I originally wrote this story for Men’s Journal, but as a result of a blow to my head during the researching of it, I can’t recall if it ever ran.
It is for good reason that in most places cliff jumping is an outlaw sport. Usually, you have to break some kind of ordinance and ignore a “No Trespassing” sign or two just to get to a point where you can launch yourself (unless your lack of forethought is exceptional) into a suitable body of water. And even though the most famous outlaw jumpers of all, Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, survived a 50-foot leap into a river (Butch, in the 1969 film version of their adventures, helped Sundance overcome his embarrassment about being unable to swim by pointing out, “Why, you crazy – the fall’ll probably kill ya!”), practitioners of the sport often enough end up with the kind of injuries, or worse, that make for a highly readable cautionary tale in the local paper. Along the coral cliffs near Negril Beach, at the western end of Jamaica, though, you’ll find no such ordinances, no such signs, and … no shortage of tourists with purple welts from hitting the water with anything but a perfectly smooth — legs together, arms tight at your sides — entry.
The most popular and, some would say, most risky Negril jump spot (in both instances because of the proximity of an every-flowing supply of Red Stripe beer and Appleton rum) is the cliff above Rick’s Café, where every afternoon in season people gather to watch the sunset and break one of the sport’s only two rules – don’t drink and jump. (The other, most often broken in tandem with the first, is to check the water depth before jumping.) The jump is about 35-feet, which might not seem like much, until you’ve seen somebody fished out nearly unconscious from a sloppy entry or walking around with a backside that looks like an overripe plum.
The “professionals,” hard-bodied locals, can double the height by shinnying up the trees that overhang the cliff and launching themselves from perches marked by hand-painted signs indicating not feet above the water but the minimum dollar amount ($10 or $20) they’ll jump for. If you must leap yourself, though, perhaps the better part of valor is to first try the more manageable heights at several of the hotels that sit along the cliffs, where, through a misunderstanding, I began my own jumping career.
I was at Tensing Pen, a cluster of garden cottages with a narrow foot bride spanning two coral promontories — 18 feet high — that guard the entrance to a boutique-size cove. Where a woman, with great enthusiasm, and a great smile, said, “You’ve got to try it,” naturally leading me to assume that she herself had done it, and that, despite my considerable apprehension (“scared silly” might be a better description), if she could, so could I.
I learned only after the jump, which lasted a couple of seconds at most, but long enough for me to review some of the reasons why it might have been a very bad idea, that she had not done that particular one, or any other. But by then I was too pleased with my success, or more accurately, survival, to care. And I like to tell myself that I moved on to another Negril hotel, The Caves, because the jump there were even higher. For a jumper, the advantage of The Caves is that there are several launching spots of different heights, from a pleasant little 15-foot drop through a hole in the ground into a sea cave, up to a break in the retaining wall of the dining patio that lets you wipe your mouth with your dinner napkin, take three steps, and plunge 25 feet.
Actually there is a third rule of cliff jumping, which is: Don’t make a jump you are not comfortable with just because peer pressure encourages it. So, even though the smiling woman at Tensing Pen caused me to break it, I can’t tell you, and am quite confident I will never be able to tell you, what the jump from Rick’s feels like. I can, however, describe the technique that worked for me at lesser heights.
After swimming underwater to personally determine the depth, step to the edge of the cliff to double check that a tsunami has not sucked the water out or that somebody with a camera and a kayak has not paddled in for a close-up shot. Then, from three paces out, preferably while an attractive person you would not like to embarrass yourself in front of looks on, take a deep breath and step purposefully forward, springing off with just enough force to get you away from the cliff wall but not enough to send you flailing like a windmill. Most important, once you start taking your steps, make absolutely no attempt to rationalize what you are doing, or you will falter, possibly for good. If any words at all must go through your head, let them be those that worked so well for the Sundance Kid:
“Ohhh…s-h-i-i-i-i-i-t!”
