You’re sitting in the woods above the lake on a lovely spring day and these are your thoughts.

These are them.

What else.

There are still unknowns here, of course. The bottom of the lake will be pretty much gravel so there wont be any billowing silt when the anchor touches down. Total silence. No telling what’s down there. The corpses of those who have gone before. A family you didnt know you had. It’s deep enough that the light is pretty dim for all the clarity of the water. A cold gray world. Not black yet. No life. The only color is the thin pink stain trailing away in the water from the blood leaking out of your ears. We dont know about the gag reflex but we’re fixing to find out.

Fixing.

Fixing. Once your lungs are full will this abate? The gagging? Dont know. No one’s ever said. The autonomous reflex will be to cough out the water but you cant because it’s too heavy. And of course there’s nothing to replace it with anyway except more water. In the meantime oxygen deprivation and nitrogen narcosis have begun to compete for your sanity. You’re sitting on the glacial floor of the lake with the weight of the water in your lungs like a cannonball and the pain of the cold in your chest is probably indistinguishable from fire and you are gagging in agony and even though your mind is beginning to go you are yet caught in the iron grip of a terror utterly atavistic and over which you have no control whatsoever and now out of nowhere there’s a new thought. The extraordinary cold is probably capable of keeping you alive for an unknown period of time. Hours perhaps, drowned or not. And you may well assume that you will be unconscious but do you know that? What if you’re not? As the reasons for not doing to yourself what you have just irrevocably done accumulate in your head you will be left weeping and gibbering and praying to be in hell. Anyway, sitting there among the trees in the soft wind I knew that I would not be going there. Maybe I had been a bad person in my life, but I hadnt been that bad. I stood up and walked back up to my car and drove back to San Francisco.

Had you driven to Lake Tahoe with the express purpose of killing yourself?

Yes.

What else.

Nothing else. I thought about writing up my findings. I thought that people bent on drowning themselves were probably in for some nasty surprises and that what I had to say might change their minds.

Did you analyze other methods of suicide in this way?

Not really. There wasnt that much to analyze. Some things of course are just too brutally painful on the face of it. Setting yourself on fire. For instance.

You wont say whether you feel you are presently at risk.

Of setting myself on fire?