New Yorkers in Exile

[BullNBear52]

A Long Jump to Manhood
By SAM DOLNICK




HIGH above the Hudson River, at the tip of the New York mainland, a few teenage boys stood expectantly on the cliffs. Looking like tall, reedy sprouts amid the jumping spots they call Jungle and Capone’s Chair, the shirtless boys scanned the horizon, searching for someone to impress.

“Circle Line! Circle Line! Let’s go, come on!” the youngest among them cried as a boat carrying tourists slipped into view. Four shivering boys scampered to the edge, found their footing and leapt, one by one, down 30 feet that felt like 100, landing with a splash in the sun-speckled strip of water that separates the Bronx from Manhattan.

Jumping into the water from these rocky cliffs is a rite of passage for boys in the northwest Bronx, a tradition that mixes adolescent swagger, apocryphal lore and just enough danger to keep things interesting.

“It’s like a bar mitzvah,” Matt Afon, 17, said as river water dripped from his mesh shorts after a recent jump. “Now you’re a man.”

But for generations of police officers with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the rocks, which lie beyond a stretch of Metro-North tracks, have offered a summer ritual of a different sort. “We chase kids all summer long,” said Sgt. Daniel Pepi, an authority officer. “Sometimes we get three or four calls a day.” Like the jumping itself, the cat-and-mouse games with the police go back decades.

Aaron Donovan, an authority spokesman, said the jumping was “extremely dangerous” and ticked off the hazards: “Jumping off a 30-foot-high cliff into the Harlem River, crossing busy railroad tracks sandwiched between two blind curves, venturing near third rails electrified with 700 volts of direct current.”

For the teenagers, the appeal lies less in the river, which periodically brings flotillas of trash to the swimming hole, than in the very danger of the jump and the bare-chested freedom of the adventure. On the rock, there are no Regents tests, no college applications, no summer jobs handing out fliers for a pizzeria (Charlie Suozzo’s gig) or stocking food at a Yankee Stadium hot dog stand (Georgie Purce’s.)

“There’s no safety net here,” Matt said. “It’s your own decision. You’re taking your own risk.”

On the afternoon of the Circle Line performance, Liam McGinn, a 17-year-old with an orange and black bathing suit, was the most reluctant jumper, and thus the target of barbs from many of the other four boys. But there were plenty of jokes to go around — there were mothers to discuss, as well as Matt’s Mickey Mouse T-shirt and his scraped ankle, and their friend nicknamed Faceplant.

There were also the jumping spots to ponder and analyze. There are at least 10 spots, each higher than the last and each with its own immutable name handed down by the gods, or at least by previous generations of boys. Jungle is the beginner level, where this group spent most of its time and from which most of the boys jumped when the Circle Line boat passed; it is a roughly 30-foot drop, and named for the overgrown bushes crowding the rock’s edge.

Next is Wheel, named for the spray-painted circle there. Then there is the vaguely seat-shaped rock called Capone’s Chair. And then, because this tradition was invented by teenage boys, there are several jumping spots named for delicate parts of the male anatomy.

But ask the boys about their goals for the summer, and they will say in unison, and with a trace of awe, “B-Ball.” They are referring to a jump from the high rock — 85 feet, they estimate — that was immortalized by Mark Wahlberg and a boyish Leonardo DiCaprio in the film “The Basketball Diaries.” A few among them have scaled its heights, and the others say that by the end of the summer, they, too, will be ready for it.

As they jump, the boys conform to an unspoken etiquette and style. They wear shorts to their knees, with boxers sticking out the top. They jump in pairs or as a group — jumping alone is no fun — and they maintain a stoic, or perhaps shocked, silence all the way down.

Georgie, 16, likes to jump only if he can go first. He said that he had grown up hearing stories of his father jumping from these rocks, and that he had made the leap for the first time last year.

“I’ve always known about it,” he said. “But last summer I just worked up the courage to come.”

“It’s a feeling of accomplishment,” Liam added, “because everyone around here does it.”

As they rested between jumps this day, the boys dried off, the blue metal of the Henry Hudson Bridge glinting in the sunlight. Georgie broke out the Cap’n Crunch peanut butter cereal. A white bird flew past and — Walker Stevens swore he saw it — defecated with gusto, sparking peals of laughter. The group calls the cliffs C Rock for the giant blue Columbia University logo painted on the rock face. The C, maintained by Columbia’s crew team, faces the university’s football field in Inwood, across the river in Manhattan.

When a couple zipped past on jet skis, the boys shouted, watching the wake disturb the rhythm of their swimming hole. They debated when the next Circle Line boat would swing by, and then were quiet for a moment as a Metro-North train hurtled past behind them. Then Walker, the youngest and most outspoken of the bunch, cried out, “Yo, look! I found seaweed in my underwear!”

As the day wore on, the boys jumped several more times, everyone except Liam, who chose the teasing over the cold water. One time, Georgie and Charlie slapped five in midair, but Matt, who had a cellphone camera, missed the shot — a lost Facebook winner, they lamented. Georgie and Charlie held hands for their next jump, but Matt missed that picture, too.

Many of the boys’ parents know they jump from the rocks — some used to hang out there themselves. “It’s a coming-of-age thing in this neighborhood,” said Cordelia Stevens, Walker’s mother. She said she hung out on the rocks as a teenager but never mustered the courage to jump.

When Walker brought it up, Ms. Stevens said, she thought about forbidding him, out of safety concerns. But she didn’t. “I felt like kind of a hypocrite, because we were talking about things that I had done before,” she said.

The boys returned two days later. Lounging in the sun, their shirts and baseball caps draped over their skateboards, they told stories of a man who supposedly burst his eardrum during a jump and permanently damaged his brain. They successfully egged on David Gessler, 15, to jump naked.

But just as they were trying to muster their courage for an even higher jump, someone spotted a police officer climbing the hill. Whispered curses accompanied a rush to pull on soiled T-shirts. A few of the boys had been caught before, but most had not.

Officer Ronald Castro of the transportation authority reached the boys, making threats about court summonses and warning about the dangers of the train tracks. The boys hung their heads, shaken if not fully alarmed, and trudged down to a road across the tracks. They expected to be let off with a warning, as they were an hour later.

As the afternoon heat began to break and the boys’ mothers began to arrive to pick them up, Sergeant Pepi, who was also on the scene, shook his head. “Believe me,” he said, “we’re going to be back.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/nyregion/18ritual.html?ref=nyregion