On a trip to San Francisco last month, I drove out to Marin County with a friend. We parked our car in the Vista Point parking lot, got out, and there, towering over a rise in the ground, was the Golden Gate Bridge. The bridge's two, 230-meter-high towers loomed majestically, wrapped in a shroud of drifting clouds, the traffic eerily disappearing into that, like it was going to someplace not of this Earth.
If you walk out onto the bridge, as I did on that foggy day, you reach a point in the middle where you are about 68 meters above the water. If you were to climb over the chest-high railing, and step into the air, you would have 4 to 7 seconds to contemplate your life while plummeting at 195 km/h, and then you would disappear into the cold waters of the bay. I wondered what you would think in those last few seconds; I wondered how many of the more than 1,300 (known) jumpers wanted to take back that last step of their lives, and how many embraced the deathly kiss of the sea.
The cause of these thoughts was director Eric Steel's documentary on jumpers, "The Bridge." He filmed the Golden Gate Bridge in 2004, when there were 24 successful suicide attempts. Steel caught many of them on film, in highly disturbing yet strangely mundane images of people climbing over the rail and suddenly plunging, or in ominous splashes just under the bridge.