An encounter this morning

This morning, while crossing the Fremont Bridge in Seattle, I noticed a pile of clothing, all red with matching red sneakers, lying in the middle of the pedestrian sidewalk. On top of the pile was a bluetooth speaker, playing what sounded like a religious prayer track, with singing and a voiceover repeating (paraphrase): which of God’s bounties will you deny? I was on my morning dog-walk, and pulled Walter away from the pile. Up ahead, I saw the presumed owner of the discarded clothing, a young man who had stripped to shorts and a t-shirt. He had climbed over the railing of the bridge.

The Fremont bridge is not very tall, with a boat clearance of 30 feet. It’s close enough to the water that it’s easy to imagine a kid or a drunk adult jumping into the canal on a dare, though there’s a sign warning anyone with ideas: the consequences of jumping from the bridge are fatal and tragic. It’s high enough that death or serious injury is highly possible, but low enough that it’s not guaranteed. And so my first thought was that perhaps the young man was a recreational jumper. But the matching pile of clothes and, especially, the prayer music made me worry that I was seeing an attempted suicide in progress.

When I reached him, I stopped and asked: why are you out on the railing?

I intend to jump, he replied.

Please don’t do that, I told him. He asked me why not. The best answer I could think of: because it’s good to be alive. I extended my hand and asked him to take it, which he did. Then, I worried that he’d lose his grip and fall, so I grabbed him underneath his armpits, lifted him, and helped him climb back over the railing. I asked the young man his name, told him mine, and offered to buy him a coffee. He stooped down to pet Walter, who was getting excited.

I gathered up the pile of shoes and clothing — there was also a phone and a wallet. Walter wanted to snatch the socks out of my hand. When we got off the bridge, the man was shivering from the cold and I waited while he put his clothes back on, the red linen suit with matching red sneakers. He told me again that he’d been planning on jumping from the bridge. I fumbled, and tried to think of things to say — I couldn’t think of anything much better than it’s going to be okay. He asked me for a hug, then asked if I believed in Jesus (I equivocated). The bluetooth speaker was still playing loudly: which of God’s bounties will you deny? I asked what kind of drink he wanted from the coffee shop, and he said he’d prefer hot chocolate to coffee.

Then a police car pulled up; someone else had reported him. I was worried about the presence of the cops, and I said in a cheerful voice that we were just going to get hot chocolate. But the young man didn’t seem to be worried. Someone said you were out on the bridge, the police officer asked, and he assented. On the officer’s suggestion, I went into the coffee shop and bought the hot chocolate and a pastry while he talked to the man. When I came back, the young man asked me to enter my contact info into his phone, which I did; the officer told me that I’d done a good thing and that there was a possibility the hospital would contact me later. As I was leaving with Walter, an ambulance pulled up.

I don’t want to speculate about the young man or how he might have come to climb over the railing of the bridge, but I hope he’s okay. Myself, I’m quite shaken. This all happened only this morning, and I’m not sure that putting it in the newsletter is the right thing to do. But I wanted to write it down quickly, while my memory was still clear.

Typically I don’t write my newsletters in advance. I usually write them on Sunday evenings, after dinner, all in one sitting, after thinking about them throughout the week. For today’s newsletter I was originally going to write a Standard Repertoire entry, about Francois Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmelites. It’s an opera about an order of nuns who are guillotined during the French Revolution after swearing a vow of martyrdom, and my thought was that it might have something to say about fear and courage during a time of political upheaval. After this morning, I’m worried that anything I write will be too glib, especially on the subject of religious martyrdom.

I’ll save the guillotined nuns for next week.