Excerpt from: Living With The Brooklyn Bridge

The first time I witnessed an attempted suicide, I was mesmerized by the tableau.
I noticed it by chance. First I saw the helicopters circling above. Then the police boats with their divers at the ready circling below.
On the bridge's roadway were police cars and an ambulance attended by a woman with a long blond braid down her back and one hand placed casually on her hip. In fact I was surprised how casual they all were: the police, the runners, the cyclists, the strollers. I've learned a lot since then. I now know the authorities usually express themselves in regard to a crisis on the bridge in a cross between mayhem and saunter.
But at the time my eye was still untrained. Finally, I caught the action almost hidden in the lace of the cable above the bridge.
On two parallel cables, uphill tightropes, six men whose dark uniforms could be seen in contrast to the silver wires, were picking their way, one foot in front of the other, each with both arms out clutching the steel supports, up, up, up to the towers of this stolid diving board.
Above them was the distressed--or senseless--man they were after. As I was discovering him, I noticed that two other policemen had somehow appeared above. They turned him around and marched him down toward the upcoming men. All made their way again carefully, very carefully, on the high ropes, downhill.
On the ground this slow-motion celestial descent turned slapstick. Keystone copes scurrying everywhere. Attendants running back to ambulances and official vans.
And a hat. The man had worn a hat. How he didn't lose that knitted hat which had now slipped down over his eyes, I'll never know. Suddenly, handcuffs behind his back. The hat slipped further.
Yet some of what must have gone on high above the threatening waters of the East River remained. For all the quick return to emergency, the rough police treated him gingerly, almost tenderly. Who knows what truths or universal pain he shared with them up there on the cables, up there where he put their lives in as much jeopardy as his own?
One policeman fixed his hat; pushed it back from his eyes like sending a small bundled up child off to school. Another kept patting him on the back, as if it were a job well done.
Perhaps it was. A Collaboration. A love of the saviors for the saved.