Michael Horgan
Looking through the window of the house he grew up in, out at the icy, mile-wide Susquehanna River, Pat Reilly, vice chair of the Harrisburg group of ICO (Inspiring Connections Outdoors), recalls a time when he and several ICO participants performed a cleanup at a local park.
“It was a service trip,” he said. “We were picking up trash. We even wore the orange safety vests.” The activity went fairly uneventfully, but when the group stopped for lunch, Pat was approached by several girls. “They said to me, ‘Can we go on every outing?’ And later, we were going to learn orientation and play with compasses and hike. But all we’d done so far was pick up garbage! That’s how bad they need to get out.”
ICO is a Sierra Club-run organization that takes kids who don’t usually have the opportunity to leave the city and brings them into the outdoors. “They don’t get the chance to do this stuff,” notes Pat, whose favorite aspect of working for ICO is seeing the looks on the kids’ faces when they get outdoors for the first time. “They’re in awe,” he says. “With their jaws hanging open. You can see the good it’s doing.”
Pat grew up as a self-professed “river rat,” fishing, rowing, and snorkeling in the rivers around Harrisburg. In the 90’s, Pat was one of the founding members of Harrisburg ICO, and says he is one of the first to even have the idea of starting a regional ICO group. Although the chapter started slowly, they now carry out around a dozen trips a year, including hiking, overnight camping, canoeing, tubing, and rafting.
The kids continually impress and surprise Pat with their enthusiasm. He relates a time when he and his students were looking at aquatic insects like mayflies and stoneflies. “Then this fisherman floated by, reeling in a big fish, and I knew there was no way I could keep the kids’ focus on me. They all wanted to see the fish. Then later, they found a tennis ball in the river, and were playing baseball with a stick, when this one girl called out to me: ‘Hey! This is a mayfly, right?’ I couldn’t believe it; they had been paying attention!”
62 years old and diagnosed with ALS, Pat still goes out on trips, if not as much as he used to. ICO “won’t let me quit,” he remarks, noting that his years of experience mean that he knows all the good places to take the kids, and he foresees that he will still work in a planning and leadership role in the future.
“It really makes a difference,” Pat continues. “It’s not hard, and it’s not a hassle. If you like the outdoors and family, it really makes a difference for the kids.”
Two years ago, a former ICO participant, now a young man, wrote a letter to the Harrisburg ICO office. In his letter, he made a connection between ICO, awe, and a sense of responsibility to the world:
“The Inner City Outings [a former name for ICO] program allowed me to temporarily escape the madness that goes on every day in urban neighborhoods. I was not only allowed to see more, but I was shown that there were alternatives to what I knew as truth…. Without ICO I wouldn’t be as open-minded, passionate, humble, grateful, caring, and loving as I am today. I wouldn’t love my environment and all the creatures in it. I wouldn’t care about picking up the garbage I see floating around. I wouldn’t have had an opportunity to witness God’s love on Earth and I wouldn’t have wanted to give back the same.”
That says it all, doesn’t it?