Sometimes I wonder if the bar for entry into the guide isn’t a little low. Take, for instance, ‘The Killing Cord’ of central Utah: a low hanging powerline with faulty jacketing in two hand-distant locations. According to my considerable research, there was nothing particularly interesting about it before its infamy as a place to and means by which to commit suicide. And the fact is, there’s no evidence of any actual suicide taking place there. Like so many satanic-panics and children-eating digital games, the hand-wringing around ‘The Killing Cord’ is likely over a rumor.
A rumor that has been bolstered by a well-meaning local government.
‘You’ll know it’s ‘The Killing Cord’ when you begin to see the warnings. The hotline numbers, yes. Those come first. Then the very concerned PSAs about the danger of electricity to the human body- detailed descriptions about the pain and charring that one might experience upon contacting a live wire. Then: gruesome images, and though the result of electrocution are naturally gruesome, these bear the telltale signs of AI generation: a real ‘what-if’ exaggeration on something already serious by default. And finally, the pièce de résistance: a wire-made human silhouette that, upon the press of a button, will fall forward on ‘The Killing Cord,’ gyrating and sparking and generally causing a scene.
People love it. People love making the fake man do his macabre dance on the wire. It must happen 20 times a day, and crowds gather to cheer and record and generally find little social-media-clips of the ensuing firework show. The installation has been nationally panned. Petitions circulate to have the wire-man retired and replaced with something a bit more serious. The government intervention is widely considered to be a failure.
But.
But nobody has touched ‘The Killing Cord’ since the wire man has been in place. The solemnity of the venue has been stripped, not unlike the sheath of the cord, and there’s always someone around to pull a struggling body from the edge.’
I imagine an expert and a roll of quality electric tape could do what the wire man has accomplished at ‘The Killing Cord’ with a lot less trouble. The wire man’s performace is loud and violent and the air around him is acrid for half an hour after, but I’m won over, in the end, by the way the sparks fall on an unseasonable frost. There’s something to be said for replacing an ugly thing with something prettier.
-traveler
