The Floater

We pushed the boat back into the current, and slowly floated downriver until we were 10 yards or so from the EMTs, who were still pounding on the man's chest. We stared, until another officer said, "Thank you." It was one of those Thank-yous that suggests by its tone and inflection the opposite meaning: "Move along. Nothing to see here. Don't be a morbid fucker."

I felt chastened. As a journalist, I have a certain professional license to be nosy. But in the news business, suicides are generally treated as fundamentally private matters, not to be discussed, investigated, or written about. There are exceptions, mostly reserved for public figures. But by and large, society has decided that it is news when a person kills another person, and it is not news when a person kills himself. Besides, at this moment I wasn't a journalist--just a passerby caught up in events.

As Cory and I boated back toward home--our appetite for fishing depleted--the questions rattled around in my head. Was the guy really dead? Why did he jump? How long was he in the water? And, were we total idiots for our hesitation out there on the water? I looked to Cory, who was seated in the front of the boat, holding his fingers to his nose and taking a deep whiff. I gave him a puzzled look, and he explained: "The guy was wearing a lot of cologne."

 

That night, I checked the TV news and scoured the web for any information on the jumper. I didn't find much. On an errand in the car, I tuned to a talk radio station, where I heard a top-of-the-hour report. It said only that a Fire and Rescue crew had pulled a man from the river in Minneapolis. There was no mention of his condition. For the next few days, I scanned the Strib and Pi Press. Nothing. I called the Minneapolis Police Department, hit a phone tree, and left a message. I never heard back. Meanwhile, a friend whose husband works for another news outlet in town passed on the word he'd heard from unspecified sources: The jumper had in fact died, and was probably dead on impact.

That last detail promised a measure of solace. Once I learned he had leapt from the Broadway Bridge, I knew he could not have been in the water very long; otherwise, the current would have taken him further downstream. The dead-on-impact theory suggested his death was inevitable, thereby absolving me for my own slowness to act. It would absolve the cops and rescue crews for their apparently sluggish response. And it would absolve anybody who happened by, anybody who decided it was not worth the risk or discomfort to swim in 60-degree water and drag in some guy who obviously wanted to die.

But the notion never struck me as plausible. At its high point, the Broadway Bridge is perhaps 30 feet above the water. That would be a long fall, but not likely a fatal one. Besides, there are no especially shallow, rocky areas beneath the bridge. Even close to shore, it is a good 10 feet. Would a fall from a relatively low bridge--into reasonably deep water--kill a person? Doubtful. For the next few days, I theorized with friends and co-workers about such matters. Then I went on a two-week vacation and pushed it out of my mind.

When I returned to town, I called the Hennepin County Medical Examiner's office and got some basic facts: name (I'll just use his nickname, "Tino"), manner of death (freshwater drowning), and cause (depression). There was one other disturbing detail. Tino wasn't pronounced dead until just after 7:00 p.m., which was approximately an hour after he was pulled from the water. That meant that he was showing some level of biological response. Which, to my mind, disqualified the dead-on-impact theory--and rendered void any moral free pass over my own slowness to act.

Once I got his name, I searched paid obituaries. Tino, I learned, was 55. Born in Moorhead to a family of migrant farm workers, he had studied at the University of Minnesota, served in Vietnam and, for the past 22 years, worked at a downtown hotel. He loved art, opera, and fashion, it said, and "his passion included bringing joy and life to his fellow employees, friends, and customers." There was also a pointed barb in the obituary. It noted that Tino's employment at the hotel "terminated a few months ago." While the funeral was out of town, local services, the obit declared in a curious turn of phrase, would be "privately announced amongst his friends and outside of the corporate world."