I lived in Westport, CT for over twenty years before I walked across the 137-year-old, 289-foot Cribari Bridge, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. I had driven over this oldest surviving moveable bridge in CT thousands of times, but the walk across the Saugatuck River provided and understandably different experience. I also walk across the Ruth Steinkraus Cohen Memorial Bridge, upriver from the Cribari, more often now that I do a three-mile loop instead of walking on the treadmill in the gym. The bridges could not be more different: one is old and rickety looking, unwelcoming to large eighteen-wheelers, and precarious-feeling to traverse by car or on foot. It’s narrow and old wooden boards make up the walkway. The longer, wider more modern Steinkraus bridge in town is all smooth two-lane asphalt with ample concrete sidewalks, often festooned with flags of other countries (UN Day) or of America (for Memorial, Independence, and Labor Days). Interestingly, for the purpose of this essay, it is also the site of all political demonstrations. Two bridges also crossed the Avon in the town of Stratford-Upon-England, which adopted me a few years back while I studied Shakespeare. The Clopton and Lucy’s Mill bridges make our “old” bridge look like a bright-eyed toddler. The former was built in 1486 to replace a wooden one that dated from 1318.
But ultimately, both serve the same purpose. Bridges allow us to move from one point to another much more easily than we could in their absence - if we could at all. They are facilitators. They represent transition. The view from them is often literally and symbolically expansive and hopeful, like that for those defiantly crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, AL. But sometimes, the water below allows the wind to whip more strenuously than it does over the sheltering land on either side and unexpectedly exposes us to an uncomfortable chill. They suspend us, removing the secure footing of solid ground, which can be unsettling. Crossing bridges where I cannot see to the end scares me. The Tappan Zee and the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel make me very nervous. This, apparently, is such a common fear that some bridges actually have escorts who will pilot your car across, going back and forth all day long for scaredy-cats like me, while you presumably hide in the back seat. It’s not so much a rational fear that the bridge will collapse into the body of water below as the invisibility of the end point.
Bridges can be beautiful from below, too. I sailed under both the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge leaving New York harbor and the Sydney Harbour, or “Coathanger,” Bridge entering that port when I worked on a German container ship in 1979. While I traversed a different expanse then - from sheltered harbor to open sea and open sea to sheltered harbor, the view from beneath afforded a unique perspective of both of these majestic structures, and allowed me to see the length to which they both go to ferry their passengers from one side to the other.
Either frame of reference makes obvious how much thought, planning, and effort went in to the creation of such spans. Architects, engineers, and construction workers collaborated and toiled to design, erect, and make these behemoths safe for us to cross. In some cases, lives were lost. Three men died during the Verrazano’s fabrication; sixteen for the Coathanger.
Our founding fathers, similarly struggled to create a system that would serve all those who used it for generations to come. They built a bridge into their design: A peaceful transition of power is one of the most important tenets of our then-fledgling democracy. A bridge between one administration and another is a ceremonial but highly significant event that shows that we as a nation respect majority rule and the process that supports it. In two days we will cross a bridge together for what has been, for most of us, a scary trek through a haunted forest to what we hope will be a brighter, kinder, more accepting landscape. I hope there is no Monty Python-esque gatekeeper at the entrance to the bridge heaving people willy-nilly off the side if they hesitate as they respond to his inane questions. I hope there is open, toll-free access to this particular bridge, because we have already paid too high a cost to build it.
In music, the bridge of a song, “creates harmony between contrasting parts” (musicgateway.com). And according to my talented singer-songwriting son, it joins the first phase of a song - one to which the listener has become inured thanks to the repetition of verse and chorus - to the second. The structure, chords, and keys of the bridge differ from what the song has said so far, but they lead to a richer, more complex, yet still familiar place in phase two. The bridge brings a new perspective that ultimately creates harmony in the coming back to the solid ground of the verse and chorus.
I love walking across the two bridges in my town, as I relished transversing those over the Avon. The new perspective afforded by the simple crossing always engenders exhilaration, as well as awareness of and appreciation for those not only who built these connective pathways, but the innumerable feet that have gone over them before. I hope that in crossing the bridge of Inauguration Day, we eschew discord for concord, and that no matter how the wind howls or the ground shakes or ugly gnomes threaten to jettison us, that we make it safely to the other side.
Wonderfully written! When I rode my first “Bloomin’ Metric” back in... 1990?... I crossed that bridge by bicycle for the first time. It was damp, post-rain, and the surface was a skinny tire-catching metal grate: that relatively short span was a terrifying, “death(or serious injury)-defying” seeming year-long journey, made even scarier by the memory of injuries suffered by the pros on a similar span a couple of years earlier, in the inaugural “Tour de trump” (coincidence???) bike race... bodies strewn across a bridge in upstate New York... so, yes! Exhilaration, once crossed. And relief. Two more days...
I love this essay! The Cribari Bridge is very dear to me and I have special memories attached to it. When I was a kid I lived on Bridge Street, almost next door to Saugatuck Elementary. My earliest forays into the unknown alone were walks across the bridge to spend my pennies at Peter’s Bridge Market, which felt very exotic and courageous. Sometimes we would run down to see it open to let a boat through. Many years later, when I returned to Westport to raise my kids, three year old Katy took off and ran all the way from the Saugatuck side to the other side of the bridge as fast as her little legs could go. It was terrifying at the time, but quite comic now! It’s a wonderful bridge and a treasure for Westport.❤️