It was a cloudless August day when Ken Baldwin decided, for the second time, to end his life. Once before, stuck in a deadend job as an office clerk and overwhelmed by new fatherhood, he had tried to escape the depression that had haunted him since his teens. That time, he had driven out to a local beauty spot by a stream, sat down under a tree and washed down a bottle of painkillers with a six-pack of beer. He thought it would be a nice place to die. But hours later he came to, despondent but still alive, and drove home and back to his life.

This time, two years later, he vowed he would succeed. The mocking voice in his head telling him he was a loser would not be silenced. Nor were his dependent wife and toddler daughter enough to will him to live. “I truly believed I was an albatross around their necks, that everything about their lives would be better if I was gone,” he recalls. “But for their sake, I didn’t want to shoot or hang myself. I just wanted to be left alone, I wanted to be gone, I wanted to disappear.” So telling his wife he would be home late that night, he got into his car outside his home in Angels Camp, California, and drove west to the end of a continent, to the city of San Francisco, to the bridge over the Golden Gate.

Of all the landmarks in the world where the desperate choose to end their life, the Golden Gate Bridge has the grim distinction of being one of the most popular. Since its opening in 1937 at least 1,300 people have taken the 225ft plunge from its span against the fabled backdrop of Alcatraz, Angel Island and the city of San Francisco. The first was Harold Wobber, a shell-shocked First World War veteran, who jumped just three months after the bridge opened. On the bridge, he turned to a stranger and said, “This is as far as I go” before stepping out into the blue.

In 1977, the peak suicide year, 40 people made the fatal leap. The bridge’s grisly record was once closely rivalled by other suicide magnets around the globe, from the Empire State Building to Sydney Harbour Bridge. But one by one, in response to the mounting death tolls, those lethal structures put up barriers to prevent jumpers. San Francisco alone held out, its officials and residents bitterly opposed to a structure that might risk the bridge’s iconic aesthetics or taint their top tourist attraction with the touch of death. “Nobody wants to acknowledge what is happening here,” Eve Meyer, the director of San Francisco Suicide Prevention, says. “That this thing of beauty is a place of death.” The bridge is, in the words of one campaigner, a “loaded gun in a psychiatric ward” that lays the welcome mat out to the desperate.

On that summer day in 1985, Baldwin found just such a welcome. He was 28. He had already decided that the bridge would be the place to go. “I had always had a thing about a beautiful place, from that first time I drove to the stream,” he says. “The bridge has a lure. I was determined I would not fail again. I had heard the water just pulls you under.” For days he awoke in a state of fevered desperation, repeating to himself: “Maybe today, maybe today.” But then that August morning he awoke and said: “This is the day.” The moment came as a relief. Calmly, he told his wife Ellen that he hadvolunteered for overtime to earn some extra cash and climbed into his car. It was 7am. “I just wanted to get out of the house before she said, ‘Are you OK?’ and I had to tell her no. I knew what I had to do. I had nowhere to go but up.” In a haze, almost of exultation, he drove the three hours to San Francisco and up to the Golden Gate Bridge. He arrived at the car park at 10am. It was a beautiful, fogless day, rare even in summer in San Francisco, and he could see the whole celebrated vista from the bridge. “Just like all the other tourists, I put my money in the meter and started walking.”

When Baldwin passed along the bridge’s pedestrian walkway he found himself leaning over a rail that barely came past his waist. Joseph Strauss, the bridge’s chief engineer, drew up his plans incorporating a 5½ft-high guard rail. By the time the bridge opened, however, the rail had been lowered to 4ft. Nobody knows exactly why, although some have speculated that Strauss’s own diminutive stature was to blame. At just 5ft tall, the so-called “little man who built the big bridge” may have simply wanted to see over the side.

As he presided over the opening, Strauss dismissed the change as a detail. “Who would want to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge?” he asked reporters.

Hundreds, as it turns out, drawn just like Baldwin by its unique blend of romance, ease and efficiency. The jump is fatal in 98 per cent of cases, making death many times more likely than by overdose, hanging or even shooting. Websites dedicated to suicide assistance celebrate the bridge as the most effective method accessible to the masses. But while its efficacy is indisputable, the myths that Baldwin had heard about the gentle tug of the tide were anything but. Death from the bridge is neither peaceful nor bloodless. After four seconds of free fallthe jumper hits the water at a speed of 75mph, with a force of 15,000lb per square inch, like a speeding lorry hitting a concrete wall. Most suffer broken ribs, which rip inward, tearing through the spleen, lungs and heart, drowning them in their own blood.

Unlike most jumpers, Baldwin did not climb on to the cord, the iron beam on the outermost part of the bridge. Afraid that he would falter, he decided to vault the rail. And with a swift, sudden intake of breath, he did. “As soon as I saw my hands leave the rail, I thought, ‘What am I doing?’ ” Baldwin recalls. “This was the worst thing I could do in my life. I thought of my wife and daughter. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to live.”

Kevin Hines, then 19, who also vaulted the rail and changed his mind, fought in mid-air to turn his feet towards the water, hoping that would save him. It did. The only people ever to have survived the plunge have all fallen feet first. Hitting the water legs down shatters the femurs, but sometimes that is enough to cushion the impact from damaging the vital organs above. But only if someone vigilant is on hand to pull you out before you drown.

Baldwin doesn’t know if he blacked outon or before impact. The last thing he remembers is rushing towards the water with regret and dread in his heart and the image of his wife and daughter seared on his brain. The next thing he remembers is waking on the deck of a rescue craft with the coastguard leaning over him: “Do you know who you are?” the coastguard asked him. “Do you know what you did? Do you want to do it again?” Once, coastguards had rescued a jumper only for him to start beating them off and trying to leap back into the water. But Baldwin told his rescuer: “No, no, once is enough.”

“I was just thrilled to be alive,” he recalls. “I just thought, ‘How amazing. I’m alive. I have another chance’. I told the coastguard, ‘Whatever you need from me, I’ll help you’.” And then he blacked out again. He later learnt that he had been in the chilly North Pacific waters for a full seven minutes before his rescue. When he woke again he was in intensive care, where his wife and a doctor were standing over him.

Having hit the water with his backside and his feet, he had suffered no major injuries beyond severe bruising to those areas and to his lungs and could feel little pain. “It was the lungs they were worriedabout,” Baldwin recalls. “Shock does terrible things to the body.”

“I give him a 50-50 chance of surviving the night,” the doctor told his wife. Baldwin, unable to move or communicate, was stunned. “I wanted to say, ‘What are you saying, I want to live’,” he remembers. “After all that, I wasn’t going to die now.” Baldwin’s response is shared by many other survivors of the bridge. A study called Where Are They Now about the fate of 515 people prevented from jumping from the bridge found that only 6 per cent went on to kill themselves, suggesting that many bridge suicides are impulsive acts. One jumper was found carrying a note reading: “No reason at all except I have toothache.” An unbearably poignant diary entry, found in the home of another, read: “If one person smiles at me on the way, I won’t jump.” But only 26 people have ever lived to tell the tale of their jump.

Hines, who suffered much more serious injuries, from shattered vertebrae to broken legs, attributes his survival to an act of God. Baldwin is not a religious man but still describes his survival as a miracle. Both men’s experiences disprove the assumption that suicide cannot be prevented and that a barrier on the bridge would only send the suicidal in search of another place to die. Many San Franciscans cite this belief in defence of their opposition to raising the barrier; incredibly, Baldwin’s wife is among them. “She’s adamant that people will just find another way,” he says. “That you can’t save people from themselves and you shouldn’t try to to the detriment of the bridge. And there’s some truth in that. If the bridge hadn’t been there, I would have found another way. I didn’t want to be saved. But that’s not true for everyone. We will never know if a barrier saves lives, but (continued on page 6) what it will do is stop people jumping from the bridge. Isn’t that OK?”

It might yet happen. After years of official opposition, the campaign for raising the barrier was given new life with the release of the documentary The Bridge, which opens in Britain next week. Its director, Eric Steel, set up cameras on the bridge, telling the authorities that he wished to film the landmark across the seasons. In reality, he wanted to capture the yearly carnage. His camera filmed 23 of the 24 jumps – one every 15 days. “There was shock at that number. People said, ‘We didn’t know’,” Ms Meyer, of the suicide prevention group, said. “Now it’s on film, everybody knows.” The documentary film makes disturbing viewing. One man is seen to climb over the rail and jump as people stroll behind him, gazing at the view. The camera follows him till he plops into the water and disappears. Another climbs over and sits on the cord as pedestrians glance nervously and shuffle by. Another, Gene, strode up and down the bridge for an hour and a half, apparently in some torment, pushing his flowing hair back repeatedly and leaning over the rail to gaze at the water. At the end of the film, he suddenly climbs up on to the rail and stands in a crucifix pose with his back to the water before gently leaning back into a fall.

Before filming, Steel and his associates had agreed a system for intervening in potential suicides by calling the bridge patrol to warn them. Gene, however, who in the film looks like the most likely candidate, was not saved; Steel says he had no idea he was going to jump. The film has attracted criticism from the bridge authorities, furious at being duped and critical that it could encourage further suicides. Advocates of suicide prevention are also critical, saying that the deaths in the film look far more peaceful than they really are. Perhaps its greatest impact so far, however, is to have reignited the stalled debate over the raising of the rail.

In a hurried meeting of the bridge authorities before the film’s premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival last year, they approved a feasibility study into raising the barrier. The news came as a relief to the barrier’s many advocates, not least the organisation formed by relatives of those who had jumped from the bridge. Among them are Dave and Jean Hull, whose student daughter Kathy plunged to her death three years ago. Dave Hull, a grief-stricken figure, described Steel as “a hero” for shining a light into such a dark corner. “The bridge is the myth of the perfect death, the gold standard of suicide,” he says.

“Fifty years of silence have not stopped this problem. We have to bring it out into the open,” he added, in tears.

In 1993 a poll indicated that 54 per cent of respondents opposed raising the height of the barrier, in the same year that a San Franciscan, Steve Page, threw his three-year-old daughter off the bridge and then followed her to their deaths.

“It’s the bootstrapped, buck-skinned spirit: I came, I built, I pulled myself up and you didn’t,” Ms Meyer says. “We get very judgmental about someone who’s suicidal.” Actually, a partial suicide barrier already exists on the bridge, running along the section that runs over dry land. Its purpose is not to save the suicidal themselves, but to save anyone underneath from being hit by them. Anyone who just wants to kill themselves, the bridge seems to say, is free to do so.

“One man said to me, ‘Why don’t we just put a divingboard there?’ ” Ms Meyer recalls. “I said, ‘Say that again, say why don’t we put a diving board there for my son?’ ”

Since his miraculous survival, Baldwin has never looked back. “Before, I didn’t want to get better. I had become consumed by my depression. But after the jump, that changed because now I knew I wanted to live.” Unlike his previous attempt, this one had been very public. “It actually helped that everyone knew,” he says. “So I didn’t have to explain. And this time, I wasn’t ashamed.” This time, too, he was forced to share his pain with his wife. “That made all the difference. With her help, I got stronger.” Catherine, his daughter, was too young to remember her father’s failed bid, but Baldwin chose not to hide it. “I don’t think we ever didn’t talk about it,” he says. “But we were able to because the outcome was a wonderful one. She never had to see me in a depressive state.” For months after the jump, whenever Baldwin closed his eyes he could feel himself falling. But he never suffered nightmares or flashbacks. His recovery was aided by a sympathetic architect who took him on as a draughtsman just five months after the jump. Seven years later, he was laid off – but this time he felt able to handle the blow.

Casting around for something he could feel passionate about, he got a job as a high school teacher of drawing and animation. On his first day, he walked into his new classroom and opened the drawer of the desk. Lying inside was an engineer’s drawing of the Golden Gate Bridge, like a blueprint, with all the measurements written on it. “I felt like it was meant to be there,” he said. “I put it up on the wall immediately.” Twelve years later, it still hangs there.

“The kids all know what it means,” he says. Every year he tells his story to his freshman classes. “Most people just have one life that goes from high school to college to marriage, job and kids,” he says. “I have two lives: one before the jump, one after. I’m almost a completely different person now.” Even today, he can still clearly picture the moment that his hands slipped from the rail. But it comes to him as an epiphany, not a nightmare. “Sometimes my wife and I will be talking and we’ll say, ‘When was that? Oh, that was before the jump; that was after the jump.’ I know now that I’m lucky to be alive. I may have had a crummy day at school, but I have my life. And that’s just amazing.”

Interview by Catherine Philp