The High Bridge

The High Bridge

         In an open plain somewhere near Santa Fe, New Mexico, The Rio Grande Gorge is spanned by the High Bridge. The bridge creaks in the wind, and the sound of the river echoes up the canyon walls to listeners. People drive across every so often, but it is far from the view of civilization, except for a couple of picnic tables up the hill. When my family stops to take pictures, we decide to park on the far side of the bridge and walk back over it. I receive a shock when I first set my feet on the bridge; it is mobile. Whenever a car passes, the structure responds, and people standing on the bridge for the first time shudder and grope for the handrail. It’s unsettling to feel the ground beneath my feet, which appears so solid a chunk of steel, suddenly get up and dance, when a bridge has never been anything more to me but a way to cross over to the other side. After that first car, I start to notice every miniscule shift in the bridge. I wonder what would happen to me if it collapsed. Would I have time to run to the side, or would I let myself fall? These morbid thoughts startle me as much as the restless bridge, but they come as naturally as a contemplation of lunch.

         Eventually, I gather courage to step farther onto the bridge. With heart hammering, I make it to the center, still gripping the handrail; I come to a small concrete platform that reaches out over the gorge. It was added for tourists to get better panoramic pictures of the gorge. I, however, haven’t touched my camera yet. I’m not mentally prepared to walk over this bridge without looking to my feet with each step to check for secure footing, and sliding my hand across the rail just in case I stumble. I wouldn’t want to accidentally tumble over the side and into the angry river below. No, when I get to the platform I hesitate. Instinctively, I don’t dare venture onto this most perilous-looking section, where I can’t see the supports that must be holding it up. The gorge is impressively deep and impossibly wide. The bridge is two hundred meters above the river. Even with both hands clasped over the railing, I still feel as though I stand on the edge of Mount Olympus with no handrail. On this bridge, there is no security. I venture to release the railing, and stiff wind picks up, shuddering the bridge and making me stumble and hang onto the railing again. But my bravery is growing.

         I step out onto the concrete platform, hand trailing on the bars that prevent me from falling. I consider myself a bit accustomed to the bridge now, and I find some small pride in that fact. I can look around a little more calmly, and I start to notice that what I at first thought were decorations are in fact gifts and messages to departed souls. Those in mourning have tied bouquets to the rails at intervals, wrapped in ribbons. The silk flowers have all faded, and only stems remain of the real flowers. Nestled in one gap between the rails, a stub of wax is the last remaining witness to a candlelight vigil. To the side of the platform, folded in plastic and secured to the railing with twine, is a letter. I can barely make out a few tear and rain-marked words on the page, which identify it as addressed to a jumper, before the impression of intrusion into a stranger’s privacy is too strong to continue peering through the plastic. There is a horrible realization: people have chosen to die on this bridge. More than two or three chose this end, judging by the bouquets. Leaning as far as I dare over the side, with a cold breeze pushing back my hair, I consider whether I would have the courage to die that way. I have no intention of doing so, but if I had to die, would I be able to put one leg, then the other over the rail, to stand on the three-inch ledge with the wind pulling at my clothes and claiming which parts of me to tear off, and to let go? Would I scream on the way down, or would I enjoy the fall, my last experience on earth? Would I feel the cold water, or would I immediately die on the rocks? Most of all, I wonder what reasons had driven these people to put an end to everything they had built up in this life. It seems like too large of a sacrifice with too little justification. I can’t believe how willing some humans are to leap into the unknown. I suppose that whether it is regarded as an adventure or an escape, the romanticized dilemma argued by Hamlet, depends upon the jumper. Then there are the cold and stiff facts of death. After death, there are no more chances to try and fix your life. Suicide is selfish, too. In Asian cultures, it is the duty of the children to care for their parents in their old age. If the child commits suicide, she is betraying her duty to her family. But people who jump off of bridges are not thinking about the family they leave behind. They are smothering in supposedly unsolvable problems.

         Dr. Philip “Death” Nitschke, a leader in the pro-euthanasia movement in Australia, believes that anyone who wants to commits suicide should be permitted to do so, whether they are a teen or elderly adult. He simplified the basis of his movement to one idea: he believes that human life is not sacred. This statement is shocking. Human life should be treasured and protected whenever possible. Even people who are pro-choice in the abortion debate wouldn’t want adults around them to just die when things weren’t going well. Many depressed people only need to find the right pill to balance their bodies’ systems, and they can live happy and functional lives. Letting them kill themselves deprives them of that potential happiness. That’s why we cry for children who die—they’ve been deprived of a potentially happy future. The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco has suicide hotline phones installed at intervals along the bridge, and a small fraction of potential jumpers has lived because of this precaution. Some people argue against such protections because of their cost. The ones who survive their troubled time of life are proof that there is always hope; if only people could be made to see it before it is too late. Where there is hope, a life is worth saving.

         A large truck passes by, and in the instant I look up, the bridge shudders again. My hand finds the rail, gripping the uneven roughness, and as my heart calms again, I notice that the rough texture is carved from names. There must be thousands over the span of the bridge, on both sides, up and down the top and bars of the handrail. Each set of letters scratched into the rail or written with marker or paint is left by someone who did not want to be forgotten. I wonder which of these names belonged to jumpers, carving their own gravestone, a last memento of themselves on this earth. Some names must belong to the families and friends of the lost, who marked their passage as they stopped to pray. It’s likely that the majority of the names, however, belong to random passersby who, like me, stopped to ponder the vastness of the gorge.

         I have the urge to honor these names, and the people who carved them there. This bridge is a monument, built over the decades by thousands of people, in honor of a few who lost their way. I can’t mark my own name among them, even if there was a space left for it, because my brother is watching from the other side, but at least I can walk the span of the bridge. I take my time, still carefully placing my feet, but now my hand slides over the rail as if to comfort an old friend, not out of necessity, but of companionship. I don’t miss the tiniest span of wood. When I accidentally skip over one name, distracted by my brother calling to me from the far side of the bridge, I step back to touch that section again. It feels like a sin to walk over this place without reverence, though it is neither hallowed nor even truly ground.

         When my mother is done taking pictures and my brothers and father have been waiting at the picnic tables for a while, I finish walking both sides of the bridge. The view is certainly astounding, but it only reinforces the tiny amount of power we have over our own lives. The bridge, though now an impressive part of the view, is miniscule compared to the vastness of the river. It’s a multi-purpose tool created by humans that fails to rival the glory of nature. In its lifetime, a bridge serves many purposes. In its most common use it serves as a good place to cross over whatever river it spans. A bridge will also on occasion serve as a meeting place for two people. Thus a bridge is a symbol of compromise, where people from different places and viewpoints can meet while remaining on the border of their own territories. A bridge is also a place where your name can be immortalized. The desire to write our names on semi-permanent structures is a testament to the anonymity humans so often feel. We want to be remembered, even if it must be by defacing a public work. This bridge and others like it are places that people can come to say farewell to those who have gone before them into the afterlife. They can make it a grave, for it was the last place their loved ones were known to be alive. For all these reasons, a bridge is often the place chosen for people jumping into the unknown. No one, up until the point of death, is ever certain of precisely what lies on the other side, but despite this uncertainty, so many choose this dramatic passage and this terrifying bridge as their place to cross over.