Life Span

The other day, we noticed the streetlights on the Lake Street-Marshall Avenue bridge were lit during daylight hours. But just on the Minneapolis side. The Twin Cities appear to share responsibility for the bridge. Both Minneapolis and St. Paul cops cruise the span, and the electric company has the bridge’s faux-Victorian lamps on two separate circuits. Minneapolis seems to be less shy about running up their half of the bill.

This accident of circuitry calls attention to the bridge’s symbolism as a passage between light and dark, life and death. Just a few months ago, a St. Paul boy fell from the girders beneath the overpass. A youthful romantic like many before him, he died trying to spray paint the name of his beloved on the undergirding.

Then there are the suicides. Bridge jumping’s surely not the most popular way to go, but it’s a provocative one. Unlike running your car in the garage, or knocking back a bunch of sleeping pills in your own bedroom, the jump is desperately anonymous. Many bridge suicides go unidentified for weeks.

Every six months, someone jumps off a bridge somewhere in the Twin Cities. It’s most common where high stress, lofty overpasses, and youthful angst converge–at the University. Washington Avenue bridge, towering a hundred feet over the Mississippi, is the site of at least one jump each year. Here, 25 years ago, Pulitzer poet John Berryman hurdled into eternity. It’s fitting and ironic that another poet, John Ashbery, is excerpted on another of the area’s most celebrated bridges– the Armajani footbridge at the Walker.

The Golden Gate bridge is the site of 30 suicides per year, prompting the city of San Francisco to install telephones on the bridge with direct connections to a suicide hotline. There’s no plan to do the same here, since relatively few people do it. Still, they may not be jumping from bridges, but in Minnesota suicides out number homicides 3 to 1.

A Minneapolis water truck is parked among pylons on the Lake Street-Marshall Avenue bridge. Roy, a Minneapolis city worker spraying down the bridge deck, doesn’t know what the deal is with the lights. He just shrugs. “Must be the full moon,” he says. “C’ est la vie.”