THE SWIMMERS.(Brief Article)

"When you swim in the Hudson, everyone thinks you're nuts, but native New Yorkers really think you're nuts," Teddy Jefferson said on a recent hot afternoon, while floating on his back in the river, off the Surfside Marina, at Chelsea Piers. It was high tide, and the water, warm, brackish, and buoyant, smelled of the sea. A tug's wake slapped at the pilings. "I don't like pools," he said. "I'm allergic to chlorine."

A few years ago, the Department of Environmental Conservation declared the Hudson swimmable (with some caveats), but Jefferson, as one of the founders of New York City's guerrilla swimming lobby, Swim the Apple, still meets with pockets of resistance. His wife, Ladan, for one. ("All the PCBs!" she says.) And the authorities, too. "One time when I went in," Jefferson said, "I was looking up and thinking, What the hell are all these helicopters doing so close to the water? Then a whole regatta--a police motorboat, Coast Guard cutters--came over to where I was swimming. I hauled myself out of the water. A fire engine and about three police cars pulled up to the end of the pier, and a platoon of people came running toward me." He turned out not to be the floater they'd been looking for.

Jefferson, a playwright and a translator, has been swimming off the lower-Manhattan waterfront for the past six years and claims never to have got so much as a sore throat from it. He swims well into autumn--one year he kept at it until Thanksgiving. His territory takes in the piers of the lower West Side. Since many of those piers either are closed to the public or forbid swimming, reaching them often involves commando tactics: scouting out police, scaling fences, or sneaking past marina attendants. Jefferson carries a rope in his pocket, with a loop for his foot, which he fastens to the edge of the pier as a makeshift ladder.

After his swim at Chelsea Piers, Jefferson tried the Gansevoort Peninsula, a wide pier half a mile downtown that houses an old Department of Sanitation incinerator. "That's a good place for swimming," he said. "You walk out through all the trash trucks and then there's a little cobbled alleyway. It's very beautiful."

A few blocks upriver, Jefferson peered over a ...