What's Right.(family ritual of jumping off bridge)

A Great Leap Forward

Baysville is a crossroads village in the Ontario lake country, about three hours northeast of the city of Toronto. It's a pretty place, with a few shops, an ice-cream store, a rustic restaurant, a row of quaint old houses, and a bridge. The bridge is actually busier than any of the town's roads. It overhangs a waterway leading into the big lakes of central Muskoka, and in the course of a single summer's day a couple of hundred vacationers will pass underneath it.

But this is not an essay about Canadian riverine transportation, fascinating though that subject is. The Baysville bridge is important in our house not because of what drives over it or cruises under it but because of what goes off it: Every single member of my wife's family.

When my wife and her brothers were young, my in-laws regularly rented a shack (they called it a "cottage") near the little town. And it was my father-in-law's practice, every summer, to stop the car at the little park beside the bridge, order all the kids out, and then dare them to jump off the bridge. He always led the way: He would climb onto one of the posts of the guardrail, stretch, and then dive headlong into the canal below. The kids would follow more or less reluctantly, feet-first. To this day, my wife says that whenever she has to do anything frightening, she tells herself: "Well, it's easier than going off the Baysville bridge."

Over the years, I heard these stories many times and even watched the jumps on scratchy old family films. I never quite got the point of them. Jumping off bridges just for the hell of it seemed to me a pretty lunatic way to spend an afternoon. But those of you who have been married for a while know that one doesn't question the habits or amusements of one's spouse's family, however bizarre they may seem.

This summer I saw the bridge in person for the first time. My wife and I had booked our two elder children into a summer camp up the road from Baysville, and we spent the weekend before camp began at a nearby lodge. It turned into quite a family reunion: My wife's parents came and her two brothers and their wives and children and the next thing I knew, we'd all agreed to rendezvous at the Baysville bridge on Saturday morning.

I parked my van at the park and walked toward the bridge. I'd been preparing some little joke about how these things never seem as high in adult life as they did when you're a child-until I saw the thing. It was high: fifteen feet or more over the surface of the cold, black ...