Suicides are like tourists. They flock to landmarks.
The Eiffel Tower is 1,063 feet tall, but falling requires skill or luck to navigate the many wires and beams. Rating: Romantic but challenging, not for beginners. Rating: 2 Stars.
Niagara Falls has sent 5,000 bodies downstream between 1840 and 2011. Rating: Cold and noisy but nearly certain; no skill necessary. Rating: 3 Stars.
The Golden Gate Bridge, spanning between San Francisco and the North Bay, is 746 feet high. In his New Yorker article titled, “Jumpers,” Tad Friend reports the following assessment by Gladys Hansen, the city’s unofficial historian: “What makes the bridge so popular, is that it’s a monument, a monument to death.”
In Night Falls Fast, Kay Redfield Jamison describes the material effect of jumping, or more precisely, the real effect of a vertical-water-landing at seventy-five miles an hour. “Trauma from water impact is extreme, ripping apart the great blood vessels, demolishing the central nervous system, and transecting the spinal cord.” Coast Guard officer Ron Wilton explains: “It’s as if someone took an eggbeater to the organs of the body and ground everything up.”
At the Golden Gate Bridge most die from impact. Some miss the water and hit land, a small outcropping on the north side of the bridge — they elected not to look down beforehand. A few survive impact and then drown. One is known to have been killed by a shark.
The Bay Bridge is 526 feet high and spans between San Francisco and the East Bay. Comparatively, the Bay Bridge would do just fine. Nearly no one jumps from the Bay Bridge. People travel across the Bay Bridge in order to reach the Golden Gate in order to jump.
Dr. Berman, executive director of the American Association of Suicidology, explains: “Suicidal people have transformation fantasies and are prone to magical thinking, like children and psychotics. Jumpers are drawn to the Golden Gate because they believe it’s a gateway to another place. They think that life will slow down in those final seconds, and then they’ll hit the water cleanly, like a high diver.”
For some, life does in fact slow down. It takes four seconds to reach the bottom. “On her way down in 1979, Ann McGuire said to herself, three times: ‘I must be about to hit.’”
The media does not help. Friend writes:
The coverage intensified in 1973, when the Chronicle and the Examiner initiated countdowns to the five-hundredth recorded jumper. Bridge officials turned back fourteen aspirants to the title, including one man who had “500” chalked on a cardboard sign pinned to his T-shirt. The eventual “winner,” who eluded both bridge personnel and local-television crews, was a commune-dweller tripping on LSD.
In 1995, as number 1,000 approached the frenzy was even greater. A local disc jockey went so far as to promise a case of Snapple to the family of the victim. That June, trying to stop the countdown fever, the California Highway Patrol halted its official count at 997. In early July, Eric Atkinson, age twenty-five, became the unofficial thousandth. He was seen jumping, but his body was never found.
People do not help either. In 1976, engineer Roger Grimes “walked up and down the bridge wearing a sandwich board that said ‘Please Care. Support a Suicide Barrier.’” There is resistance to a barrier due to cost and aesthetics. “‘People were very hostile,’ [said] Grimes. ‘They would throw soda cans at me, or yell, Jump!’”[7] But suicides do make for good sport. “In the eighties, workers at a local lumberyard formed ‘the Golden Gate Leapers Association’ — a sports pool in which bets were placed on which day of the week someone would jump.”
Only 1% of jumpers (or fallers) survive. Friend tells the story of Paul Alarab. On Wednesday, March 19, 2003, Alarab made his way to the outermost beam, 32-inches wide and called “the chord.”
A forty-four-year-old Iraqi-American, Alarab was a large, balding, friendly man who kept a “No Hate” sign in his office at Century 21 Heritage Real Estate in Lafayette, across the Bay. The day before, he’d told a co-worker that the prospect of civilian deaths in Iraq made him sick to his stomach. Alarab had chosen this day, the first of America’s war against Saddam Hussein, to make a statement of opposition by jumping. It was his second time out on the chord.
Alarab is among the 1%. In 1988, he was protesting the “plight of the handicapped and the elderly.” It is not clear that he intended to jump, but he fell anyway. Falling, Alarab thought to himself: never again. Protesting the war in 2003 he fell again. It is not clear if he jumped or slipped. In any case, he died this time.
At the opening ceremony of the Golden Gate, in May 1937, chief engineer and visionary Joseph Strauss reprimanded reporters who inquired about the attraction for jumpers. “Who would want to jump from the Golden Gate Bridge?,” scolded Strauss.
In his official remarks, he stated of the bridging of the Bay: “What Nature rent asunder long ago man has joined today.” Friend concludes his article: “Joseph Strauss believed that the Golden Gate would demonstrate man’s control over nature.” Rating: It’s the Golden Gate Bridge; with deduction for 1% survival: 4 Stars.
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Tad Friend, “Jumpers,” New Yorker 79, no. 30 (2003).
Kay Redfield Jamison, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1999), 148.