Attempted suicide or "harmless" fun?

Monday, Aug. 18, 2008
12:30pm

Today quite exciting things happening on my lunch walk and they involved emergency vehicles, an indication that today's events were quite interesting.

As I was walking back up Mem towards Mass Ave. a fire truck pulled up in front of the yacht club. My initial thought was that there was a fire at the club. Last week there was the strong smell of pot coming from the club so this pot smoker could have very well started a fire. However, as I walked by the club the Cambridge Fire Boat, which is docked there, was starting up and one firefighter was being helped into his dry suit. This was quite more exciting than I had expected.

Right around this time about 10 other emergency vehicles descended on the Harvard Bridge (which is actually crossed by Mass Ave. and is not near Harvard). I thought that perhaps someone was trying to kill themselves. Luckily, at this very moment, the guy who called 911 happened to walk right past me and was exclaiming to someone about what he knew. He kept saying, "I called it in! I called it in! They were jumping off the bridge!"

The emergency vehicles stayed around the bridge for a few minutes and then all left, so I'm thinking no one killed themselves. Who exactly was jumping off the bridge, though? And if you were to jump off the bridge why would you do it in the middle, rather than toward the edge where you could easily swim to shore? Maybe there were triathletes jumping off or Olympic swimmers. It would be a pretty tough swim from the middle of the Charles to shore. I did a quick search online but only found out that Houdini had jumped off the bridge for one of his stunts. Perhaps someone was trying to recreate that. Regardless of who these people were or why they were jumping, it made for yet another exciting lunch time walk.