Leah Mensch

Selected by Jane Wong

Jumpers

The longer you live in Pittsburgh, the more people you’ll know who have jumped from the city’s bridges. I was born here, suspended in-between northeast and midwest, a city tumbling down a hillside, built around and above the three rivers. The parent of someone I went to elementary school with jumped from the Andy Warhol Bridge when I was seventeen. Just over a decade prior, I saw a woman standing on the edge of the Smithfield Street Bridge while my grandmother drove me across town. The woman looked down at the water. Inbound, cars slowed, a police car stopped along the brim, and she bent her knees, about to jump. I knew she was about to jump. The Smithfield Street Bridge was titanic against hills, houses stacked upon one another like Tetris, green and cold. Spring.

This was long before I understood what suicide was, at least intellectually. Long before I searched through decades of news reports, obsessively trying to find an end to this story, to this memory of the woman about to jump from the Smithfield Street Bridge. Long before I understood I was a jumper, too.

Pittsburgh, with its post-industrial, blue-collar history, was long ago dubbed the City of Bridges, boasting, give or take, 446. More than Venice or Amsterdam or Poland—more than Hamburg or New York City and all of its boroughs. In elementary school, I studied the rivers that buckle into one another at the city’s point—Monongahela, Ohio, Allegheny—and the bridges we used to navigate our way over the rivers. The Smithfield Street Bridge connects downtown Pittsburgh to Station Square and the South Side. The oldest operating bridge in Pittsburgh—built in 1818—it is a historic landmark, and is the second farthest bridge downstream in the city. Rusting and painted baby blue, I learned that the Smithfield Street Bridge is a Lenticular Truss bridge, and I loved, for years, telling my parents this each time we crossed through the city. Even now, I don’t understand the anatomy or the namesake of a Lenticular Truss—how the bridge has managed to sustain itself atop the river for over two centuries. I only know how to recognize its shape: not an arch but a straight line, ovals twisting over and under. It is a shape you cannot forget once you really look. Even if you try.

The jumper survives in my peripheral and sticks to my ribs. Throughout my childhood, I catch glimpses of her as I’m falling asleep at night, when I’m walking to the school bus stop, watching my mother dry the dishes with a cloth. The memory does not strike me as strange so much as fragmented, sudden, something that I have carried with me for so much of our lives that our origins feel intertwined. Perhaps they are. That I might inflict death upon myself—either deliberately or accidentally—is one of my earliest fears. I am afraid of so many things, and all of them involve dying: roaming outside during a tornado and rattlesnake bites, housefires and stroking out, that my mother will abandon me at a hotel and nobody will come looking for me, that I will lay down on train tracks a mile down the hill and not stand up.

It is possible suicide existed inside my lexicon at age six, the year I saw the woman standing on the bridge, though I’m doubtful. I am certain, however, that my body recognized the generational tug of not wanting to be alive. Depression batters Mother’s genealogy. War and the persecution of Arab-Jews left her parents intermittently displaced across southwest Asia for several decades. As I age, I see the way our faces are beginning to look the same, my mother’s and mine. I see how I resemble her grandmother, her mother, her father. We don’t talk about our shared history, my mother and I, but my body vies to protect me from what my memory cannot. I wanted to forget the bridge jumper because forgetting is how my immigrant family survives. We pretend we can outrun our burdens, that we can cultivate healing by crossing a bridge and letting our history collapse behind us. But memory is sentient, and everywhere I turned, I bumped into her, if only an image in my rearview mirror as I drove home from work, hair hanging down around her neck as she stared into the river. 

Search results in the local paper yielded pages and pages of headlines: “Body Found Beneath Tarentum Bridge Believed to be Jumper”; “Crews Recover Body of Man Who Jumped Into Allegheny River”; “Man Dies by Suicide After Jumping Off the Fort Pitt Bridge”; “Man Dies After Jumping from Liberty Bridge”; “Young Mother of 3 Jumps to Her Death”; “MLB Umpire Saves Suicidal Woman on Pittsburgh Bridge”; “Pittsburgh Woman Who Drove Off Bridge into Ohio River Committed Suicide, Official Says”; “1 Dead After 3 Jump from Pittsburgh’s Hot Metal Bridge”; “Man Jumps to His Death from Fort Pitt Bridge.” And this is only the first page. Suicide and its mourning are sewn into the infrastructure of my childhood. I grew up, in more ways than one, at the mouth of grief.

If I knew the ache of depression, the impulse toward death for nearly my entire life, I didn’t find my limits until the summer I turned twenty. I woke one morning in May, and I could hardly walk to the stove to boil water for coffee, go down the stairs to retrieve my mail. The world was incomprehensible, black and white, and I was split down the middle, laid open to gesticulate in the sun like a fish. I couldn’t shower and I couldn’t eat. I slept fourteen hours a day, sometimes in my shoes. I had two ears, and in one I heard the birds singing, praying to the sun behind the clouds. In the other ear, I heard nothing at all. Depression has always shown its cards to me like this: in a silence demanding a code, in a silence re-written. That summer, searching for an origin story felt, still feels, useless. I only wanted to return to the person I had been before.

Eventually, I narrowed the date to May 2005 and searched the newspaper archive for the Smithfield Street Bridge, and there she was. The local paper yeilded only one result, and it corresponded with my memory. The headline: “Smithfield Bridge Jumper Saved by State Trooper.” The local paper catalogs and completes in 114 words the memory that has haunted me for nearly twenty years. A state trooper saw the woman standing on the rail as he was crossing the bridge, driving to work. When he got out of his car and approached her, she jumped off the rail, but he caught her by the arm in mid-air. A stockbroker from the north side, driving to work downtown bears witness. He said, this is the most heroic and unbelievable thing I’ve ever seen. And I hope I never see anything like this again.

The jumper lived. She never even touched the water. The police took her to the hospital for psychiatric evaluation, and just like that, the story is over. She would tell a different one, I am sure, but I never learn her real name. What haunts us names us. In her case, in my case, it is Pittsburgh. She is the Smithfield Street Bridge Jumper.

That summer when I searched for the Smithfield Bridge Jumper, I thought too often about ways I might die, and all involved some injudicious orientation of knives, or rope, or jumping in front of machinery moving faster than I could run. Still, I wanted to believe I was infallible, that I would never actually attempt. There was a severance between myself and the jumper, I insisted, because I had never felt the urge to jump off a bridge. I was too afraid of heights, too afraid of pedestrians bearing witness to my death wish. Too afraid I might survive the fall and wake up in the hospital. The Smithfield Bridge Jumper did. 

On the internet, I found buried forums of people responding to the suicide attempt. I don’t know why people go for the Smithfield Street Bridge, someone wrote. If you really want to die, go for a much higher bridge, like the Roberto Clemente. I thought to myself, that’s the point. I wondered, also, if there was really anything to get. Suicide demands a narrative, but offers only fragments of identification, tiny microtears and lapses in memory. Has anyone who has ever attempted suicide really been sure they wanted to die? I certainly wasn’t sure I wanted to die. I was tired of being alive, and I was tired of wanting to die, but I was most tired of being suspended in between the two worlds. That suspension of throbbing ambivalence was the sensation I wanted to extinguish. Years of grappling with my own suicidality have not ferried me to a space where I understand the suicidal mind—only to a space where I can empathize.

One evening that summer, I ran from the neighborhood where I lived to the Birmingham Bridge, which would lead me to a path along the river. Halfway across the bridge, I stopped and looked at the city skyline, downtown’s skyscrapers reflected into the Monongahela’s water like stained glass. The air was still, shattering nothing. Downstream, bridges connected the South Side of Pittsburgh to the North Side for as far as I could see—their bodies forming a tunnel, orange glow seeping through their beams. Liberty. Fort Pitt. Then the Smithfield Street Bridge, where I saw the jumper. I thought about her as I held my hand over the river, and when I saw my own reflection from above, it occurred to me how easily I could jump. All I had to do was step one leg over the edge and then the other, and go.

The Smithfield Street Bridge Jumper did go for a higher bridge. Not until two years after her first attempt, not the Roberto Clemente as the poster on the forum had suggested, but the West End Bridge instead, which is far longer than the Smithfield Street Bridge and not highly trafficked. Still, a witness saw her standing on the edge and called the police. The city sent search and rescue teams out looking for her in the dark but found no body. They stopped after four hours and assumed she died of hypothermia. It was February. The river temperature was 41 degrees. But the next morning, around 8:00 a.m., she called for help from a metalworker on the shore, far downstream. The police chief estimated she swam more than five miles overnight. He also said she was depressed and her skin was discolored, but she would survive.

I stumbled upon the article about the second attempt shortly after the first. “West End Bridge Jumper Found Alive On Shore,” read the headline. The West End Bridge Jumper is archived into a pile of newspapers alongside reports on stocks and a review of a new dive bar, but not before she is re-named. I sought the end of the jumper’s story only in part. I wanted, above all, proof that I would forget and heal—that I could return to the person I was before I looked over the edge of the bridge that summer and saw my reflection in the water. But to what was there to return? For so many years, I’d felt the drive to the edge fluttering beneath my chest, seen death in the face of the man bagging my groceries, the trees on the hillside languishing in the polluted air. I’d mistaken the gravitational pull I felt toward the river, standing from the side of the bridge. It was not my body and brain chemistry changing. It was my façade collapsing. I’d always been the jumper. The only difference was now, I no longer had the ability to convince myself otherwise.

When I was growing up, people called Pittsburgh a dying city. In some ways, it still is. The three rivers often rank among the most polluted bodies of water in the United States—filled with sewage from poor drainage systems and steel and coal remnants, skeletons from the city’s glorious industrial days. Our infrastructure and air quality also ranks amongst the nation’s worst. Asthma rates are three times higher than average in Pittsburgh, and still, even decades after the steel industry’s collapse, trees can’t grow on the hillside. Soil is so polluted the city recommends neighborhood’s close to the shore forgo vegetable gardens. An annual report about the degrading bridges in Pittsburgh, produced by the city, tells me that, in 2011, nearly thirty percent of the bridges were structurally deficient. The highest proportion in the nation.

I have spent so much of my life thinking about dying, being from a place like this, being from a family like my own. Death has, more than anything else, colored my worldview schematically. It is not the physical act of jumping, but this—moving through the world seeing death—that makes me a jumper. Even now, I still can’t imagine anyone not having a jumper inside of them, not thinking about jumping every so often—even passively, a thing that can be done, with no intention of ever completing the action. I hoped finding the rest of the jumper’s story would heal me, that if I could close the wound of memory, then this—eating cheese and crackers for dinner and sleeping in my shoes, and wondering how the days can possibly last longer than they already are—would end. But the jumper was not the origin of my wound. She was not the reason I thought so often of my own death—only a physical manifestation of something my generational memory knew with intimacy. When I was young, when I saw the woman standing on the edge of the Smithfield Street Bridge, I also saw myself. I still do. That summer I searched for her, my despair was less a stretch of time and more a threshold crossing. My depression never really lifted. I only learned how to exist inside of it.

Finding her real name was not hard, even seventeen years after she first jumped. Traces of her present life appear more quickly than traces of her past life, if such a way to distinguish between the two even exists. She is alive. Fifteen years have passed between her second attempt and now. And she still lives here, in this city of rivers and bridges and hills.

I thought about writing to her, but I faltered, now knowing what I wanted to say. I did not wonder why people jumped off bridges, or what she was thinking while she stood on the edge. These are the un-answereable questions about suicide I once felt compelled to articulate, as if knowing the answer might protect me from killing myself. Perhaps I had been asking the same question the entire time I searched for her. If I no longer believe forgetting is possible, what do I have left to heal me?

I lived for three and a half more years in Pittsburgh after the summer I found the jumper and saw my reflection in the river from the side of the bridge. I despaired at the thought of leaving home, even if I knew I could not heal in the city of bridges. Wanting not to see the skyline backdropped against the Monongahela when I left home for the west, I tried to re-route myself around Pittsburgh, but I couldn’t get to the highway without crossing through the city. And so I crossed the Liberty Bridge, which took me from the suburbs into Pittsburgh, and I crossed the Smithfield Street Bridge, which took me through the tunnels, and onto the highway. I knew I would never return in the same way.

After I crossed the bridge, I kept driving—through cities in Ohio that all looked the same and a tornado warning in St. Louis, a border checkpoint in El Paso and New Mexico’s white sands—until I arrived in Southern Arizona. Here, a landscape so far from rivers and hills, clutched by the Catalina and Rincon mountains in the borderlands, where orange and lemon trees grow and Saguaro cacti survive for centuries, I think, still, of Pittsburgh.

In Tucson, where I live now, there are hardly any bridges high enough to jump from. Only miles and miles of highway, leading to other places. Over the phone, my mother tells me to take my sunglasses off and look around—this is the land of my people. She means the desert. She is thinking of Baghdad. Some days, all I see is garbage and boulevards criss-crossing one another and strip malls, so much human ravaging. Other days, I take one of these boulevards and hike up a mountain to an overlook just beyond the city limits. I hold my hands up to the sky—blue, without clouds, more than three hundred days a year, and I cry quick and hard because this life means so much to me. The mountains, pink in the evening light, swell over the city. When I look down at my feet, at the overlook, I notice the way the sun has cast my shadow halfway off the ledge. The silhouette of a saguaro cactus waves its dark green arm, gesturing toward the ground—and how many ways, I think to myself, there are to reach that ground. I remember everything.

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Selected by: Jane Wong is the author of the debut memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, out now from Tin House (2023). She is also the author of two books of poetry: How to Not Be Afraid of Everything from Alice James (2021) and Overpour from Action Books (2016). Her essays have appeared in places such as McSweeney’s, Black Warrior Review, Ecotone, The Common, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, and Want: Women Writing About Desire (Catapult).