newyorker.com/fact/content/?031013fa_fact
Issue of 2003-10-13 Posted 2003-10-06 Shortly after ten-thirty in the morning on Wednesday, March 19th, a real-estate agent named Paul Alarab began hiking across the Golden Gate Bridge. Midway along the walkway, which carries pedestrians and cyclists between San Francisco and Marin County, he stopped and climbed the four-foot safety railing. On a sunny day, as this day was, the view is glorious: Angel Island to the left, Alcatraz straight ahead, Treasure Island farther off, bisecting the long gray tangent of the Bay Bridge, and, layered across the hills to the south, San Francisco. Alarab turned and looped a thick rope over the railing, then wound it around his right wrist five times and grabbed it with his gloved right hand. His weekday attire usually consisted of a business suit with a "Peace" T-shirt underneath, but today he wore black gloves, black shoes, black pants, a black T-shirt, and black sunglasses. Through the palings of the bridge rail and the rush of traffic, he could see the mouth of the Bay to the west and the Pacific beyond. Clasping a typed statement to his chest with his left hand, he leaned backward, away from the railing, and waited for help to arrive. Alarab, a forty-four-year-old Iraqi-American, 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. Responding to a "10-31," bridge code for a jumper, four uniformed California Highway Patrol officers soon arrived at the rail, joined by three ironworkers who had been repairing the bridge. As it happened, a number of TV crews were at the south end of the bridge, filming standups about heightened terrorism precautions. A Telemundo crew came out, and Alarab began to read a declaration about Iraq's defenseless women, children, and elderly. His weight proved too much for the apparatus, and the can broke free with him inside. Survivors often regret their decision in midair, if not before. Ken Baldwin and Kevin Hines both say they hurdled over the railing, afraid that if they stood on the chord they might lose their courage. Baldwin was twenty-eight and severely depressed on the August day in 1985 when he told his wife not to expect him home till late. After treating himself to a last meal of Starbursts and Skittles, he paced back and forth and sobbed on the bridge walkway for half an hour. A beautiful German tourist approached, handed him her camera, and asked him to take her picture, which he did. He didn't even tell his wife, whom he married in 1990 and divorced in 1995. The only hint of his fascination was his business card, which he resisted changing despite his boss's complaint that it looked unprofessional. The card featured a photo of Alarab on the shore of the Bay; On that March morning, facing the camera, Alarab read an ambiguous handwritten addendum to his statement: "I would sacrifice myself as a symbol of children that will die. He bent to put his statement on the bridge, then placed his cell phone on it. He then unwound his wrist from the securing rope and stepped off the chord. The officers on the walkway craned their necks in a horrified line, watching him fall. At a 1977 rally on the Golden Gate supporting the building of an anti-suicide barrier above the railing, a minister, speaking to six hundred of his followers, tried to explain the bridge's power. Matchless in its Art Deco splendor, the Golden Gate is also unrivalled as a symbol: it is a threshold that presides over the end of the continent and a gangway to the void beyond. Just being there, the minister said, his words growing increasingly incoherent, left him in a rather suicidal mood. Every two weeks, on average, someone jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge. 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. At least twelve hundred people have been seen jumping or have been found in the water since the bridge opened, in 1937, including Roy Raymond, the founder of Victoria's Secret, in 1993, and Duane Garrett, a Democratic fund-raiser and a friend of Al Gore's, in 1995. The actual toll is probably considerably higher, swelled by legions of the stealthy, who sneak onto the bridge after the walkway closes at sundown and are carried to sea with the neap tide. Many jumpers wrap suicide notes in plastic and tuck them into their pockets. Adios--unfit," one seventy-year-old man said in his valedictory; Like Paul Alarab, who lived and worked in the East Bay, several people have crossed the Bay Bridge to jump from the Golden Gate; Jerome Motto, a local psychiatrist and suicide expert, says. Yet the locals take a peculiar pride in the bridge's notoriety. The idea of building a barrier was first proposed in the nineteen-fifties, and it has provoked controversy ever since. In the United States today, someone takes his own life every eighteen minutes, and suicide is much more common than homicide. He walked up and down the bridge wearing a sandwich board that said "Please Care. The impact had ripped off his left glove and his right shoe. It was Alarab's ex-wife, Rubina Coton: their nine-year-old son had been waiting more than two hours at school for his father to pick him up. When she did, he told her that her ex-husband had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. Tindel described Alarab's outfit, but Coton didn't recognize the clothes. And she recalled, suddenly, that their daughter had made such a necklace for Paul. Jumpers tend to idealize what will happen after they step off the bridge. Lanny Berman, the executive director of the American Association of Suicidology, says. On her way down in 1979, Ann McGuire said to herself, "I must be about to hit," three times. But the impact is not clean: the coroner's usual verdict, suicide caused by "multiple blunt-force injuries," euphemizes the devastation. Many people don't look down first, and so those who jump from the north end of the bridge hit the land instead of the water they saw farther out. Jumpers who hit the water do so at about seventy-five miles an hour and with a force of fifteen thousand pounds per square inch. Eighty-five per cent of them suffer broken ribs, which rip inward and tear through the spleen, the lungs, and the heart. Those who survive the impact usually die soon afterward. If they go straight in, they plunge so deeply into the water--which reaches a depth of three hundred and fifty feet--that they drown. These corpses suffer from "severe marine depredation"--shark attacks and, particularly, the attentions of crabs, which feed on the eyeballs first, then the loose flesh of the cheeks. On December 17, 2001, fourteen-year-old Marissa Imrie, a petite and attractive straight-A student who had planned to become a psychiatrist, left her second-period class at Santa Rosa High School, took a hundredand-fifty-dollar taxi ride to the Golden Gate, and jumped to her death. Though Marissa was always very hard on herself and had lately complained of severe headaches and insomnia, her mother, Rene Milligan, had no inkling of her plans. The site notes that many suicide methods are ineffective (poison is fatal only fifteen per cent of the time, drug overdose twelve per cent, and wrist cutting a mere five per cent) and therefore recommends bridges, noting that "jumps from higher than . Every year, Marissa had written her mother a Christmas letter reflecting on the year's events. On Christmas Day that year, Milligan, going through her daughter's things, found her suicide note. Everyone is better off without this fat, disgusting, boring girl. At the bridge's opening ceremony, in May of 1937, Strauss read a statement in a low voice, his hands trembling. The class poet at Ohio University, class of '91, Strauss also wrote an ode to mark the occasion: As harps for the winds of heaven, My web-like cables are spun; I offer my span for the tr...
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