Today, I watched "The Bridge," a documentary about people who jump from the Golden Gate Bridge. I grew up in the Bay Area, and the movie illuminates it beautifully. Two stories stand out in the film. One is the testimony of a young man who hurls himself over the guardrail--and survives the fall. The other is the story of a man from Pittsburgh who's taking photographs on the bridge when a girl climbs over the railing.
I was taking pictures of Alcatraz at the time. And while I was taking a picture, I saw, like, out of the corner of my eye a girl walking by, and she climbed over the rail, and she did it so smoothly it was almost like she was going to, like she had her own little clubhouse, I don't know, like she was going to sit on the ledge to, like, eat lunch. So I got a couple pictures of her climbing over, and then I start taking pictures of her standing on the ledge there, and I realized that this girl was about to jump. But when I was behind the camera, it was almost like it wasn't real 'cause I was looking through the lens, I was, actually, like, I guess I was waiting for her to jump 'cause I thought there's nothing I can do, it's too late... I started yelling out to the girl, you know, asking her what was wrong. She seemed to be speaking in a different language and basically, like, tuning me out, like really not thinking about what I was saying. So I got up on the rail, and I reached out, and I really didn't know I was going to be able to grab the back of her jacket, but once I grabbed it, I just lifted her over the rail and got her down on the ground. She started fighting me a little bit, so I just sat on her chest and just called 911, and they were probably there within a couple minutes... As crazy as it sounds, I think of myself like a National Geographic photographer must feel, and he's behind the camera filming and there's, like, a big tiger that's, like, running at him, and he's, like, his footage is so great he forgets that, you know, in a couple seconds that tiger's gonna be on top of him. But it's like when you're in that camera, it's like you're behind it, and you don't really think about what's going on, and that's where I had to separate, or I had to actually, like, get out of that, that mode of thinking, and actually act on it, and do something to help her.
