Bridges

 

There is talk going around about spending a pile of cash on fixing up the ‘infrastructure’. That is more than patching potholes. Infrastructure is the bones of the country. Them underground pipes that bring up tap water and takes away out poop. Them wires that hang overhead that brings us juice to run the television and computer and refrigerator and hair dryers and anything else we can plug in and tune on. Them airports are still using 1940 radar to figure out where them giant birds are. Them highways and byways and all the lanes and streets that get our soon to be obsolete fossil fuel vehicles from place to place and back again. Them crumbly about to fall down bridges.

Unless you are on one of them eternal spans, you might not notice a bridge. A bridge is nothing more than a road that goes over a ditch or a stream or a river or a lake or another road. The key word here is ‘over’.

I live in a river town. The picture above is the only bridge I’ve ever crossed riding. I used to take classes across the river and would zoom down at one end and crawl up the other twice a day. Even back then, the bridge that was called the ‘Nickel Bridge’ (actuality the Boulevard Bridge but might now be the Arthur Ash Boulevard Bridge or the Quarter Bridge or the Buck and a Half Bridge or a Bitcoin Bridge) because there was a tollbooth where you paid a nickel to cross the bridge. Obviously I never paid a nickel.

The bridge was old then. The 2,030’ span carried State Route 161 across the river. It was constructed in 1925.

When the traffic was heavy (since it was a two lane bridge) I’d walk my bike on the narrow sidewalk, many times jumping over holes looking down on the rocks below.

Did I tell you I have vertigo?

Let me tell you of another bridge. This bridge was built in my lifetime and I’ve have used it everyday.

Where I grew up was a post-WWII suburb. Every house looked alike and all the rest. Four blocks east of my house were the railroad tracks. They were in a ditch in the ground and there was a two-lane bridge over them. My father crossed that bridge everyday going and coming from work downtown on the bus. The same #41 bus would take me downtown on weekends and bring me home the same route. When I went to Jr. High I walked across that bridge twice a day for three years. When I went to college I crossed that bridge for most part of four years.

As a kid, we’d play under that bridge (before homeless people came). We’d venture through the brambles and vines on the hill and throw rocks at the Florida Express train. It was also a wonderful place to get away from the world. It had a wonderful sound of the traffic overhead and the wheels on the tracks below.

Most of my life was spent going west, but I had friends who lived on the ‘other side of the tracks’. It was a boundary.

In the 70’s it was decided to widen the ditch and build a highway on both sides of the railroad tracks. The three bridges in my neighborhood had to be replaced.

By this time I was living on the ‘other side of the tracks’ so it didn’t bother me much. By the late 70’s I moved back to my old neighborhood and enjoyed the new shiny bridge with plenty of room for traffic and me.

For the next twenty something years I walked, rode a bus or bike across that bridge in every kind of weather, day and night.

Every now and then when I cross this bridge, I see cracks and uneven pavement. There are places where water becomes ponds and I am more than ready to get across.

This is just one bridge on one stretch of road in one town.

Hope you make it to the other side of the tracks.