I spent the summer of 2003 training in the Napa River sloughs outside of Vallejo north of San Francisco Bay. We were working up for small boat riverine operations on the Al-faw Euphrates in Iraq that we’d eventually never do. Besides nearly freezing to death a few times I don’t remember that much about our training. What I do remember was Coast Guard Station Golden Gate and the handful of corpses they pulled out of the bay in the weeks we were there. The station was in shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge on the northern side towards Marin County. It’s where we kept our boats while we bedded down at the abandoned citadel just up the hill.
In the operations center of the base was a large chart of San Francisco Bay with push pins of different colors scattered about it. The red ones represented vessel distress calls. The blue ones were harbor police support. The most common ones lined either side of the bridge, three and four deep along both sides. They were black. And they were body recoveries; usually suicides; usually off the bridge.
One particular morning I came down to water to check on our boats and have a cup of coffee and watch the fog roll off the bay as the sun came up. There was a dead man on the pier a few feet away from where the boats were moored. My 20 year old new guy standing watch told me that the Coast Guard boat came back with it and left one of the crew members there to wait for the coroner. On the water the corpse belonged to the Coast Guard. On the dock, it belonged to the coroner. So that Coast Guard 20 year old new guy quickly turned to mine and asked him to keep an eye on him until the coroner arrived. You don’t need two new guys to watch two boats and a corpse after all. One will do.
The body was old. His clothes, even after a bay washing, were dirty. His hair and beard were a tired gray and tinged yellow with streaks of coal black memories. His eyes were gray and open. Eventually the coroner came and loaded him up in the truck. And that was that.
I’ve told that story from time to time over the years much as I just wrote it; with the sort of indifference and bravado often used to tell stories about war. I’m at the center of it. The people around me are background or props to make a point. The point is that I’ve been places. And I’ve seen things. One of those things is that San Francisco is such a mess that homeless drifters jump into the bay daily and are dumped on the pier like sacks garbage. I have no idea who that man was. But he was someone. He’s just not in the story.
When I met my wife a few years before that she was teaching at the high school she went to. She was the young and likable health teacher kids felt like they could talk to about their problems. She was the SADD club president. She was the one that kids felt they let down with their bad decisions. The one who had students come to her wedding ceremony. She mentored. She cared.
One had a had a particularly rough family life. Her mother was trying to clean herself up but had lived hard and would die when the girl was just 18; precisely the time in someone’s life where the system stops caring and it’s up to individual humans to start. Except she had no individual humans. So we took her in a bit. We gave her place to stay when she needed it; taught her to drive. Helped get her ready to go off to college. We played family for her.
We kept in touch as she went off to school. And then to grad school. And then when she went off to Spain to teach. She stayed with us from time to time when she was in town. She helped take care of our kids. She was good with them. Nice. cheerful. And caring. She’d beaten the odds.
A few years ago some friends of hers reached out to us. They were worried about her. She was living on the streets in one of the coastal towns in Southern Spain. She didn’t seem herself and was posting erratically on social media. We reached out. She was in distress. The details were vague but she wanted to come back to the U.S. but had no money. I bought her a plane ticket back to San Diego and she came to stay with us. When I picked her up at the airport she was different. She’d lost weight. And she seemed in a fog.
We gave her some space. We got her a job as a server at a restaurant where we knew the owner. She was in her 30s by then. But she was clearly losing her grip. The job didn’t work. And staying in a house with special needs kids didn’t either. So she left. And we lost touch again.
We got some bills (we were her last address) from Alameda County. She’d been checked into an institution and released. And we got a few voice mails of incoherent rambling. Scary stuff. She dropped off social media. Covid came. And we lost touch completely. It was clear that she was angry with us for not letting her passively couch surf at our home. For insisting that she get help. Or that she try to work and earn some money to get back on her feet.
This week we got a phone call from the city of San Francisco. They’d pulled her body out of the water. I don’t know how they knew to contact us. That they did drove home the reality that she had no one. And the guilt floods in.
Clearly we helped when no one else would. And the world won’t hold us responsible for her unfortunate end. The world will forgive us. But that’s not how guilt works.
The world is full of general theories that hold things to be broadly true. People are rational. They pursue their interests and can be trusted to behave within the bounds of certain expectations. When a policy is enacted an outcome will persist. When we do this for your children, we can expect that outcome. We believe these things because they are often broadly true. The 80/20 of it holds up. But we also believe them because they give us a sense of control. Some symmetry to trust. When we zoom in close enough though, when our focus takes us beyond the general theory of humanity, down to the quantum level of one single human, these theories break down. What’s true of physics is true of human behavior. There is no universal theory. And the stories we tell ourselves about the way things are fall short.
There’s another black pin on Coast Guard Station Golden Gate’s board tonight. One more statistic in the grand problem of mental illness and the cycle of addiction and homelessness. And maybe more ideas about how to solve them on the grand scale. But I can’t get away from the feeling that no policy let down our friend as much as we did. And from that reckoning comes the realization that the scarce resource is individual humans caring about individual humans. I share this because I don’t want to let you off the hook for your thoughts about what is broadly true. I want to put Kelly in your story about what you think should and shouldn’t happen. To solve the injustice of how I once told the story of the corpse on the pier. I’m telling you because I feel guilty. I feel guilty after I tried. And there is power in the guilt. And I want others who have done less to feel it too.
Tragedy scales. Individual human empathy doesn’t.