I, too, saw someone die, and the sounds and the visual were literally out of sync for my friends and I were on one side of a rocky gorge and a bunch of teenagers were on the other. First would come the image, then would come the sound. The kids were climbing on the rocky wall next to technical rock climbers, all roped in and helmeted with a spotter on the ground managing their ropes and chalked-up hands. There was a lot of yelling--the technical rock climbers yelling at the kids to "get back", and the kids yelling happily at the new form of freedom they'd found on a perfect, warm Minnesota spring day. I looked away for a moment, making certain of the safety of my own group of friends as we all watched in horror at the probable outcome. We heard, "I'm slipping, I'm slipping, I'm slipping" in a young woman's voice, then saw a person falling almost in slow motion down by the cliffside in freefall until she hit the ground. We then heard her last words, "I'm slipping! Ahh!", a surprised scream cut short as her breath was taken away by the fall, and her realization of her upcoming death. Then, a sound that could only be described as that of a tree falling in a forest--a thousand branches breaking all at once. The mind failed to comprehend, for a moment, that it was this young woman's life-bones breaking. Our group, now thoroughly out of the mood to rock climb and swim on our side of the river, ate our picnic lunches in total silence, not wanting to leave the pathetic little body lying there among the rocks without any cover or protection. About a half hour later an ambulence arrived at the visitor's area near a boat dock, without sirens or flashing lights. The EMTs, in hiking boots and shorts, carefully carried a small stretcher back into the barely accessible region in which the young woman had died so suddenly. Some of her friends had clustered up at the top of the cliff, in the parking lot look-out spot from where they had so perilously started their descent, then cut it short when tragedy struck the most intrepid amongst them. The rest of her friends had quickly run down the groomed trails to the lower parking area and, when it arrived, gathered by the ambulance as though it were an official meeting spot for their friend's return.
Deaths were so common here that, sadly, her fall from the cliffs, by the "Do not climb here" sign and on the far side of the fence attempting to hold people back, was not even reported on the evening news or the next day's paper.
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