Aurora Bridge Suicide Prevention Signs (Possibly) Do the Trick
Our quest to make it from Renton to Ballard for happy hour was nearly dashed yesterday because some drunken idiot craving attention almost jumped off the Aurora Bridge.
It was 4:45 and traffic on 99 North had been light, so things were looking good. As we drove onto the bridge in the right lane, we imagined the earthy, hop-heavy smell of Hale’s lobby. We’d be there by five—one full hour to drink cheap! On the patio! Under a warm, blue sky!
Sirens. Brake lights. Holy shit—we crushed our own brake pedal as the school bus in the middle lane made a jerky move toward ours, its lights suddenly blinking. The truck in front of us cut over in front of the bus and pulled away as we came to a stop right in the middle of the bridge.
In a graceful swoop of whirling lights, two oncoming police cars zipped in front of us to jackknife across both our lane and the middle one. Our eyes jumped ahead of the first officer, out of her cruiser in a hurry, to the pedestrian walkway ten feet ahead of our car: Some scruffy dude was leaning over the rail, rocking like Rain Man when the smoke alarm went off. But in a suspiciously drunk, rather than mentally handicapped, way.
The female officer leapt onto the walkway beside the guy and grabbed his shoulder, twisting him out of his showy, I’m-gonna-do-it! posture. The sirens on the two police cars had cut off but we heard more in the distance. Why the royal treatment? Then we remembered this story. Someone must have seen this guy’s antics and called 911 as they drove past. (That person was probably being served a beer somewhere right now.) No, wait. We thought of this story—we’d smirked when we’d read it. What truly suicidal person is going to make a last-ditch phone call before willingly buying the farm? we’d thought. What’s the person who answers going to say? “Thanks for calling the Aurora Bridge help line, this call may be recorded by a supervisor for quality…” Maybe this guy actually picked up one of those six red phones?
Someone behind us, apparently even more impatient and less sympathetic, honked. The school bus pulled around the second parked police car and within moments the bottleneck was history and traffic—except us—was on its way. We sat there with our blinker on, growing frustrated that no one would give us an extra moment to slip ahead of them. We looked over at the sorry dude and his police escort from doom. He appeared offended, surprised. We glanced directly to our right, out the passenger window, and saw an advertisement for those potentially life-saving phones: SUICIDAL? it asked. It seemed mounted too low. For suicidal kids, maybe.
We wondered what the officers would do with the guy. His little show had cost us 10 minutes of happy hour. He’d pulled law enforcement away from enforcing laws, catching bad guys. We realized, dimly, that we weren’t at all concerned with his well-being. Weird. Should we be? Were we just as self-centered as him? Someone let us over into the left lane. We thanked them with a courtesy wave.
Fifteen minutes later we had a big mug of beer before us, a clear blue sky above, and nothing to complain about. We started planning our weekend without another thought about the almost-jumper or where he’d be spending the next few nights. Even for him, wherever he was, the world still turned.
