The Jumper On the Cooper River Bridge

[oneighty]

I catch a ride from Breach Inlet over to Charleston,South Carolina and hit a few bars down on King and Calhoun Streets. Night arrives. I go to the bus stop where I learn there is no bus service crossing the Cooper River bridge at night. I have no money for a taxi so I am forced to hitch hike or walk. I am wearing white fisherman's boots, jeans and a cold weather vest. Nobody stops to give me a ride. I do not blame them so I set out to walk across.

I walk the bridge on the right hand side. All bridge traffic is one way and it comes from behind me. I do not attempt to hitch hike, a person would be a fool to stop on this bridge. As I cross the bridge I recall when I was doing a few dive jobs down there in the river.

The life line and air hose on my Mark Five diving rig became fouled up in some debris under the old bridge. We were checking the piers for the Army Engineers. Later in life another Eddie and I do a job for the Navy replacing degaussing coils deep under the mud in that muddy river. We moved four or five feet of mud with a fire hose to get to the coils.

As I walk this long bridge in the cold wind I decide that unlike Nancy Sinatra's boots my boots are not made for walking. I must stop frequently, remove the boots and adjust my socks. I stop often to rest, leaning against the bridge railing. Leaning there it is easy to remember things that were.

Under this very bridge the Boomers put out to sea. The Trident Submarines are huge,somehow both awkward and graceful. Their passage through the water creates a huge bow wave and from the stern a smaller wave is formed.

Sailors in their crisp white uniforms stand tall and proud on the planes jutting out from the sail. The sailors standing there demonstrate how large these real sea monsters are. She can carry twenty four Trident Missiles, each missile is capable of carrying eight W88 warheads and each warhead has a potential yield of 475 kilotons.

The W88 is a fission fusion fission weapon. The Russians call the fission fusion fission method 'layer caking'. The Russians 'layer caked' a nuclear bomb 'Tsar Bomba' into an estimated 50 megaton yield. When that baby went off I bet even the gods blinked.

About that time as I am leaning there a Police car pulls up. The nice man in the car says "Get in the car." In the car I quickly warm. The cop asks "What is your name?" Avoiding the question I reply; "I am a commercial fisherman, my boat is tied up at Breach Inlet and that is where I am going." He relaxes some. He tells me they got a call about a jumper on the bridge. "It is not me, I am not a 'jumper'."

The nice police man puts me out of the car on the Mt.Pleasant side. The very next car that comes along takes me right to my boat, the Vicky Mary.

I still think about the Boomers and all those nukes now and then.

Do you?

From 'Voyages of the Vicky Mary'.

180

[RaleighNCDUer]

1. Nice.

And yes, I do. Occasionally.

[JitterbugPerfume]

2. My copy of

The Voyages of The Vicky Mary is a treasure

'specialy that one poem

You know which one

[JitterbugPerfume]

3. Jumper is one of my favorites

i get vertigo looking down at water

I also get crazy thoughts---like I wonder what would happen if---????

[oneighty]

4. Yes Jitterbug like

what would happen if one should be urged to jump? Splash or splat?

180

[JitterbugPerfume]

5. I am not a scientist

but I play one on DU

and I have heard that from that height , at that velocity, It would be like hitting cement

etai

[Dogmudgeon]

6. Tsar Bomba

Tsar Bomba detonation at Novaya Zemlya, 30 Oct 1961 (Public Domain image)


I had a friend who was a boomer submariner, and learned all about this stuff himself, although his tours of duty were during the 1980s.

I heard about Tsar Bomba when I was in grade school. In the mid-1960s, when the Cold War was thawing, a book about nuclear energy provided the details, including (if memory serves me) the picture you see at the top of this message. Back then, the yield was reported as 67 MT, probably a typo of the "official" AEC estimate of 57 MT.

Tsar Bomba was actually designed for a 100 MT yield; developers Andrei Sakharov, Viktor Adamsky and 24-year-old nuke wunderkind Yuri Smirnov trimmed it back to 50 MT before detonation.

Here are two excellent articles on the greatest of all nuclear bombs:

Wikipedia

Nuclear Weapons Archive

With thanks to oneighty for another excellent rememberance.

--p!

[WCGreen]

7. I really enjoy your crisp no nonsense style of writing.......