Barbary Coast Ranger

Sweetie and I were out at Fort Point, under the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge, when Hopper’s Hands caught our eye.

Runners would come up to it, it marks the end of how far you can jog along the Marina esplanade, tap their hands against it and then turn around and run back the other way. For people jogging with their dogs, there is a corresponding set of paws, though we didn’t see any running dogs low five’ing the fence.

This is pretty cute, the paws are an especially nice touch, and it brings up the obvious question: who’s Hopper. My guess at the time was that Hopper was some famous local runner (”famous” meaning “prominent among the small set of San Franciscans who run around the Marina a lot”). This turns out not be true in a surprisingly serious way.

Ken Hopper is (was?, don’t know) an ironworker. He works on maintaining the Golden Gate bridge. When he saw that joggers would tap their hands against the fence at the turning point in their run, he had the hands sign made. Seeing a woman having her dog touch the fence, he had the paws sign made. This empathy and metaphorical reaching out, also led to Ken’s other, volunteer, job: trying to talk jumpers down off the same bridge he works to keep up.

Ken was on call to talk/wrestle people down off his bridge and he did so successfully at least 30 times. Two unsuccessful attempts to talk people down put him into therapy for awhile. Not exactly the nike clad fun runner I envisioned when I originally saw the hands. Hopper’s hands turn out to more about the spiritual heart than the cardio pump heart in your chest.

Someone was nice enough to run this down and post it at http://www.hoppershands.blogspot.com/ where there’s more information, largely from a San Francisco Chronicle article from 2001.