A Human Connection Means Everything, Even Among the Self-Centered

Shortly after 10 on a Saturday morning, Jeffrey Taylor swung gently out into space, the triple ranks of the San Gabriel Mountains arrayed behind him, the great green carpet of the Hansen Dam Golf Course stretching out before him. Below, 110 feet down, lay the dam’s concrete spillway.

Around Taylor’s waist was a harness attached to a rope. The rope was tied to a guardrail on top of the dam.

In Taylor’s right hand was the left wrist of a 21-year-old man who dangled beneath him like the lower half of a team of trapezists.

The young man’s feet swam in the air. He lusted for the concrete below. With his free hand, he clawed at Taylor’s.

Back and forth, the two men swung.

This was not the way Jeff Taylor had expected to spend his morning.

He and a team of other Los Angeles city firefighters had been nearby, preparing an abandoned house for a demonstration burn, when they were called to the dam. Police were trying to reason with a man who had climbed over the guardrail, pulled his black T-shirt up over his head to cover his face and was trying to summon the courage or the calm or the final galvanizing bit of madness to jump.

When the firefighters got there, the young man was standing on one of the 2-foot-by-2-foot pilasters that run nearly the height of the dam. His hands were on the guardrail and he was facing the police officers. He bounced up and down on the balls of his feet.

The firefighters fastened ropes onto the far guardrail across the road. Harnessed, Taylor climbed onto the near guardrail, 10 feet or so from the young man. A second firefighter did the same on the man’s other side.

Then the man turned to face the abyss, his left hand behind him on the guardrail, steadying himself. He began bouncing harder. He’s going to go, thought Taylor. He’s going to go.

The young man went. At the instant his feet left the pilaster, however, a police officer grabbed the man’s left wrist. Taylor saw that the officer, with his arms extended through the railing, had no leverage and couldn’t hold on for more than a few seconds. Taylor dove from his perch.

He grabbed the young man’s wrist just as it slipped from the policeman’s grasp. Taylor and the young man swung out over the spillway.

The other harnessed firefighter dropped to the top of the pilaster and draped himself over it. As those manning the ropes above drew Taylor and the young man back toward the dam, the second firefighter was able to get his arms around the young man’s waist.

Straddling his colleague on the pilaster, Taylor struggled to get a capture strap around the writhing, flailing young man. It was no use.

A police officer handed down a set of handcuffs. Taylor fastened one end of them around the man’s wrist and the other through a D-ring on his own harness.

The men atop the dam began to haul up Taylor and his catch. When the young man was within reach, the police officers swarmed him and flung him and Taylor to safety in the middle of the road.

They forgot that Taylor was attached to the man, and the scrapes and bruises Taylor incurred landing on the road exceeded those the man had inflicted when the two of them were hanging in thin air.

Finally, Taylor detached himself.

“The whole time, I was pretty cool and calm about it,” he says. “But then I went to sit down on the curb and, all of a sudden, my knees started shaking and I thought, ‘Holy mackerel. . . . Holy mackerel.’ ”

In his career, Taylor had gone into burning buildings to lead out endangered people. This was different--the clarifying, terrifying literalness of having held another person’s life in his own fallible hand. What if his grip had weakened? What if his faith in himself had wavered?

Teeming, striving Los Angeles is a place where the mechanical smile, the desultory cheek kiss, the loose handshake commonly pass for interest in the existence of others. That’s why the image of Jeff Taylor’s hand clutching the young man’s as the two strangers swung out over the spillway is so striking. It reminds us of the truth, worth recalling from time to time, that even in a place notorious for self-searching, none of us would last a day without meaningful attachment to others.

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The young man’s rescue took place on Jan. 14, 1995. Four years later, when Taylor was 50, doctors found he had colon cancer.

For eight long and frightening months, Taylor dangled over another abyss, suspended first by the hand of a surgeon, then of a radiologist, then of a chemotherapist.

In February, the City of Los Angeles awarded him the Medal of Valor, its highest firefighter honor, for saving the young man’s life.

Earlier this month, his doctor told him that one year after surgery, he appears to be cancer-free. It will be a while, though, before he knows for sure that he’s been returned to solid ground.

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James Ricci’s e-mail address is [email protected]