At the age of 31, Ricki Shapiro was working at a community college in upstate New York when a colleague recommended Outward Bound to her. Ricki was intrigued. After all, she loved trying new things and it didn’t look that difficult, so she signed up to spend 11 days on a 30-foot ketch in Penobscot Bay, Maine.
Ricki enrolled on an adult sailing course with 11 men and 2 other women for late July of 1983. “I remember being shocked by how few items – and winter items, no less – were on the clothing list. One wool hat, wool gloves, wool pants, two cotton t-shirts, one pair of cotton pants, one bathing suit, two pairs of sneakers, and underwear. That was it for 11 days. When I took out my second t-shirt after living in the first one day and night for six days, I will never forget how great it smelled!”
Ricki was surprised by the high tides, the frigidness of the water, and brilliance of the moon over the ocean at night. She recounts awakening in the wee hours of the morning for her turn at anchor watch and having to carefully crawl over each of her crewmates, sleeping head to toe on oars resting on the boat’s seats, to reach the bow of the boat.
After a few awkward days getting acclimated to the constrained quarters and rigors of boat life and a contact lens lost during the morning “run and dip,” Ricki found her source of inspiration in another woman on her course who had to delay an earlier attempt to take an Outward Bound course because of a flare up of multiple sclerosis. “I thought to myself—if she can do this, I can do this. And I did it,” said Ricki. She vividly recalls all the activities of her course, from her frustration with rock climbing to the exhilaration of rappelling, to the rush of fear turning to a sense of accomplishment as she stepped off the platform of the zip line and reached terra firma on the Hurricane Island ropes course.
A writer, Ricki brought a notebook to record the moments and observations that might later be forgotten… like the oar-full of rocket seaweed that caused one rower to exclaim: “that’s a week’s worth of toilet paper!” and the song that she wrote on her solo called “The Bad Bruise Blues.” One of her biggest take-aways was that “the elements don’t care who you are. Everyone is treated the same. And on the boat, what you did in your professional life didn’t matter and in fact, never even came up in conversation.” Throughout her experience, as she got to know her crewmates better, she learned to appreciate the skills that each contributed to their “Signuts” team and the bonding that grew deeper each day they were together.
Ricki’s Outward Bound experience also helped her professionally; she listed it on her resume as an accomplishment. During an interview with the senior vice president of the next company she would work for, she was asked to describe something she was proud of. “I did Outward Bound,” she told him. “Tell me more,” he replied. He had been considering taking his senior management team on an Outward Bound experience, so the fact that Ricki had already done so sealed her “new hire” deal. Now working for GE Global Research in Niskayuna, New York, she can still remember with great clarity many of the details of what she calls “a cross between Army boot camp and survival school” and one of the best experiences she has ever had.
Though she returned home unshaven, unshowered and with more than a few bruises, Ricki says it was worth every moment. “I am very grateful for Outward Bound. It is something that made a big difference in my life. When I returned from Outward Bound and faced obstacles, I thought: I did Outward bound, I can do this!”
One quote that has stuck with her from the Hurricane Island Outward Bound Readings Book is by Henry C. Link: “Although generalizations are dangerous, I venture to say that at the bottom of most fears, both mild and severe, will be found an overactive mind and an underactive body. Hence, I have advised many people in their search for happiness to use their heads less and their arms and legs more in useful work or play. We generate fears while we sit—we overcome them by actions. Fear is nature’s warning signal to get busy.”