By Erin Bruehl
On a freezing January afternoon, 30 shivering friends and family stand on the banks of the Bronx River to watch 16 young boat builders launch Spartina, the dark green 18 foot flat-bottomed skiff they built at Rocking the Boat over the last four months. The river is frozen and there are several inches of snow on the ground. But this does not stop Adam Green, the organization's founder and executive director, from launching the boat. “We don't do much in the traditional sense at Rocking the Boat,” Green says and holds up a chunk of ice.
“I just chopped this out of the Bronx River,” he says and hands it to Ted Okie, the boatbuilding assistant. Walking up to the skiff, Okie breaks the block of ice on the bow to ‘christen' it as cheers go up from the crowd. The teenagers jump into their boat and Green and Okie launch the skiff in the snow. Twenty minutes later, everyone drives in their heated cars to East 174 th St. and the boatbuilding shop for a potluck party to celebrate the launch and the end of another semester.
Rocking the Boat is the creation of Green, the soft-spoken but energetic 31-year-old who is not only trying to teach inner-city high school students how to build boats and show them what nature is in the Bronx but is also seeking to make some sort of difference in their lives.
The boatbuilding shop is a safe place where the kids can go and hang out. The program offers them advice and tutoring in school as well as getting them any needed outside counseling. It takes them out of the Bronx to experience nature and the outdoors in places like Maine, New Hampshire and the Hudson River Valley. And it is a place for kids to be amongst friends and be part of a second family with staff and friends who care about them.
“We're trying to give kids a better sense of the world around them,” Green said. “So they have something they can use. I give kids a lot of responsibility and room for mistakes and a lot of compassion.”
Kadijah Abdur Rahim, 17, a student at City As High School is new this semester at Rocking the Boat and can see already that it is special.
“There are fun people,” she said. “I see why no one wants to leave. We work but it's not like any other job you ever had.” In fact, she comes almost every day of the week from Monday to Friday for Rocking the Boat's two main programs -- boatbuilding and “on-water” -- and to talk about colleges.
Students for each program come after school twice a week for three-and-a-half hours, starting at 4 p.m. The boat builders work out of the 174 th St. shop and the on-water kids on the Bronx River. Each semester lasts four months. The students receive school credit that Green easily arranged when he went to guidance offices of local high schools.
The high schools in the area have some of the poorest graduation rates in New York City, including William Howard Taft High School and Adlai Stevenson High School, where only a quarter of students graduate on time and nearly half are ‘behind grade.'
A few days before the launch, a lot of work still needs to be done; Spartina does not have seats. Having invited some recruits from one of the New Century High Schools, the Gateway School for Environmental Research and Technology, Green puts the extra hands to work.
With his curly reddish-brown hair and beard and wire-rimmed glasses, usually dressed in workman's pants and flannels, Green looks the part of workman and mariner.
He opens a book and leans it against the edge of the still-unpainted boat that fills most of the shop. “This is the boat we're making,” he says. Steps away, Meliza Pena, 19, a former student, senior shop apprentice and now a full-time on-water staff member, recruits a bunch of kids to work with the planer to smooth down the wood. Since 2002, Green has taken the kids to cut down trees to get the wood themselves so they work with wood in its roughest form.
“Over here my darlings!” Meliza calls out to position the kids as the wood, over six feet in length, is put straight through the planer to smooth it down. Three kids stand with Meliza to push the wood and four others wait on the other side to catch it. The wood is so long, the door to the back lounge has to be opened to get it through the planer. The smell of popcorn for break time and warmth from the lounge fill the shop as the door connecting the two opens. At the bandsaw, Okie shows the kids the next step: chopping the bark off the now-smooth wood. But despite all the interaction for new students, the bandsaw is still off-limits. “This is the easiest machine to cut your hand off with,” Okie says to the group of six students gathered in a semi-circle around him, “So I will do it.”
Like telling a story, a finished boat only comes about when all the relevant pieces are put together in the right places and at the right time.
Meliza, with her large gold-hoop earrings, giant smile and Yankee cap, first became part of Rocking the Boat as a student, three years ago.
She moved to the Bronx from the Dominican Republic at age two and worked 30-plus hours a week at a supermarket when she was in high school to help her single mother make ends meet. Sometimes she did not get home until 9 p.m.
Coming home one night she passed the then-new Rocking the Boat location. “I've been hooked ever since,” she said.
Having worked so many hours at the supermarket, Pena was in danger of failing several classes and having to go to night school. Green went to her school the day she told him, talked to her counselors and got her out of night school in exchange for having her work with him.
“Rocking the Boat gave me the chance to reach out,” she said. “No other job will be as supportive and understanding. It's Adam. I could tell him anything. He's not only my boss; he's my friend and a mentor. He tells me everyday ‘good job'.”
She has two more semesters to go before she graduates from Bronx Community College. She then wants to pursue an education degree and ultimately become a judge.
One goal of Rocking the Boat is to create a comforting environment for the kids so that the shop is some place to which they want to come. Walking into the warm shop, littered with wood shavings on the floor, piles of wood in the corner, tools hanging on the walls, wood cutting machines and sanders sporadically located next to the boat-in-progress, kids can go back to the little lounge, have snacks and check their email. When they sit down on the couch, the sandy-colored Woody, the shop cat, will jump into their laps.
Green came up with the idea for Rocking the Boat his senior year at Vassar College in 1995. He took a semester off and worked on the Clearwater , the 106-foot wooden Hudson River Sloop founded by folksinger Pete Seeger, which restores and preserves the Hudson.
After graduating in '96 from Vassar, with a Bachelor of Arts in American Culture with a thesis on folklore and storytelling in the Hudson River Valley, the teacher he worked with in a boatbuilding program at East Harlem Maritime School referred him to Hostos Community College.
He called the program, “Rocking the Boat.” After seven months of work, they launched their boat in August 1997.
Green learned everything about building boats while on the job at East Harlem and Hostos.
A storytelling thesis may not seem relevant to building boats, but Green says the two are both about process, something in which he has always been interested and is part of his mission at Rocking the Boat.
“A boat is all about process and these kids had no sense of process. We try to give kids a sense of accomplishment to develop the rest of their lives around,” he said.
Linda Cox, executive director of the Bronx River Alliance for the last two years, agreed that Rocking the Boat effectively teaches the kids about process. The building process teaches the kids about the commitment to doing an effective job. A boat that is not built well will leak or sink. Their boats do not sink, she pointed out.
Cox said that Rocking the Boat is doing its job. Her first introduction to Rocking the Boat and Green was when some of the kids came to a symposium about work on the Bronx River that Green could not attend. Their knowledge of the area and their compassion for Green was evident.
“They had so much confidence and knowledge of the river and it was clear that Rocking the Boat was helping them grow into committed, knowledgeable, ready-to-go adults,” she said. “And I could see they had an attachment and fondness for Adam.”
In the summer of 1998 Green received five grants that suddenly gave him $55,000 to start his own organization. With the help of people affiliated with the Clearwater , he found the New Settlement Apartments in the Southwest Bronx to house Rocking the Boat and proposed a boatbuilding program for 16 kids to do outdoor education. He set up in a building basement in August 1998.
Green then developed the apprentice program as opportunities for ten students (five originally, five more when the on-water program was added) to be paid to work in either the boatbuilding shop or the on-water program.
In fall 2002, Green launched the on-water program. The students use the boats made in the boatbuilding class to explore the Bronx River through data collection and physical restoration projects. The students learn that there is nature in the Bronx. The program is in conjunction with five organizations that work on the Bronx River including the Bronx River Alliance, of which Green is a board member.
Now, six years after launching, Rocking the Boat has seven full-time and 12 part-time staff members. And Rocking the Boat is known throughout the community. People walk by the shop's storefront overlooking the Cross Bronx Expressway and gaze at the works in progress.
But the road to expanding Rocking the Boat did not come without personal hardships for Green.
While at New Settlement, Green met a social worker named Amy Watkins. They started dating and lived a block away from each other in Brooklyn. Green was 25, Watkins was 26. On March 8, 1999, they decided to ride a different train after work as Green was going to his parents' house for the night on the Upper West Side. They took the D train instead of the 4 train. Green got off in Manhattan and said goodbye to Watkins. It was the last time he ever saw her.
Watkins walked out of the subway around 9:30 p.m. in Prospect Heights, not far from her apartment. She was stabbed in the back with a fillet knife and was left lying facedown on the sidewalk.
“She was dead,” he said. “It meant I had to deal with it on my own. In some ways it affirmed the work I was doing. With boatbuilding, we could always make mistakes and figure out ways to fix them. In life, there was nothing I could do to fix this one. I couldn't bring her back. And I'm Mr. Fix-It. It was very challenging.”
In a way, Watkins' death brought him even closer to the community in which he was serving. He went to work the next day and started counseling people right away.
“At Rocking the Boat, we could look at things from a different perspective, start from different angles if something didn't work,” he said. “It showed me that there aren't that many areas that are black and white and it was very empowering.”
Rocking the Boat's first boat was due to be launched on March 24, 1999. They named it “Amy Watkins.”
At the time of Watkins' death, she was working with women at New Settlement on a wall mural just a few blocks from New Settlement and Rocking the Boat. The mural, about the strength of women in the community, depicted colored silhouettes of women doing activities such as using hammers. It was supposed to be unveiled several weeks after Watkins died. In a tribute, the community people dedicated it to Watkins. With a picture of her, it reads “In memory and celebration of Amy Watkins.”
“I wasn't a fan at first,” Green said. “I didn't want to walk by and see her picture everyday.”
The demands of Rocking the Boat helped him deal with Watkins' death. And he still works around 70 hours a week, sometimes six days a week. The hard work has helped Green get a clearer vision of what he is trying to accomplish.
Last fall, he hired Okie to assist in the shop and a licensed social worker for the “what's next” program to talk to the kids about college and act as a referral service in case they need someone with whom to discuss emotional problems.
Green also joined with the new Harbor School in Bushwick, Brooklyn to create a boatbuilding shop for those students on board the ship Wavertree at South Street Seaport.
Expansion brings the challenge of defining just what Rocking the Boat is.
“I have a specific way of dealing with kids,” he said. “There is a certain way of doing things around here and it's not just me. Part of the challenge is understanding staff management and translating it to your staff.”
Tracy Jonsson, 19, a former student, was just hired full-time at Rocking the Boat. A student for a term three years ago, Jonsson, like many former students, kept in contact. “Everything Adam introduced us to, like the Clearwater revival [a weekend trip on which Green takes students] I went anyway,” she said. Green asked her all summer 2003 to join his staff and she joined part-time last August. Her full-time job was a birthday present this past January from Green.
Jonsson grew up in Sweden and moved to the Bronx when she was 16 because her mother, of Dominican heritage, wanted to be with more people of her culture. Jonsson hated the Bronx. There was no abundance of nature like in Sweden. Then Green came to her friend's school to recruit.
“My friend told me this guy came to his school and talked about a place that builds boats. It was Adam. So we came down. Rocking the Boat brought out the good things in the area that there is a river nearby, there are woods upstate,” she said.
The comradery and family-atmosphere Green created, drew her in.
“It's like a little family,” she said. “Most people even if they move on, they still come back now and then. And Adam is always here. He's such a cool guy. On trips, he's just like one of the kids the way he jumps into the water with us.”
Green takes each program of kids on week-long trips every summer as well as end-of-the semester weekend trips to experience nature in other places. This past summer he and the boat builders drove to Maine and Cape Cod and took a midnight rowing trip out to an island off Cape Cod that none of them had been to before.
“We do a lot of things that are very unorthodox,” he said. “I feel like it's that kind of stuff that makes people feel special.”
Lory Nemwyer, executive director of the Hull Lifesaving Museum in Hull, MA that works with kids and boats and a colleague of Green's, agreed that the unorthodox things are part of what makes Rocking the Boat unique.
“We were intrigued by his [Green's] energy and commitment,” she said. “Word was that he was doing raw stuff with kids and time showed us we were right, he was amazing. Adam has amazingly creative ideas of what he does with kids, such as harvesting their own trees. It's the off balance stuff that really engages kids.”
Green does this for himself as much as for the kids.
“I don't decompartmentalize my life,” he said. “Forestry, carpentry, festival organizing are all hobbies I have that Rocking the Boat fulfills.”
Green also does fundraising, grant writing, recruits kids by going to local high schools with Pena, as well as updating the website.
Fundraising especially is a challenge, as Green has to raise more than $600,000 this year to keep his planned programming. Most money comes from foundation grants. It has come a lot farther than the $55,000 he started with.
Now Green has to decide where Rocking the Boat is headed. With nine boats, there is no need for more. For summer 2004, Phillipsburg Manor in Westchester is interested in having Green and his class run a boatbuilding program for payment. And for the first time in Rocking the Boat's history this summer, they are not keeping one of their boats. The boat built this spring will be launched in June and donated to the Save Esopus Meadows Lighthouse Commission in Esopus, NY. The boat will be used for the worthy cause of helping restoration workers get to the lighthouse. Donating the boat to an organization in the Hudson River Valley is also one small step closer to fulfilling Green's dream of creating a Rocking the Boat in Kingston, NY because of its proximity to the Hudson River.
After Spartina's launch, friends retreated from the cold to the shop to celebrate. The long tables now held home-cooked food from pastas to cheesecakes, all brought by families and students. In the corner where the rows of tools are against the wall and the boats are built, instead there was an all-male reggae band. Children stood in front of the band and swayed to the music. For a night, the sounds of the music and conversation replaced the sounds of the bandsaw and hammers. Towards the end of the party the band did a rendition of Christina Aguilera's song “Beautiful” . Not your traditional celebration song but then again, Green doesn't do anything traditional at Rocking the Boat.