program is stronger than it has been in years. Our relationship with ZUMIX, and its kids, continues and we have been on three successful outings with members of Boston's Urban League. We have three qualified trip leaders and several active volunteers. We've conducted our first overnight trip, climbed a few significant mountains and have become friendly with dozens of Boston's youths. Yet at the same time the future is very troubled. We are effectively broke and it is clear that fundraising is not our forte. Volunteers continue to drift in and out as other aspects of their lives demand more attention and I am too slow in filling out paperwork and returning ICO calls and letters as I fulfill my responsibilities as a new father.

That February night, as I looked at the people gathered to celebrate the arrival of Hope's and my first child, I didn't know what to expect for ICO's future. I guess I still don't. But I did know that the gifts these people were giving us would help my family grow, not so much because of the gifts themselves but because of the love with which they were given. I also knew that we were learning as much from the kids we took on outings as they were learning from us and that we would all find the world much richer for our time together.

For me, these have been lessons worth repeating.

The Massachusetts Sierran