Survival Skills Learned in the Asphalt Jungle

On a wall in the small office of Rudy Rodrigues, a leader of Outward Bound, hangs a detailed map of the wilderness that his charges must conquer in pursuit of survival through self-confidence.

This challenge is particularly tough. The map is of New York City.

America’s large cities are asphalt jungles all right, at least in metaphor. But for more than a quarter-century in America, Outward Bound has evoked images of well-heeled executives and well-scrubbed youths in expensive hiking boots breathing clean air on faraway mountains.

So what’s a nice program like that doing in a place like this?

“It’s long overdue,” says Rodrigues, “or would appear so from the results of our first year. This is no experiment. We’re committed now, and going all out.”

Return to Principles

Actually, Rodrigues says, urban Outward Bound programs are a return to first principles. The organization was founded to teach resourcefulness, confidence, compassion, perseverance and self-esteem, but always has tried to include the ideal of service as well.

“It’s not easy to stress the service ideal in the wilderness,” he says.

“The traditional Outward Bound schools cater to the more privileged, so this is a shift from the traditional. In the city, we serve. Our focus right now is on inner-city youth and the homeless.”

Serving, Outward Bound crews have renovated shelters, picnicked with homeless children, distributed food. But, on the theory that most urban discord results from people of varied ethnic and economic stripes threatening and fearing one another, relieving social tensions, Rodrigues feels, might be the best service of all.

Indeed, Outward Bound is so satisfied with its work in concrete canyons that a staff is already setting up a similar program in Chicago and others are planned in Boston, Baltimore, Los Angeles and Minneapolis.

Haves and Have-Nots

A typical New York Outward Bound program matches a dozen or so corporate executives with an equal number of disadvantaged persons of various ages and cultures and turns them all loose on the town for a few days with an instructor.

The haves live, work and discourse with the have-nots, an unlikely get-together in any town. The haves, moreover, must make do without cab fare, credit cards or carpet slippers.

They will sleep outdoors in blankets, walk where they want to go or ride the subway if they have a token. They find meals as best they can and as cheaply.

Without exception, participants report that the experience gave them a new, less judgmental perception of the lower crust, even a bond with them, and thus a clearer view of the city’s social problems.

For their part, the inner-city folk discarded long-held prejudices among themselves. “Black kids and Hispanic kids in New York grow up believing that white kids are weak,” one 18-year-old black reported. White participants weren’t aware of that.

Corporations Pay

The corporation picks up the Outward Bound tuition for its own execs and also for their classmates, $60 a day each, same fee as the traditional courses out yonder.

The course relies on proven wilderness techniques transferred to the cityscape with, of course, some compromises.

Instead of testing endurance by dashing across mountain meadows, for example, the New Yorkers take laps around the Central Park reservoir. Instead of going hand over hand across a chasm, they climb in the rigging of a four-master at the South Street Seaport museum. Instead of a white-water raft adventure, they row an eight-oar lifeboat up the East River.

The lessons apparently have the same results. One graduate says: “In the boat, all of us were strangers, but until we discovered that we had to pull together we went in circles.”

On one expedition, 18 men and youths recruited from a shelter for the homeless in Harlem were taken to Ft. Tryon Park--not exactly Yosemite, but it did afford a 40-foot rock wall. All 18 scaled it.

‘We Were Selfish’

“In the shelter,” one recalled afterward, “we didn’t trust one another. We fought. We were selfish.

“Out there on that rock there was a guy on top with a rope, and my safety depended on him. When it was over, the relationship we had with one another was totally different.”

That lesson, and even more so the lifeboat lesson, harks back to the origin of Outward Bound.

During World War II, the head of a British shipping firm, Lawrence Holt, decided that too many of his sailors, despite lifeboats, were being lost at sea when their ships were sunk.

He consulted Kurt Hahn, operator of a prominent boys’ school. Hahn, in 1941, opened a school in Wales to teach young mariners self-confidence, small-boat handling, route-finding, rescue--and community service.

Holt named the program Outward Bound, a nautical term for the point at which a ship leaves safe harbor for the open sea.

Now Outward Bound programs thrive in 36 countries. Only two others, Britain and the Netherlands, include urban programs, but according to Rodrigues, the New York director, neither has the scope of the New York operation.

More Programs Planned

“We conducted 10 programs last year, and so far this year we have planned 16 weekend courses and two 16-day courses which will be a blend of the wilderness and the city,” he says. “These will run April through November.”

Meanwhile, says Rodrigues, beaming, his curriculum includes continuing programs in four of New York’s polyglot high schools that have had racial and ethnic clashes.

The high school programs, not surprisingly in New York, use techniques of the theater. Students act out roles, exposing bigotries and foolish fears. The results are especially satisfying to the executive director.

Rudy Rodrigues was born in Kenya in 1941 when it was a British colony. His father was a British civil servant, born in Goa, a Portuguese colony in India. His mother was born in Karachi, then a part of India.

Jeans for the Office

Rodrigues is a lean, swarthy man with vivid brown eyes behind aviator glasses. A mane of thick, black, curly hair lit with strands of silver brushes the neck of his sweater. Jeans and sweaters are the work clothes of his staff as well, in characteristic contrast with the three-piece suits and straight skirts predominant in the mid-town Manhattan skyscraper where they work.

‘When I was a boy,” Rodrigues was saying the other day, “all the various races in Kenya lived and grew up and worked in isolation of one another. After 10th grade, I went to Outward Bound. It was my first opportunity to be together with people of different races and backgrounds.

“One of my instructors was a British army officer. He kept talking about this place called Sandhurst, the Royal Military Academy. He told us only the best, the creme de la creme , could get in.

“Here I was a kid from a colony, non-English. What chance had I? But because of my Outward Bound experience I decided, hell, I think I’ll go. I knew it was up to me. So I went.”

Fascinated by Possibilities

After an army tour and a stint with the United Nations fighting famine, Rodrigues moved to New York. The notion of an urban Outward Bound program fascinated him.

“I believe the urban backdrop has a much more exciting dynamic to it than the wilderness,” he says.