When First I Knocked

There is—or used to be—a high unprotected railroad trestle on the outskirts of Ann Arbor. Narrow, constructed of massive beams, it was straight out of a cinematographer’s imagination, just the sort of place that a romantically suicidal undergraduate would think to go, although I don’t know whether anyone ever did successfully—or even unsuccessfully—jump from there.

I no longer remember the string of events that got me and my friend Whitney up there, but one very early morni...