Detroit wouldn't exist without its river. In Detroit's earliest days, the river was the city's gravitational center, its entry-point and highway, and the city was apportioned so that every landowner had access to it. Today, were you to take a boat out to its center, you'd find it remains a force of nature that makes a metropolis feel small and far away. It carries an energy and life, and, as these things tend to go, also represents the opposite end of that pendulum swing, a place of final crossing, of silence and death.
An unknown number of Detroiters have gone to the river for that final baptism, seeking release in a manner that remains one of the most difficult and agonizing ways to die.
What draws them there? Perhaps the way it's alive with mythology and metaphor, calling to mind the river Styx. Even as our frontier settlement darkened and spread into a city, the river represented that last bit of unconquerable wilderness, with its preternatural character, always moving, always remaining, flowing somewhere while going nowhere.
Or maybe it's just that, time and again, so many people have run out of options in our fate-battered metropolis. Lacking the pills or pistols to ease the way, they are drawn to the last thing nobody can shut off, the Detroit River, giver — and taker — of life.
If we were to consider the river a boundary to the afterworld, then the Belle Isle Bridge would be its surest crossing. And for much of the 20th century, the Belle Isle Bridge would metaphorically help people "get to the other side." Associated almost from the beginning with suicide, the bridge is an unlikely place for it, its walkway perched just 30 feet above the water's surface — hardly a death dive.
And yet more than 100 people have walked onto the 2,356-foot-long bridge without stepping off either end again.
There have been several bridges to Belle Isle. The first was a cantilevered structure of wood and iron built in 1889. (The only press account of a person jumping off it was that of escape artist Harry Houdini, who leaped off it in manacles with a rope around his waist on a chilly, late-November day in 1906.) In 1915, that burned to the waterline in a great fire. A temporary bridge was constructed while today's bridge was planned, built, and finally finished eight years after the blaze. (In 1942, it was officially renamed the Douglas MacArthur Bridge, though Detroiters have an almost defiant insistence upon calling it by its original name.)
The city took possession of it with great civic fanfare on Nov. 1, 1923. Acting Mayor John C. Lodge opened the span to traffic, and Council President James Vernor led a crowd of 2,000 across it on the unseasonably cold autumn day. It was inaugurated with a poem from Detroit's own cornpone poet, Edgar Guest, featuring verse decidedly less folksy than usual. The theme was that bridges are usually meant to speed commerce or make money; this bridge would exist solely to hasten the city's careworn working people to an island of pleasure.
One stanza reads:
Who wearies of the city's noisy hum,
The urge of labor, to this bridge may come
And walk its path and catch the sweet clean breeze,
Be the companion of the friendly trees,
Romp with his children, purge his soul of hate.
And claim the beauties of this fair estate.
As with so many words bravely spoken of Detroit early in its boom, the words have an ironic ring strong enough to evoke cringes, because it's the site of many ugly scenes in the city's history.
On June 20, 1943, it was where a bloody brawl between black and white Detroiters — and a few hundred sailors from the nearby naval armory — injured dozens and touched off a bloody race riot that left 34 dead, hundreds injured, and caused almost $200 million in damages in today's dollars.
On Aug. 19, 1995, it was where a minor traffic accident touched off a beating that left 33-year-old business student Deletha Word terrified, injured, and stark naked, before she fell, or some say jumped, off the bridge and drowned.
And, for generations of Detroiters, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, the bridge was literally a place to end it all. According to apocryphal accounts of the time, the river soon saw enough bodies to occasionally jam the water intakes of the factories downstream.
The numbers, presented in the Detroit Free Press' Detroit Almanac, are staggering. By 1935, 87 people had leaped from the bridge to their deaths, a sum no doubt aggravated by the Great Depression, which hit Detroit especially hard. The problem was so acute that the Detroit Police Department instituted a "suicide squad" to scout the bridge for potential jumpers. In 1938 alone, 15 would-be jumpers were saved.
Such actions came too late to save Mario Tremonti, who leaped from the bridge in 1927, just four years after it was built. Tremonti's grand-niece, Sarah Peters, a Ferndale resident, recalls the incident from family stories handed down orally.
"Of course, he wasn't anyone I ever really knew," says Peters. "And it happened so long ago. But every once in a while, I'll remember my grandpa talking about him, and I'll say to my mom, 'That happened?' And she'll say, yeah, it did. And I remember the first time I thought about it as an adult, I was like, the MacArthur Bridge? That seems weird. Are you sure it wasn't the Ambassador Bridge? And she was like, 'Nope, it was the Belle Isle Bridge.' It seemed a really strange, strange choice."
Peters isn't alone in considering the low bridge an odd place for suicide, but death was certain enough for those who couldn't swim, or were determined to die. For many months of the year, the icy waters can make death a certainty. All that's needed is a steady current to make going back impossible.
What's more, the bridge afforded access to the river that Detroit's waterfront, choked with railroad and factories, didn't allow the average Detroiter.
It also had a bit of poetry, a bit of distance from the wharf district's seedy bars, from the guttering smokestacks of the industrial waterfront. The peace and calm of a structure designed to awe the public no doubt attracted many for reasons quite different from the weekend parkgoer.
On Monday, Dec. 13, 2010, 59-year-old Wayne State University professor Kathryne Victoria Lindberg's car was found in the middle of the MacArthur Bridge.
According to reports, the keys were still in the ignition. The car also contained Lindberg's purse, which still had her ID in it. It was a cold day, below freezing, and snowy enough for police to think her car was stalled or stuck, not abandoned.
After a missing person report was filed, divers searched the waters but could find nothing. This led to an uneasy period of waiting and fading hopes on the part of her friends and colleagues.
Remarkably, Sarah Peters, the grand-niece of 1927 jumper Mario Tremonti, was friends with Lindberg for more than 15 years, a former student who would reconnect and socialize with her every few months.
"She was a great teacher," Peters says. "She assigned really amazing things. I remember we read Soul on Ice, which I thought was a pretty great book to assign to a class. And in her latter years, she was mostly focused on African-American history and culture and literature."
Peters wasn't alone in admiring the professor. Those who knew her have described her as whip-smart and politically astute, with a toughness under her skin that didn't take much scratching to reveal. If you were underperforming in her class, she wasn't shy about pointing it out and challenging it. It was the sort of thing that caused students to love her or hate her.
Courtney Henriette, co-owner of food truck Katoi, met Lindberg back when they were both working to reinvigorate downtown Detroit's Isaac Agree Downtown Synagogue.
"She was a really fascinating character," Henriette recalls. "Really crazy intelligent. But it's interesting. She had a bite to her. You could piss her off. She seemed like one of those people who was kind of hard, like curmudgeonly, but it's because they really care. They probably care more than anybody else."
That tough streak aside, most who knew Lindberg remember her for her lively conversation and good humor. In fact, those who saw her last recall nothing but smiles and good times, which are not abnormal facades.
But after her car was discovered on that icy Monday, and as officials leaned toward declaring Lindberg a suicide, her friends began the familiar process of wondering what they might have done to prevent it.
"You feel like that person was really alone, and really desperate," says Peters. "I cared about her a lot, so... it makes you wish that could have known and done something. I mean, I just saw her two weeks before."
Henriette says, "In hindsight, you could kind of see she was the sort of person to carry around tremendous pain. She was just that strong. Like people who just don't allow themselves to have moments of weakness. They just hold it all in. She would be up all night reading papers. She was the sort of professor that took everything seriously. She would just work herself to the max. You could tell she was lonely. We couldn't tell until after it happened. We were like, 'Oh, I kind of get it now.'"
Also, Lindberg had recently lost her husband, the poet Murray Jackson, an event that Lindberg's friends now agree was a major factor.
"A lot of her friends and I have speculated that losing him was just more than she could take," says Peters. "I think that romantic relationships can be some people's anchor in life. And she was a very high-energy — had a very hyperactive type of energy. And she was kind of a scattered person, not a very organized person, but totally brilliant — in some ways, like your classical absent-minded professor. And I think sometimes somebody who has really extreme personality needs to have a bedrock like a spouse like that. ... He seemed to keep her more grounded. It definitely seems like that had a huge impact on her."
Another typical reaction to suicide is to see ominous portents in comments that had been only briefly considered, a reflection of reading too much into something that you feel you'd read too little into at first. For instance, Henriette says, "It was odd, but in the last email she wrote to me, she told me was she was reading Moby Dick. ... That's all I could think of after she passed away."
Right from the start, Peters says she harbored few doubts that Lindberg jumped that night. After all, her great-uncle made the jump 77 years ago, and came from a family that loved the island, which puts her in a position to know that suicides seek out familiar places they've loved. And Belle Isle was a joyful refrain in her conversations with Lindberg.
"I know she liked to go on drives on Belle Isle," she says. "We both loved Belle Isle, so we would talk about it. To my family, and to my grandfather's family, Belle Isle is really important. My grandpa had family picnics there regularly. He loved the conservatory and the aquarium. And Kathyrne loved Detroit and loved Belle Isle. And I mean, I love that bridge. I've crossed the Ambassador Bridge many, many times, but I don't really feel any kind of connection to it. I think that people have a really profound love for Belle Isle, and I think that bridge is so lovely. ... Belle Isle is like a place people really feel spiritually connected to, because it's like nature that you can access almost instantly from the city. I think that people maybe like to do that near something they feel connected to."
Peters also offers an unusual insight: that by jumping in the river, Lindberg may have hoped to spare her friends any unpleasantness.
"Maybe bridge jumpers think that no one will really have to face what they're doing to themselves much," she says. "Like, shoot yourself in your home and someone's going to have to ... I think you distance yourself a bit from the idea that someone will discover you if you jump into the water."
For Lindberg's friends, no discoveries came, while several months of uneasy uncertainty passed. It wasn't until late in the spring when Lindberg's body was found. According to the Downriver News-Herald, fishermen found her body at about 6 a.m. on June 12, just off the northeast tip of Grosse Ile. By August, dental records had been used to identify Lindberg's remains after her nephew heard about the body and contacted authorities. It brought a measure of closure, just a week or two before what would have been her 60th birthday.
"I guess it was sort of a double-edged sword when they found her body. I thought that, in some ways, OK, now there's a definite answer for what happened," Peters says. "Because before all that, all you have is a car with a door open. And it's just missing person. You want to know. But then ... you know. As irrational as it seems, when someone is missing, there's always hope."
The current is a continual refrain in discussions of the river, often ill-understood and misrepresented. Ask a dozen Detroiters and you'll hear all sorts of stories about it, about sudden undertows, tricky subsurface currents that can overpower seasoned divers, and that steady, powerful flow that will flush you straight down the river.
According to expert divers, the flow itself isn't deadly — but fighting against it is.
No public safety officer knows the river better than Sgt. Mike Carpenter. He's head of Detroit Dive Team, operating from the headquarters of the Detroit Harbor Master, a squat boathouse that's been just downriver from the bridge since the 1950s. The 50-year-old has spent literally thousands of hours diving in the Detroit River since joining the dive team in 1988. He describes a place where the flow is normally four to six knots, driving over an eerie underwater junkyard.
"There's a pretty quick current. There's a lot of debris on the bottom," he says. "You know, the old bridge is still under there, the one that burned. Years ago, the river was where they dumped stuff, so there's a lot of stuff from the tire factory, the Uniroyal plant that was there. Fences, tires, steel, and wood.
"It is too strong to swim against," he continues. "There is no undertow. If you swim with the current and float toward shore, you will eventually reach it. The reason people drown, that we've found, is that they get fixated on where they fell in at and they will try to swim back to that point. If they were to go with the flow and swim toward shore they would eventually make it. I imagine an Olympic swimmer may be able to swim against it briefly, but you're not gonna swim five to six knots for very long."
By his count, Sgt. Carpenter has rescued 50 or 60 jumpers during his career, all while 10 or fewer have died. (There has not been a suicide off the bridge since 2013, according to Lt. Arthur Green of the Law Enforcement Division of Michigan's Department of Natural Resources, which has jurisdiction over the island.) It's not quite the official "suicide squad" of the Great Depression, but Carpenter's dive team is on patrol and has even been able to coax several would-be jumpers back to safety before they made the plunge.
"It's really not high enough for the impact to kill you," he says. "I imagine it's possible. Most everybody who has jumped off has been on the surface for a while. And they all change their mind, too. They're all yelling for help after they hit the water. If they jump off, we're right here."
But should the search and rescue mission become a search and recovery mission, the dive team's job gets simpler in a grisly way.
"The way our river works, especially because of the speed of the current, where you see them go into the water for the last time," he says, "they will go down right to the bottom."
The way the dive team captain describes it, it's eerie work done in a twilight where visibility usually ranges from four feet down to zero. Search teams don't use lights; Carpenter compares it to flipping on your brights in a snowstorm:
"It's the same thing down there," he says. "If there's sediment in the water or algae or whatever, if you turn on a light it's just worse." Visibility can be as far as 12 feet just before the ice breaks up, before waves and wakes stir up the bottom, but such exceptions are rare.
Carpenter says, "Basically, if it's zero visibility, you're doing it by feel."
If the body isn't recovered, it will stay where it is until it floats.
"Floaters can make quite a journey once they're buoyant," says Carpenter. These are the bodies you hear about being recovered in places like Ecorse, Wyandotte, Grosse Ile, or other communities on the Canadian side of the water.
Over the last few years, thanks in part to the efforts of the Detroit Dive Team, the bridge has seen fewer suicides.
In truth, many other factors likely contribute to that decline. Detroit has changed a great deal since the bridge was built in 1923. Instead of a dense city of 1 million bound closely to the river, it's a sprawled-out metropolitan area of 3.7 million encompassing more than 1,000 square miles.
And as the city's parks and policies change, the river's relationship with the city was bound to change as well. A host of recent regulations, such as requiring recreation passports of visitors and closing the park at night, have had a chilling effect on the kind of casual visitation Belle Isle once attracted. And the opening of Detroit's riverfront to pleasure seekers over the last several decades has had an effect as well. Much like the planners of the 1923 Belle Isle Bridge, the architects of Detroit's riverfront attractions, such as Hart Plaza and the RiverWalk, likely had no intentions of smoothing the way for those seeking to end their troubles. For most of the day, these urban parks lack a certain amount of solitude and silence, an atmosphere that so often prevailed on the bridge.
But they've seen their share of jumpers, most notably on one October day last year.
That's when 17-year-old Renaissance High School student William Derrick Watts Jr. went over the railing at Stroh Place and swam out into the water to drown.
The young student, better known as "Bill" or "Billy" — or his alter ego DJKillBill313 — was no stranger to hardship. He lived in Hamtramck with his mother, who suffered from chronic health problems. He developed a strong relationship with his uncle, Marvin Pillow, a part-time DJ and carpenter, and Watts went to live with Pillow's family at his west side Detroit home from time to time, attending Renaissance with Pillow's daughter.
Pillow, 46, says, "Me and him were probably closer than anyone else in his life. Even closer than his friends. Pretty much, he spent 90 percent of his time with me. He was a very creative young man. Very articulate. Pretty good in math and just pretty good in school. Very creative and kind of one of those people who could just pick up things pretty quickly. If he tried to do something he could pick it up by just doing it a few times. He was great at graphic design and wanted to go to state college for it."
Watts was also something of a quiet iconoclast, given, for instance, to wearing button-down shirts printed with lively patterns.
"He did not want to be a middle-of-the-road person," says Pillow. "He didn't want to be like anybody else, ever. So he always did things a little different from what other people would do."
As for Watts' DJ work, Pillow explains: "He was kind of following in his uncle's footsteps, so to speak. We would sit in my basement for hour and hours, listening to music, and when he started making his own music, I would critique it, and we would do changes together."
Pillow's voice trembles with emotion for a moment as he says, "In retrospect, there's times when me and Bill were in the basement, because we had the music on, there were times when I went down and he just didn't look like himself. And I would ask him what was wrong. 'You look like you're so depressed. What's wrong with you?' And he would say, 'Aw, no.' And I would say, 'You just had this look on your face. I don't like the way you look. I don't like when you look like that because it looks like something is wrong.' So I would tell him come on outside and get some fresh air and sunshine because it's beautiful. He seemed to be always smiling and pretty much always happy. It was quite a shock. I was really devastated by this."
In many ways, Watts was a normal Detroit kid, working part-time at a Checkers fast food restaurant, trying to save money for a car, considering what courses to take at college, riding his bike from Hamtramck down to the RiverWalk on weekends. But in retrospect, Pillow now sees how the young man was deeply disturbed about adulthood and what it entailed.
"A lot of our conversations would be about him getting older and being able to do the things that older people can do," says Pillow. "And he kinda had a thing about – I can't even say this – he had a thing about getting old and being worried about bills and worried about paying for everything because he knows. I would go through my bills with him and say, 'Well, I gotta pay this and pay that. That leaves me only a couple of bucks to do what I need to do, but we gotta pay bills.' And he didn't really like that, if I could say it that way.
"And throughout his life, Bill has come to live with me on two, three, maybe four occasions. But before he came to live with me, he had a lot of pressure of being the parent in the house, if you can understand that, because of his mother's health challenges. He kept having to take on the role of kind of an older person."
Pillow adds that Watts was an excellent swimmer, and that they'd actually discussed a jump from the MacArthur Bridge in one of what must have been many wide-ranging conversations.
"Bill and I had a conversation about jumping off of the Belle Isle Bridge," he says. "We discussed how difficult it would be for anyone to swim in the Detroit River. I've been boating on that river quite a bit in my lifetime and the current is really strong. I've had that discussion with him and I'm just really shocked that he did this."
The emotional wallop experienced by Pillow was only intensified by what he discovered later: Watts had been foreshadowing his intentions on social networking.
"Before I read through his Instagram page," Pillow says, "I didn't know that he was showing how bad he felt inside. You couldn't tell. It is pretty unbelievable to me, because some of the postings that he put on Instagram were much more telling as far as how he was feeling inside rather than him speaking it aloud. And his Instagram page was really — I had never been on Instagram before and I would say that he started to prepare to do this I would say at least, serious preparation began a least a month or two before."
Watts' social media page appears to bear out Pillow's theory, with cryptic captions going back to mid-September. On Sept. 13, a picture has the word "Chrysalis" as its caption, suggesting a coming transformation. On Sept. 17, apparently unrelated captions read, "Dead," "Why is leaving my first but only option," and "Syn•co•pe," a medical term for loss of consciousness.
On Oct. 3, one of his Instagram captions read, "Do you hate life enough to see what happens after?" On Oct. 5, Watts posted an image with the caption, "Disconsolate," and another a picture of a drowning woman, taken from the cover of Young Galaxy's 2011 album Shapeshifting. It shows a peacefully unconscious young woman with her temple resting on the sandy bottom, while the rest of her body floats above, with Watts' caption reading, "I think the saddest thing is the closeness isn't there anymore so you're completely alone for now or maybe even forever." He tweeted: "The Weekend is Near" and "I can't describe how happy I am."
Friday, Oct. 24, and Saturday, Oct. 25 seem to have been busy days for Watts. His uncle dropped him off at his mom's in Hamtramck, where he uploaded his EP, entitled .NOTH!NG., to the Internet, while erasing much of what was on his laptop. After posting a link to his album on YouTube, he published his final tweet: "I'm not taking my computer home. Goodbye."
As his family later realized, Watts had set up his getaway for Sunday. His uncle and his mother both thought he'd be working that afternoon, and the earliest he was expected was at the Pillow residence later Sunday. After midnight, early Sunday morning, Watts' posts became more explicit — and more disturbing. At 1:37 a.m. Sunday morning, he posted a photo of him smiling broadly, his glasses hanging off an arm stuck into the hair under his hoodie, with the caption, "Thinking about cutting my hair for my funeral."
On the morning of Sunday, Oct. 26, Watts left his mother's house in Hamtramck and began walking downtown, posting 14 photos to his Instagram account along the way, some unimportant, others provocative. At 10:28 a.m., he posted a photo of a glass of water and two plates of food: waffles, sausage links, and hash browns. He captioned it: "My last meal." At 10:39, his caption read, "Planned and focused." By 10:45, he had reached the Blue Cross-Blue Shield building, in a photo captioned, "Still progressing." At 11:05, he posted a selfie of himself squinting in the morning light down by the Detroit RiverWalk.
Needless to say, some of Watts' friends, alert followers of his Instagram, began trying to get in touch with him, as his uncle later learned.
"And as he was posting those pictures, people were calling him or texting him," Pillow says. "I believe he spoke to one person on the phone and then he would text back and forth with others. And they were asking him what was he doing when they saw he said his 'last meal.' There were some people that tried to call him. None of his friends that are on Instagram, none of them contacted us to say that they thought something was wrong. We don't really know his school friends. We got to know them personally after this incident."
The final two images are the most disturbing. The final image is of Watts' wrist, his watch reading 12:03 p.m., captioned with the morbid joke, "Time to see if my watch is really waterproof."
But the second-from-last image is most compelling of all. It's a selfie of Watts, ball cap, headphones, and all, staring into the camera. What stands out most is the expression on Watts' face. Unlike the grins in the photos from the night before, he wears a relaxed smile, the eyes steady and even. It's as if, in the moments before death, the young man who'd posted so many carefully coiffed selfies finally felt comfortable to let his guard down a little. The caption reads simply: "Smile. You've lived."
"What really caught me about that photo was his happiness," says Pillow. "I rarely saw him smile like that. ... It was the last picture that he took of himself and he looked extremely happy. And that was disturbing to me."
What happened next is difficult to ascertain. Pillow says there was a witness, somebody who was watching Watts as he listened to his headphones by the river.
"This person indicated that he was listening to his headphones," he says. "Bill never went anywhere without them. And he sat over the edge with his headphones and listened to music for a while. I believe the guy had a conversation with him — and then I guess he decided to jump in."
A competent swimmer, Watts quickly made it about 50 feet from shore before going down.
What happened next is extraordinary. At roughly the same time witnesses called police about Watts jumping into the river, another man jumped into the river closer to Hart Plaza. Quick action from the Detroit Dive Team saved the man, who roughly matched Watts' description but was much older. The man was quickly hospitalized, and, despite the confusion, the dive team quickly pressed on with their search for Watts. It would take three days to find his body.
Pillow and his family had no idea what was happening. On Monday morning, Marvin Pillow got a call from Renaissance High School saying Billy hadn't reported to school and that students were all talking about his posts to Instagram. Trying to track down Watts' last movements, he went to Checkers, only to find that Watts didn't have to work the day before. Finally traveling to Watts' mother's house, he found Watts' laptop, and that's when Pillow knew something was very wrong: "He would never leave it anywhere."
A trip to the Hamtramck Police Department wasn't much help, since the HPD were apparently still under the mistaken impression that the Hart Plaza jumper and Watts were one and the same, that Pillow's nephew was saved and hospitalized. But by Tuesday, Oct. 28, HPD realized that the patient was a much older person than 17-year-old Watts.
The confusion finally ended on Wednesday, with the dive team's recovery of Billy Watts' body. The family held Watts' funeral Nov. 8, and laid his body to rest.
Almost six months later, Pillow finds it hard to believe his nephew could have intentionally drowned himself in the river.
"I cannot believe that," he says. "It's unbelievable to me. I haven't spoken to the man who – I would like to speak to the person who witnessed him jumping in. But I can't believe – if you would have asked me if he had the psychological strength to do that, I would have said no."
Looking back, Pillow also believes things would have been different if he had been monitoring Watts' social media.
"I don't deal with social media too much," Pillow says, "but, when this happened I went through his page as far back as I could go, and there are some things in there that he wrote that are kind of disturbing. If I would have seen them, I would have definitely investigated so much more."
Among the most disquieting things to come to light since Watts' death was that his nephew had planned to originally commit suicide earlier.
"I found out from his girlfriend that he had actually planned on doing this in January of 2014," Pillow says. "His girlfriend talked him out of it or he told her that he thought he had more to live for. That he was gonna reconsider. He actually went down there to do it and he rethought about it and I guess came on home. The girlfriend, I asked her why she didn't tell anybody and she said the only person she told was her mom. And I'm quite surprised that mom didn't give us a call or that we never heard about any of this until after the death."
While Watts' death wasn't covered much in mainstream media, the story moved many to comment, especially on a memorial pages set up for him.
In death, Watts did much to raise the issue of chronic depression among his peers. For example, take hip-hop writer DJ Kraze's obituary of Watts, which included a defense of the socially ostracized outsider Watts epitomized, declaring, "I was once 17. I was once that weird DJ kid everybody noticed but nobody knew. I was once (or maybe a few times) depressed to the point where being on this Earth was more pain than I could bear."
If that outpouring of love and sadness represents Watts' memorial, it's his final opus, .NOTH!NG., that's his monument. It's full of not-so-subtle hints about Watts' battle with depression, alienation, indoctrination, and suicidal ideation. The quotes he bites are especially interesting, such as Russell Crowe's speech from A Beautiful Mind, in which he says, "The truth is that I ... I don't like people much. And they don't much like me."
There's a sound bite in which a man discusses the parasitic nature of technology, about how it separates us from human interaction. He bites Frank Zappa's intelligent rant against schools, in which Zappa says that schools "try and breed out any hint of creative thought in the kids that are coming up."
A female voice discussing depression is one of the longer pieces of dialogue; the speaker says, "One of the scary parts may be having the feeling that you serve no benefit to society. And that you feel forced to expect tomorrow is going to be better when you know it's not. Being afraid all the time and not even knowing what you're afraid of. It hurts to live, and breathing is painful. You feel helpless. You feel hopeless, like there's nothing more than this funeral that's playing over and over in your head. For some all they can do is wait for someone to snap them out of it. But what if there's no one is there ... to snap them out of it?"
There are chilling effects, too, such as the sound of a flat EKG, or a sinister, overmodulated voice that declares, "You can end it all!" The composition goes out with Kevin Spacey's lines from American Beauty: "I've always heard your entire life flashes before your eyes the second before you die. First of all, that one second isn't a second at all. It stretches on forever, like an ocean of time. ..."
It's a bit of electronic, 21st century poetry, from somebody who left his mark and moved on. And it almost harks back to Edgar Guest's rhymes dedicating the Belle Isle Bridge 92 years ago:
Much we have done shall swiftly pass away,
Shall fade and fall before Time's sure decay.
A few brief years and we shall be forgot,
Our memory but the common resting plot,
But this staunch bridge, from all the cares of day
To rest and beauty, still shall proudly stay.
If you or someone you know is struggling with depression or has suicidal thoughts, the number for the 24/7 National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255.
Michael Jackman is managing editor of Detroit Metro Times.
