Beauty at a Price

A somewhat delayed blog.....

Each lamp post on the Golden Gate Bridge has a hidden significance. One the tourists thankfully do not see or acknowledge.

22 years after I first visited San Francisco I'm trying to remember the walks and highlights from that visit unsuccessfully. I'm staying on Vallejo in Russian Hill where Chinatown and the Italian quarter seem to merge into other, naturally. This morning I ran to Golden Gate bridge, across this astonishing structure and back along Union Street home. There's no logical reason to run all the way across a bridge, stop on the other side and run back. But the GG is such an imposing structure that you are drawn to it, and to look at SF from the other side. The view from the Marin Headlands actually isn't anything special. Its the bridge that's special. Although it's a rust rather than golden color, it has a flow and lines that are beautiful. It seems to bend from the peninsula to the headland, arching out across the channel until it reaches land again.

Running the bridge isn't exactly a peaceful experience, with traffic thundering across. Nor is it a particularly romantic one, as I think of the average of one person a week who takes their life jumping. The Bridge is the second most common suicide site in the World behind the Yangtze River Bridge in Japan, with over 1200 suicides and counting. Well not actually counting as official records were stopped in 2005. The 'success' rate is 98% (one woman survived only to try again successfully a second time) and the most common place is in the middle (the locations are mapped by the position of lamp posts). There is a french phrase l'appel du vide, which literally means the call of the void, and is used to describe that feeling when you are on a high ledge and have a desire, feeling of 'I wonder what it would feel like to jump'. Apparently it's very common. Up on the Golden Gate Bridge, with it's low handrail, 80 meter drop to the sea and stunning vistas, it's easy to think, even for a second 'what if...' This is very different to the traumatic and bleak place you would have to be to seek out a place to end it all, despite the strong urge for all humans to live.

Nevertheless, police, workers and volunteers estimate that they save 70-80% of those planning to jump by vocal or physical methods. There seems only a minority who want to see the bridge 'suicide proofed' as it will spoil the aesthetics and cost a fortune apparently. The rest accept the toll as a bi-product of this piece of architectural beauty. As you run across the only indications are strategically placed phone boxes suggesting you reach out before you step out. Would a higher barrier really spoil the view of the bridge from the headland and not be worth 50 lives a year? Suicide isn't an terminal disease. Those talked down from attempt DO have a 10-15% chance of completing their mission, but that means 80-85% will live. Is the cost of a strategically positioned fence and the loss of aesthetics not a small price to pay for saving 40 lives a year?

Maybe I'm alone in these macabre thoughts, and the majority of tourists just go 'wow', but I felt a feeling of emptiness imagining someone's last thoughts as they made that fateful, mostly irreversible decision.