Bridge over Icy Water

by Jeff Isaacson

  Bridge over Icy Water

  By Jeff Isaacson

  Text copyright © 2018 Jeff Isaacson

  All Rights Reserved

  Table of Contents

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  More Mysteries!

  About the Author

  1

  I am fascinated by two things: bridges and suicides.

  My fascination with bridges began when I was six years old. I was in Costa Rica. I was on vacation with my parents and my older brother.

  I remember very little about the vacation. Frankly, I remember very little even about the moment that changed my life.

  For example, I know that I was in a rainforest. I was surrounded by trees. Those trees undoubtedly had gnarled, smoothed, or peeling bark. The rainforest was full of animals. It is certain that monkeys chattered, birds twittered, and perhaps even a jaguar growled in the background. No doubt a smell hung in the air, perhaps like eucalyptus, cedar, or cinnamon. The air was humid, so full of water, and water combines so readily with so many things, that maybe something lingered in my mouth like the coating that remains after a glass of chocolate milk. Maybe even the air had a taste.

  I don’t know.

  All I can tell you is that there was a moment in Costa Rica that changed my life. This is what happened.

  I was on a bridge over a river I could not then and cannot now name. The bridge was a rope suspension bridge. It was just wide enough for one person to step onto those tea colored planks, grip the rope handrail, and bounce up and down over the river one step at a time.

  The river roiled below the bridge. Water seemed to turn in little cyclones as it met smoothed, slate gray boulders. Then those cyclones exploded through the nooks and crannies between the stones, frothing madly like a two liter bottle of soda shaken almost to the point of bursting. The water seemed slightly equine. It was like it startled and burst into a mad gallop. There was a sound coming off of that water. We lived close enough to the airport back then that some planes came right over our roof. That was what it sounded like. It sounded like a commercial airliner passing close by.

  I immediately loved this swaying bridge with its dizzying views of the furious river below more than anything. I ran back and forth across it. I stood in the middle, over the roaring, foam capped rapids and discovered that I could sway the whole bridge from side to side.

  I suppose that a normal mother would’ve raced out on that bridge, grabbed their six year old daughter, carried her off the bridge, and scolded her. After all, I was still in the limit testing invincibility of youth. And even at six, I noticed that there were big gaps in between the vertical ropes on the suspension bridge that I was shaking. I realized that I was certainly small enough to fall through them into that churning, turgid river below. I wasn’t worried though because I planned to hold on tight to the ropes.

  My mom didn’t rescue me though. My mom just sat on the shore. She didn’t even really watch.

  But that exhilarating moment of swaying on a flimsy bridge that I easily could’ve fallen off of into the rapids and almost certain death wasn’t the moment that made me hopelessly obsessed with bridges. Although, I suppose that Freud would say something like I couldn’t have had the second moment without that first intense moment.

  The moment that made me love bridges, especially bridges over water, came a little later. It came that night. When I tossed and turned in the lower bunk of a small cabin without indoor plumbing.

  At first, I didn’t know why I couldn’t sleep. I just kept thinking of being on that bridge. I thought of swaying on it. I thought of running on it. I thought of the water roaring below. And then I had the thought that I think I had been trying to think for hours. It was this:

  How did that bridge get built?

  I puzzled at this. I knew that there was nothing there before that bridge was built. There was just this amazing gap, this torrent of foaming, fulminating water and two distant shores. How did somebody get that first rope across?

  My first thought was that someone made a lasso and just threw it across the gap. But even as a six year old, I realized that no human being could’ve possibly thrown ropes that heavy across a gap that wide.

  I thought about this for a long time. I was determined to come up with a realistic solution to this problem.

  I got really sleepy. So I decided to accept the idea that the way the support ropes got from one side of the gap to the other was that someone climbed the tallest tree on one edge of the gap. They tied one end of that heavy rope to the top of that tree. Then that person swung on the rope, Tarzan style, to the other side of the shore. There, they anchored that end of the rope on the other side. As they did that, someone else climbed up to the top of the tree on the other side. They untied the knot. Then they climbed down with the other end of the rope and anchored their side of the rope on the other side of the gap.

  I was so happy when I fell asleep that night. And I had pleasant dreams of bridges.

  I had never encountered such a puzzle.

  You may be wondering how they actually construct rope suspension bridges. I know how to do it now. I hope I do. I inspect bridges for a living. But if you don’t know. I’m not going to tell you. Ask your preferred search engine if you want, but listen to me.

  It’s better to not know.

  So that’s how I became obsessed with bridges. It’s complicated and beautiful. At least it was to a six year old.

  The story of how I became fascinated with suicides is simple and tragic. Six months after I discovered the magic of bridges, my mother committed suicide.

  I’m fascinated with bridges, especially bridges over water. So I became an engineer who specializes in bridges in Minnesota, a place with a lot of water. Given that I indulged in my fascination with bridges, you may also wonder. Am I suicidal, maybe even something of an expert on being suicidal?

  The answer to that is perhaps, in a way.

  First of all, I would never take my own life. I don’t mind my life. I even vaguely enjoy it. I get paid to inspect bridges. I get home most nights and go for runs of various lengths. (I’m a marathoner.) I like running. I get to research suicides because I’m single and have the time.

  The single part is the kind of suicide though.

  Drawing my family tree is like drawing the family tree of a wooly mammoth. It is like drawing a family tree of the last family of hominins that had tails.

  Besides my dad, my brother, and me, my mom is survived by only a few relatives, one sister and two aunts, all spinsters and old maids. My dad’s side of the family is just the opposite. He has four living relatives, all male. He has one brother, two cousins, and one uncle. I think that his uncle is still in jail. As for the two cousins, one is living the Unabomber life in self-imposed exile in Montana, while the other is doing the same in Alaska. All three of them are chronic alcoholics. Although none of them have as serious a drinking problem as my dad’s brother, my uncle, Mikey. Mikey probably holds the world record for near death experiences. He may be the lowest, meanest, gutter drunk in Las Vegas. My dad texts me every few months that Mikey may die. It hasn’t happened yet.

  I have given you an accounting of every single member of my family except for my dad, my brother, and me. As for my dad, something very important died in him when my mom committed suicide. It was something that he never got past no matter how much family therapy he bravely soldiered through, “for us”.

  For my part, I thought that the therapy was absurd. Especially when I got older a
nd the therapist brought up the idea of penis envy. Certainly I had wondered what I’d do with a penis if I had one. I think that every young woman has. I mean I’d probably just do what guys do with it, but who knows? Maybe I’d do something with a penis that had never been done before. But the idea that this penis envy was some major psychological impediment was absurd to the point that I laughed in his face.

  It didn’t seem to do a lot of good for my brother or my dad either. I regret that therapy back then was still all about Freud. I think that one of the newer somewhat scientific styles of therapy would have been better for all of us. I think that we all have that kind of analytic mind that balks at some of Freud’s nonsense.

  My father never remarried. I think that he became Professor Emeritus in the Anthropology Department at the University of Minnesota in 1991. He’s technically still working at the U.

  My dad was a wunderkind. He published like his hair was on fire beginning when he got his Ph.D. from Harvard at only twenty-three until my mom died when he was thirty-three. Those ten years of publications were so significant that he was allowed a kind of privilege that I think only somebody who is a mandatory citation in every scholarly paper in their field in academia can get. He was transferred to an administrative position where no one cares if all he does is show up, read poetry, and write his own (bad) poetry. So that’s what he does.

  My brother inherited the family legacy. He has battled depression and alcoholism since his teens. He lives in Chicago. I have a digital subscription to two Chicago area newspapers, and I check them every morning to see if my brother has followed the example my mom set for us.

  My brother was married. He’s divorced.

  He tried to have kids. His sperm have low motility. That means that his sperm aren’t active enough to fertilize an egg.

  That could improve if he quit drinking and started taking better care of himself, but that doesn’t seem likely to happen.

  So the fate of two bloodlines depends entirely on my ability to spawn. And I have no use for a kid.

  I’m on the pill. Right now that seems like the kind of redundancy that’s sometimes built into bridges. A one inch plate will work? Why not upgrade to a two inch plate if it doesn’t add too much to the weight or cost? Redundancy. Who knows maybe a fully loaded cargo plane will have to make an emergency landing on the bridge? Then won’t we look smart for having thought of those two inch plates?

  I know that I don’t want kids. I really don’t know that I even want a man.

  I get at least one offer/harassment almost every day. That’s just life for a rare female engineer. They say that when you’re serving in a war zone, a woman who is an eight becomes a ten.

  Engineering is like that.

  I’m not the worst looking woman in the world. I’m a little better than average. But I’m thin because I run so much. And I think that guys value that more.

  I used to work with a woman who I thought was so pretty that I was almost attracted to her. She had these beautiful, full bodied, ink black tresses like an onyx waterfall. Her bright brown eyes, whisper of a nose, full, pouty, ruby lips, and soft chin made her face so pretty. But she was a little overweight. So the engineers and contractors that I worked with on that project harassed me first before moving on to her. Even though I thought that she was much prettier than me.

  I know exactly what I want in a guy. I want a guy who is like a cat. I want a guy who can occupy his own time. I want a guy who only comes up to me when he can tell that I need affection.

  The guys that I meet are dogs. They’re always jabbing their snouts under your hands.

  And yes, you can say that maybe it’s because the guys that I meet are all socially awkward engineers. And there is some truth to that. I was recently approached by a man who clearly tried to flatter me by telling me that I had, “A modicum of attractiveness.” To be honest, I admired his straightforwardness a little. And he wasn’t cheap. He offered to take me to Cirque du ‘Sota. (Basically a local version of Cirque du Soleil and almost as pricy.) And then back to his place. That was literally in the proffer, like a quid pro quo.

  So, yes, I am surrounded by socially awkward men now, but I was in college once. I used to meet other kinds of people. I used to date a rock star. No kidding.

  I think that the only reason that I stayed with him as long as I did was because everyone was jealous of me. He was insufferable. He was obsessed with himself. He’d always ask me about his hair, his outfit, etc.

  I felt like I was in a lesbian relationship with a woman who had some kind of birth defect that made her have a shocking indifference to and a complete inability to comprehend the emotional life of another human being. And at first I thought it was just him. But now I think that it might be all men.

  So I’m not just a suicide. I’m the slow motion murderer of two bloodlines.

  You’ve probably already figured out that since I’m fascinated by bridges and suicides, I must be most fascinated by suicides that happen on bridges. If so, you’re right.

  What is so interesting about suicides on bridges, or more specifically jumping off of bridges, is how trendy certain aspects of it are. It inspires a little morbid hilarity in me. Example? Suicidal in San Francisco? You can’t just jump off the Bay Bridge to your death! How gauche! You simply must leap to your death from the Golden Gate Bridge!

  Not to mention, suicides always increase once someone famous commits suicide. There’s a whole peer pressure from beyond the grave element to them.

  Apparently, everyone’s mother besides mine asked their child the same question when that child said that they had to do something because everyone else was doing it. I’m sure you know that question because I’m sure you heard it too, but I’m going to repeat it here. “If everyone jumped off of a bridge would you do it too?”

  It’s supposed to be a question with an answer that is obviously no. It’s a question designed to make a kid realize that they don’t have to do what everyone else is doing.

  The reality is just the opposite. Very few people are jumping off of bridges. Yet every time they do some follow. Where does that logic get you?

  If everybody was jumping off of a bridge, I think that a hell of a lot of people would follow them off of that bridge. We are more lemming than we think.

  That’s the conclusion of one who has exhaustively researched American suicide. We are more lemming than we want to believe.

  After years of voyeurism into suicide, it’s rare that I see something new, something surprising, something that I, something that maybe no one else, had ever seen before.

  Such an incident happened in January of 2018. That incident made me (eventually) set pen to paper.

  It happened to one poor young college girl in the dead of night on the Third Avenue Bridge that connects downtown Minneapolis to Northeast Minneapolis. The bridge stretches high across a yawning gap over the Mississippi River.

  I’ve seen the video that the police released to try to identify the woman before she became known to authorities at least a thousand times. She staggers onto the bridge. She veers in slow, swaying steps. Then she stops for a moment before she makes a final wild stagger. The video cuts off. Presumably that was when she went over the railing and fell to her death.

  There was something about that final stagger that I couldn’t get out of my mind. It bugged me in the way that the puzzle of how someone built that rope bridge bugged me when I was six years old in that cabin in Costa Rica.

  Later reports identified her as a twenty-one year old student at the University of Minnesota, named Faith Nguyen. She had grown up in the Minneapolis suburb of Columbia Heights.

  Toxicology reports noted that Faith had so much alcohol in her system that it was possible that she would’ve died from alcohol poisoning if she hadn’t careened over the railing and into the frigid waters of the Mississippi River on a January night in Minnesota. She also had the date rape drug in her system. Which was odd because she hadn’t been raped. Of course that might ha
ve suggested that this poor woman had narrowly escaped one unspeakably awful tragedy only to stumble to her death as she fled. Another odd thing, was that she had a needle mark as if she had recently injected intravenous drugs. Yet there was no evidence of any drug(s) other than alcohol and the date rape drug in her system. The coroner ruled the death suspicious. That meant that it was technically no longer an official suicide, but I was still fascinated.

  I watched video of her final moments on my computer over and over again.

  Then, one day, months later, I got up to make myself a sandwich. As I was peeling off a piece of lettuce to go on my sandwich it hit me.

  I knew what fascinated me so much about Faith Nguyen’s final moments.

  She appeared to have a moment before she careened over the side of the bridge where she made a semiconscious (perhaps Freud would say unconscious) decision to flop over into the river! I had seen it a thousand times. She had paused and gathered herself the way that an extremely intoxicated person does when they have some onerous task in front of them, like making it to their bed to pass out. She had paused. She took a deep breath. And then the lurch that followed looked so half intentional! That lurch flung her over the railing. The part of her mind that craved death had taken advantage of that young, vibrant girl when all of her defenses were down!

  That was what I couldn’t take my mind off of! Her actions were something entirely new to me! It was like half a suicide, a semi-suicide, if you will.

  Even though the police were after whoever gave her the date rape drug for possible murder charges, it occurred to me that what the perpetrator really should be charged with was something more like assisted suicide.

  It was impossible for me to put myself in the shoes of that poor girl, but I guessed that she hadn’t had any desire to kill herself when she was sober. I had certainly been drunk a few times, but never so much so that I nearly drank myself to death. That act alone indicated a kind of latent suicidality to me. There was something inside of Faith that wanted to die. And that evil man who slipped her a roofie, eliminated the last vestige of that conscious mind that was likely in love with life. It freed that beast within her that wanted to die.