Nature Noir Jordan Smith (book series for 12 year olds .TXT) 📖

were led out to face each other on the bridge deck—a symbol of the cooperation between Democrats and Republicans that built the new span. Then the crowd bowed their heads for a blessing by Father Brennan of Saint Joseph's, the Placer High School band played a march, and the dignitaries led the crowd in a tour of the bridge.

But without the reservoir beneath it, the bridge immediately became something it wasn't intended to be. Within minutes a man appeared from the crowd and leaped over the railing. He was wearing a parachute, which floated him safely to the canyon floor. Within a year and a half the feat was repeated with a hang glider. Then, on October 8, 1975, a despondent seventy-seven-year-old man from Citrus Heights became the first to jump without either device. Just over a decade later John Carta rode his motorcycle off the span, and in December 2001 a stuntman drove a car off it for the Hollywood feature film XXX and, like Carta, parachuted to safety. This time the rangers had issued a permit for the stunt, but it was nevertheless unpopular with them. "No one told us Corvettes are made of plastic and shatter into hundreds of tiny pieces on impact," one of them later remarked. "We're still picking up little red bits of it down there." Meanwhile, the suicides continued.

One man jumped too close to one side of the bridge and survived for a while before he was found dead. With his broken arms and legs, he had made what Ranger O'Leary later told me was an impression like a snow angel in the dust beneath the bridge. Another man wasn't taking any chances, so he sat backward on the bridge rail with a shotgun in his mouth. And in the summer of 2002 a chase involving several police cars ended at the bridge, where the suspect jumped out of his car and into the canyon; he had been paroled from prison and didn't want to go back. It was the second suicide there within a week.

In July 2003, after one man splattered himself on the canyon bottom and another was talked out of it by police, an outraged editorial in the Auburn Journal scolded the county—to which the Bureau had turned over the bridge when it was finished—for not doing something: a net, suicide hotline phones on the pedestrian walkway, something. "Unacceptable," the paper said, "that's the only way to describe the fact that repeated calls ... for action at the Foresthill Bridge continue to go unheard." But the situation was hardly the county's doing. For thirty years the bridge had waited for the water to rise beneath it and stop the carnage, and meanwhile its notoriety had spread to the adrenaline-addled and serotonin-deficient all over the United States. When they got there, someone usually saw them standing at the railing and called 911. The 911 operator called Roberta, and Roberta radioed the rangers.

For all those years there had been another, even more common problem with the bridge sans reservoir: People enjoyed throwing things off it, just to watch them fall. Driving along the river now, Bell saw his man waving from the road shoulder ahead and stopped. The thirty-eight-year-old male victim identified himself as John Geary and introduced his female companion, forty-year-old Lynn Parker. They'd been a little down on their luck, Geary told Bell, and they'd been living in a Roseville motel room and driving up to the river during the day to pan gold. It was a common story. For a century and a half people had been coming to the river in hopes their luck would change. It seldom did. We rangers called them "pilgrims."

Geary and Parker had left their car at the Confluence that morning, they told Bell, and hiked up the river underneath the big bridge. Overhead, cars and log trucks made ominous booms and clanks at the bridge's expansion joints, which echoed through the canyon. Maybe it was these noises or the sheer majesty of the structure, but when he got right underneath it, Geary stood looking up at the bridge. It was then that he noticed three people, mere colored specks, standing at the railing far above. Then he saw them throw something into the canyon. As soon as they let go of it, the object seemed to bloom bigger. He and Parker watched it drift toward them, and as it grew larger they could see it was a little yellow parachute with something hanging from it. Something that seemed to move on its own, as if alive.

A few seconds later Geary could make it out clearly. It was a chicken. A chicken on a little yellow parachute. It floated past them and landed below them in the brush. They stumbled toward it, down the steep talus. When they got to it, the chicken was squawking miserably, hopelessly tangled in its parachute shrouds. So they freed the bird and it fluttered off, clucking indignantly, into the manzanita.

Now Geary heard distant shouts from above. He couldn't make out the words, but the tone sounded angry. Looking back on it, he realized the chicken's owners were mad at him for letting it go. But all he was doing was trying to help. You would have done the same thing, he told Bell. Then he and Lynn Parker heard a series of evil, whirring zips followed by loud cracks, and looking up, he realized that the people on the bridge were dropping rocks, pretty big ones, on them. He could make out the rocks as they were released, but then he'd lose track of them until they appeared again just a couple hundred feet overhead, at which time he and his girlfriend had only a second or two to evade them. They began dodging the rocks, running around like crazy people. The rocks literally exploded on impact. Then Geary saw one of the people above heading for one end of the bridge—to get more rocks,