If Your Friends Jumped Off a Bridge, You Would Too (3x)

On Friday, soccer practice was canceled because the varsity coach and his immediate family had some exposure to some folks who came down with coronavirus. They had to do the whole test-and-wait thing.

So since there was no soccer, my son Alex said he was going to play spikeball with his friends. 

Serendipitously, our acupuncturist had just opened up. She has two rooms at her office, so my wife and I both booked appointments. We told our other son Ian where we were going, put our phones on do not disturb, and went and got punctured.

During that hour block when we were incommunicado pincushions, my son Alex sent a sequence of interesting texts.

He was not playing spikeball. 

Instead, him and his older buddies had decided to head to "the safest place in New Jersey." His definition of "the safest place in New Jersey" was a nearby lake with a small cliff to jump off. He said the cliff was seven feet or so.

We were sort of annoyed that he didn't check with us before he took off on this adventure-- and we added a new rule to the parenting handbook: if you can't contact us, you are not allowed to leave town on a dangerous adventure!

We asked for some details and got them. I've got to commend my son on being the only one in this group to actually disclose where he was headed. The other kids did NOT inform their parents what they were doing.

Of course, he did not FULLY disclose what was going on. Not sure if this was due to ignorance or his desire to protect his mother from the truth. 

First of all, he was headed an hour SOUTH on the Turnpike, not north. 

Second, he was jumping off a forty-foot bridge into a dirty tidal estuary. Kraft's Bridge. While it's not the safest place in New Jersey-- my living room couch is the safest place in New Jersey-- it's supposedly fairly safe, as far as bridge-jumping goes.

This is what happens when soccer practice is canceled due to a pandemic.

Alex was with the same guys that he went on this epic biking adventure with. They just graduated and he's a rising junior, so I can see how this all went down. 

How do you refuse a bridge jumping expedition with some college guys? 

His buddy Gary went as well . . . Gary said he was going to "rocket club." Some of you may know Gary from the NYT Mini-crossword leaderboard. He's a smart kid. So that made me feel better.

As an aside, now Alex and his two older buddies have completed the biking and swimming legs of a very stupid triathlon. 

I assume the running portion will involve streaking.

As usual, though this was kind of a rash decision, things might have gone smoothly, if it wasn't for a lack of communication. Alex stopped answering calls and texts, and we didn't have his friends' cell-phone numbers. 

Like his bike adventure, it got dark and my wife got increasingly worried.

I texted my friend and asked if he had heard from his son. He said no, that his son had gone to play spikeball. I informed him that his son was not playing spikeball, he was down in south Jersey, jumping off a bridge into a river.

"Sounds bad," my friend texted back.

So now my wife and I were just hanging around, worried. We hadn't heard from anyone. 

I call this dilemma Schrödinger's Phone. 

If cell-phones didn't exist-- like when we were young-- then none of the parents would have had any idea of what was going on. Ignorance is bliss. We would have thought that Alex was playing spikeball and he lost track of time.

We would have been annoyed but not worried. 

But it's not 1986 (spikeball didn't even exist in 1986).

It's 2020 and so-- like Schrödinger's cat--  the boys were in a quantum superposition. They were in all states: drowned in the Rancocas Creek, on their way home, broken down on the side of the Turnpike, etc. Alive, dead, injured, safe, sound . . . until we got information from the phone, all the possibilities in the universe are possible.

A message from the phone would reveal (and possibly create) their reality. That's what we were waiting for.

It finally came, around 8:30 PM. They had left their phones in the car, so they wouldn't get wet (except for the kid who drove-- he had a waterproof phone and brought it to the river in case they needed to call 911).

The reason they got held up for so long is that their driver-- the kid with the phone-- froze up on the concrete ledge. He couldn't climb back up to the bridge and he was too scared to jump. I've seen this happen to people. So this poor kid spent over an hour on the ledge, petrified. Meanwhile, Alex said he did the jump three times. From the concrete ledge and from the bridge itself. So did his other two friends. 

Finally, their driver jumped. They all walked back to the car, only to find that their driver has left the keys back by the river. He had to walk all the way back down the path, in the dark, to find his keys. 

Alex said he could see his phone ringing in the car and knew he was in trouble. But he couldn't get to it.

Luckily, the driver found his keys, and they got home safe and sound.

Alex got to clean all the bathrooms in our Saturday morning (and that's just the start of his chore list). 

Once again, he was fairly close to getting through this adventure without consequence, but he was done in by the existence of cell-phones. And, as I said, it turns out he was the only person who gave his parents any idea of where he was going. So there's that.

And it's kind of nice to have someone clean all the bathrooms. I'm sure this won't be the last time he does that . . .