The Bridge -- Part Two

On Friday, while my dogs were getting their hair cut and my car was getting its brakes de-squeaked, I had an appointment to meet James McCann (to pick up a big stamp for Spring Book Hatching, 2008 and talk about our upcoming Chocolate & Chat Tour) on Granville Island. So I decided to ride my bike.










It was the perfect day for a ride. A bit overcast in the morning -- a bit windy, but not too bad, and then the sun came out for the trip home. A great ride. But it was my first time across the Lions Gate since I rode the Golden Gate last year -- which led to this post.















It was fun to ride across the bridge again. It was actually a four-bridge bike ride for me, as I crossed the Lions Gate twice and the Burrard Bridge twice.


I really enjoyed riding through Stanley Park on the other side, checking out how things have recovered since the big storm.





(Still a ways to go -- say 300 years or so -- until the growth is back to where it was, as you can see...)






I've never felt the same about the Lions Gate since I saw The Bridge. It was interesting to ride across in light of all I have learned about it since seeing the movie. I noticed that there is no protective netting or fencing anywhere on the span, apart from this piece:







where they clearly don't want anything or anyone landing on the railroad tracks below.













But apart from that -- nothing.






I can't find the stats for people who jump off this and other bridges in the Lower Mainland, but I did find an article here in The Province, indicating that the Lions Gate will be equipped sometime this year with crisis phones.

For me, in the end, the bridge was a link to the city, a beautiful ride on a nice day. I wish it was the same for everyone.

~kc

The Bridge

Stayed up far too late last night watching a documentary called 'The Bridge', and then reading the end of 'Deathly Hallows', discussion of which will be left to another day.

'The Bridge' is the end result of a year of filming, day and night, at San Franciso's Golden Gate Bridge. The film-makers caught 23 of the 24 suicides that took place there in 2004 on the more than 10,000 hours of tape they shot. Very disturbing, and somewhat controversial -- but I'm very glad I watched it. Much food for thought: were the film makers exploiting the last, black moments of the people who chose to end their lives by jumping off the bridge? The executive producer Eric Steel admits to lying about the reason behind his filming in order to get permission to shoot his film around the bridge for a year. Was he glamourizing the deaths to fill his own pockets?

My take is that the film deals sensitively with a very bleak subject. It doesn't offer facile answers, but looks at the lives, families and friends of a half-dozen or so of the people who died that year. And a look at the interviews (included on the disc) of the people who worked on the film shows that they thought deeply about the subject matter they were filming. All of them had access to the suicide prevention line and made use of it.

The question they were left with was why money hasn't been set aside to put up jump-barriers on this bridge -- by all accounts one of the most common sites of public suicide in the US. A person jumps off the Golden Gate an average of once every fifteen days. There have been more than 1500 suicides since the bridge was built. It makes me wonder about the Lions Gate bridge...

I took the picture above when I was in San Francisco in April this year.

~kc