"God, it's freezing out here," complains one of the teenagers, dressed only in his cotton work shirt, baggy jeans and safety goggles. "It's too cold. I'm getting sick out here."

"Oh, toughen up, big guy," a fourth form teases from the shadows near the barbed wire-topped gateway that leads from the street. "It's not cold out here."

Bundled in a blue fleece jacket, a blue fleece hat and dusty blue workpants, Adam Green is dressed for the cold weather work. His full red beard and light hiking boots lend him the look of a seasoned outdoorsman from the Rockies-not the 30-year old founder and director of a growing city-based organization with an annual budget of $350,000 based out of a 1,250 square foot storefront space overlooking the busy Cross-Bronx Expressway.

"If it weren't for the Rocking the Boat, I would not be in New York City-I can definitely say that's true," said Green referring to the non-for-profit he founded in 1998 and continues to run, often seven days a week. "But, I guess my feeling is that the work we're doing here is more vital than my personal concerns."

That work includes teaching 16 Bronx teenagers each semester how to build 17-ft wooden boats from trees, how to row them along the Bronx River and how to examine and recognize pieces of the natural world in their very urban neighborhood.

Green says the reason for building boats with kids is in the metaphor. "Say you come in here at four o'clock, and I set you to work on shaping an oar. You work on that oar for two hours, and it's different than it was when you walked in. That's really powerful in my mind. That's like, you just changed the universe in a very short time. When was the last time you can think that you went into something and you came out and it was different? You have the power of change, so you can look at your own lives and realize that there are things you like and there are things you don't like, and say 'I don't just have to accept the things I don't like, I can alter them.'"

With additional camping and fishing trips, journeys up the Hudson to cut down trees, swimming and environmental education, as well as a tutoring program, career counseling sessions, and an informal network of social service contacts to help students deal with life issues outside the workshop, Green's goal is to "turn the kids on." By collecting scientific data and working on physical restoration projects along the Bronx River, Green hopes the students' energy will fuel a social revitalization of the neglected riverfront and encourage other residents to take an interest in the welfare of river.

"The links between being a tree-hugger and building boats is pretty consistent," said Funeka Bailey-Robinson, an adult volunteer. "We all say we care about the environment, but sometimes we have to be reminded."

"I've been on boats all over the world, but it's amazing what you can find right here in the Bronx," said Bailey. "Out on the river we saw so much wildlife -- ospreys and amazing ducks that dive under the water and then come up and surprise you. It's magical. This is what we need to make cities the way they should be, because you can't always get away."

Despite it's filthy reputation and its industrial wasteland appearance, the Bronx River is home to more wildlife than anyone would expect. Horseshoe crabs, shrimp, blue crabs, striped bass and flounder are just a few creatures sighted by researchers in the polluted waters this fall. Flowing 23 miles from Westchester County to the East River at Hunts Point, there is limited public access to the river's shores, and environmentalists are finding it hard to drum up support to clean and restore a waterway no one can get close to.

By bringing kids directly onto the river, Green tackles this apathy. What better way to grow attached to a place than by spending time exploring it, close-up, under your own oar power in a wooden boat you built yourself?

"Before Rocking the Boat, I was kind of closed-minded," said Meliza Pena, 18, a pretty young woman with a quick smile and gold hoop earrings. "My idea was that I'd just graduate from school and get some job. I didn't think about college. I was just keeping my head above water. Everybody needs support, and coming from where I was coming from, I wasn't getting it."

Meliza, who lives on the same city block as the workshop, first joined Rocking the Boat when she was a freshman in high school. At the time she was working 40 hours a week at a discount store after school and on weekends for $5 hour to help her single mother pay the bills. She was also failing two classes. At Green's workshop on 174th St., she found a haven.

"This was my frustration-free zone," she said. "I'd walk in the door and the feeling of being involved with everyone just changed everything."

After her first semester, in the spring of 2001, Green offered Meliza a job as a paid apprentice at making $7 hour to help run the workshop and teach other students the carpentry skills they need to build boats. Now she is a boss, mentor, and inspiration around the shop. She goes to Bronx Community College and is very active in campus environmental groups. She plans to be a teacher-but only to pay for law school, so that she can eventually become a judge. When asked if she knows any judges personally, she answered, "No, but I look up to one. Her name is Ruth Bader Ginsberg."

Meliza talks freely about her life and she swings her legs as they dangle from the dusty worktable she's sitting on. "In my community, it's tough sometimes. There's a lot of violence in my community, and drugs. There's a lot of jealousy and people just want to put you down. They say 'oh, she can't be so perfect' and would speak bad about me. But on the day of graduation, I got to walk through my building with my cap and gown on, and that felt great."

Meliza credits Green for helping her grow more responsible and more mature.

"All my friends hate their bosses," said Meliza. "For me, Adam's not even like my boss. He's my friend, and he's an inspiration to me," said Meliza. "He noticed something in me that I didn't even see in myself. A lot of people, they work for a little while and then give up. He's not like that. He'll try and try."
hat I didn't even see in myself. A lot k for a little while and then give up. He's not like that. He'll try and try."

* * * * * *

Green grew up on Central Park West, and as a teenager spent a lot of time aboard the Clearwater, a 106-ft sloop docked off the West Side Highway that folksinger Pete Seeger helped found as an floating classroom in the late 1960s. Clearwater crewmembers teach ecology and conservation to their charges, and Green says he took the lessons to heart.

"Every summer we'd go out for a sail on the boat and that was a really powerful experience," said Green. "We could go out into the middle of New York Harbor and feel totally in the wild-- even though you can see Manhattan Island right there. It becomes very clear that its Manhattan Island, and that consciousness of living on an island, surrounded completely by water and surrounded by nature is something that I became very aware of."

During his senior year at Vassar, Green took a month off to live and work as a on the Clearwater. Later that year, he volunteered to help some Harlem junior high students build a dinghy. That was his first boat-building experience, and he followed a magazine diagram as a guide, drawing on the limited carpentry skills he'd acquired the one summer he worked building houses upstate. After a successful test-float of the boat in the school pool, Green decided to expand upon his boat-building career, and he created a program to build a larger boat with students at Hostos Community College. That boat took eight months to build, and the team ultimately had to knock a concrete wall down to get the boat out of the workshop.

With another completed sea-worthy boat under his belt, Green began soliciting funds to found his own operation. By late 1998, Green had secured $53,000 in grant money, an initial workspace in the basement of the New Settlement housing development in the South Bronx, and a crew of local kids eager to come build boats.

Spend an hour with Green, and you can tell he is a hard worker. And he does not give up easily. Despite a yearning for country living, he won't leave New York City until Rocking the Boat is secure. Three and a half years ago, when Green's 26-year-old girlfriend was murdered two blocks from their apartment in Prospect Heights, then too, he refused to abandon what he'd begun.

"After it happened the thought was you know what? I want to defy what happened and to not break under its pressure and its power-not to give it that power. I'm going keep doing what I'm doing and keep on rocking and rolling."

Amy Watkins was a social work student at Hunter College, originally from Kansas, who met Green while she was working with domestic violence victims in the New Settlement, where Green had just founded rocking the boat. Around 9:30 p.m. on March 8, 1999, Watkins left work and took the inbound D train with Green. He got off at 125th St. in Manhattan to have dinner with his parents, and she continued on to Seventh St. Station in Brooklyn. Just two blocks from her house, she was stabbed in the back and killed by a stranger with a 10-inch knife who robbed her of $8 and fled.

Green says after her death a part of him wanted to leave all of New York City far behind, but he decided to stay on.

"The idea was man, this could force me out of my home, it could force me out of my job, it could force me out of my city, and a lot of me wants to get the hell out but at the same time I feel like the work that we're doing is really vital and this is a way to overcome that evil, or whatever it was, that happened."

* * * * * *

The air gets colder in the narrow alley as the three students and Green continue passing the cedar plank through the planer. On one side of them is a six-story crumbling brick tenement housing the New African Unity Grocery and a hubcap store. On the other side a 15-ft high chain-link fence topped with circular barbed wire blocks anyone from stepping into the empty overgrown lot next-door. Overhead, three stars twinkle in the November sky.

Other students come out to offer moral support, but quickly get too cold and leave. Sixteen-year-old Elliot Davila works tirelessly, and aside from an occasional shiver that he shakes off almost instantly, he doesn't seem to notice the temperature. "I love this place," he says above the scream of the saw. "I get to build boats and use power tools."

The walk from the cedar-strewn alley to the workshop is only about 30 feet, but in that distance you confront an environment in stark contrast to where you left and where you are going. The elevated 4 train rumbles and clanks loudly one block to the west. To the east, the busy Grand Concourse is also elevated. Directly across the street, and below, runs the Cross-Bronx Expressway-jammed and honking at 7 p.m. on this Monday night. The sidewalk is greasy and pitted with the grit of millions of shoe soles and the particles of air pollution spewed from the endless traffic rushing by.

In front of the glass windows of the workshop sits a 20 ft (?) long wooden box, about a foot square, elevated on saw horses. Steam pours through its cracks, as if the box is breathing heavily in the frozen air. Inside lay 10-ft long, ¾ inch thick "ribs" of oak that are steaming for 45 minutes until they are flexible enough to bend and be nailed inside the a boat's hull as supports.

Below the steaming box is a gas grill-sized fuel tank attached to an ancient looking iron grate that is actually a stove. The stove heats an equally ancient-looking black metal box full of water that feeds water vapor into the box by way of a metal tube about two inches in diameter. Green wears heavy oven mitt-style gloves to open the steam bath and remove each rib.

"This wood was standing in a forest one month ago," he said, smiling. Since that time the students have chopped it up, sawed it down, and planed it smooth.

Inside the shop, bright overhead lights reflect off multi-colored wall murals of blue oceans, white-sailed ships, and dark green trees. Other walls are painted sunshine-yellow, and maps of the Bronx river hang at various points around the room. Six students and an instructor are working on the 17-foot hull of the boat, which is propped up on sawhorses in front of the window. The boat is a rowing vessel called a Whitehall. Whitehalls were common in the 19th century when they ferried supplies from ship to shore in New York Harbor. They were first constructed on Whitehall St. in lower Manhattan in the 1820s and were used in ports throughout the country. To date, Green and his students have built eight of them. The first, completed in the spring of 1999, was christened the Amy Watkins.

This one, the Phoenix (I think) has been rowed along the Bronx River for two years, and this semester the students are converting it into a sailboat. One student lays on his back underneath the boat, slicing a cut along the keel with a Japanese saw which looks a little like a flat spatula that is serrated on both sides. The hole is for the new centerboard, which will keep the sailboat from being blown sideways in a crosswind.

Three students are hammering copper nails into some of the ribs that had already been set inside the hull the week before. The noise is deafening when all three strike at once, which is often, but no one seems to notice. One of the hammer-wielders is Tyiesha Smalls, 15, wearing a gold ring and two gold earrings that spell her name out in cursive writing. She pauses briefly in her work to show her partner where the "i" is loose in her rhinestone belt buckle that also spells "Tyiesha."

Green enters the shop with a rib he's just taken out of the steamer on the sidewalk. He and the other instructor try to bend it gently into place inside the curved hull. It snaps. Green tosses the smaller end onto the floor, and the two try again. It snaps again. They try a second rib, and this one bends, stretching into an arc that hugs the inside of the hull. Students rush to fasten the ends to the side of the boat with large C-clamps.

According to Green, the actual boat is not all that important. What count with him is the empowerment and confidence he hopes to bolster in the kids by the entire process. "We use boat building as a medium and only as a medium," he said. "The boat is not the goal of what we're trying to do. The goal is to give kids the opportunity to create something from nothing and really use it-- to be very basic to the process of creation, to understand how things get to the way they are-from something as concrete as a boat or as abstract as their own personalities."

One way he hopes to buttress this talk of creation and change is by creating a network of resources so that he can better help students cope with their lives outside the workshop. According to Green, a pressing new concern within the group is sexual abuse. In the last five months at Rocking the Boat, he said, three girls have disclosed that they have been abused. Two of the girls had never told anyone before.

"We're also finding that this is an environment where kids feel really, really comfortable and have been able to express things that they haven't been able to express to anybody else," said Green. "Which is pretty amazing to be on the receiving end of, but at the same time it's handing us some really big challenges."

Green is trying to do what he can. This summer he more than doubled his staff by hiring three adults to run the environmental education components of the program and to assist in the workshop. He is working to design an effective career and college-counseling program and continues to contact social workers and counselors to talk to students in need of additional services. He's also hoping to find time to carve out a life for himself outside Rocking the Boat now that he's hired additional help, but on a Monday night he is still in the office at 8:30 p.m., editing staff presentations, answering the phone, and joking around with students about the previous Saturday's fishing expedition.

For some of the students, it's these trips outside the city that are the most important part of the whole program. Elliot Davila, an aspiring photographer, says these journeys away from the Bronx are something he'd like to make a tradition in his life by getting out at least once a month.

"The atmosphere is so invigorating," he said. "When I smell that air I feel I can do anything."

In late October the group spent a weekend in Beacon, NY, camping out in tents on Pete Seeger's land along the Hudson.

"I love the night sky with all those pretty stars," said Elliot. "I know I'm freezing my buns off, but I love the view. It's all worth it just to see the night sky and the sunrise. You can't see that in New York City."