Elegy for A Bridge

The Big Creek Bridge (still standing, thank goodness!)

There is something about bridges. I can't quite put my finger on it. Perhaps it's their monumental size, combined with graceful engineering and design that makes them both an imposing edifice and a thing of architectural beauty. Perhaps it's their imposing and sometimes improbable span across high gulches or great bodies of water. Occasionally, it's just the fact that they've always been there for as long as anyone can remember, until it seems a permanent part of the landscape, something that has always been there and always will be.

Until, of course, they are not.

The truly grand examples, the covered bridges of Winterset, or New England, the stone arch bridges, the soaring, monumental feats of engineering such as the Golden Gate, are perhaps some of the best-loved monuments to transportation, connectivity, and the passage of time. Thought time marches steadily on, we stubbornly cling to them. It doesn't matter that they can only handle one or two lanes of traffic at a time. We don't care that they are getting creaky and in need of extra (and in some cases extraordinary) maintenance in order to safely bear the wear and tear of modern transportation. And heaven knows no one likes to think about the money it will cost to replace it with a new one. In spite of practicality, safety, and expense, our sentiment for those graceful aging spans sometimes seems to outweigh even our common sense. It's still good, we tell ourselves, and many communities have gone to extraordinary measures to save them. We move them to county parks to become part of light duty trail systems. We close them permanently, maintain them as a tourist attraction and build a whole new road into town. The ones we keep around, we keep because they are inherently beautiful, and a part of the landscape we can not bear to lose. We make memories upon them, and thus they become bridges not only to the other side of the bank, but to the other side of our lives as well. They connect us to those who came before, and to those who will come after.

Or so we like to imagine.

I lost my favorite bridge this week. The Ely Street Bridge, a graceful iron lady that spanned Big Creek on the south east side of Bertram withstood the ravages of the great flood of 2008, only to be taken out by a quick flash flood and a particularly large tree this time around. Built in 1891, she was one of three bridges that once served the small community, together with the Blaine's Crossing Bridge (still standing, but decommissioned in the 1960's shortly after Highway 13 was put through, and the Big Creek Bridge (also washed out this week, but mercifully, still standing), they connected Bertram to the world and the surrounding farmers to Bertram.

From the time I was a little child, the Ely Street bridge was an old familiar route. Crossing it once meant coming home, situated as it was, only a minute or two away from my grandparent's farm. It was the bridge we rode our horses across and under, considering it both an essential part of their training as tractable mounts while giving us both a bit of a thrill and a challenge as we briefly considered the possibility of our snorting, shying steeds plunging over the side into the treacherously shallow waters of the creek below. Later, it was my scenic route home, the occasional cruise down memory lane, connecting the route between the farm where I was born, the more suburban house a few miles away where I finished growing up, and the farm I recently purchased and intend to spend out my days. The Ely Street Bridge spanned not only both sides of Big Creek, giving me a handy back road connection between my old home and my new one, but a connection of memory to these three major phases of my life.

But time passes, seasons change, graceful iron ladies fall, and one day you come to the familiar crossing only to discover that this time, you really can't go home again.

The Ely Street Bridge collapse

I knew it the moment I drove down the hill and failed to see her bright red girders waiting for me, but rather a gaping expanse where red girders should have been. Surprisingly, I was not quite as sad or heartbroken as I had expected to be. At least, I thought, she went out like a bridge, on her own terms, waging her own battle with Mother Nature, and finally losing. As an added mercy, she went with no lives lost save her own. She was not retired, carted away to some county park as an amusement or bypassed and left to stand and rot. There can be no argument, no political debate, her fate is no longer something for an affectionate and conflicted populace to decide. She is simply gone. She cannot come back. We will miss her, but she managed to leave us with no regrets.

I was not alone that day in mourning her loss. A family was already there before me, looking at the wreckage, and when I got out of the car, the first words that came out of my mouth were: "Oh no, my bridge is gone."

The young girl standing at the edge of the precipice nodded slowly. "My bridge," she said. "I walk here every day."

It occurred to me that for an aging monumental edifice that had not moved an inch since the day of it's construction some 123 years ago, the Ely Street Bridge really got around. As more and more people showed up to survey the damage, it became readily apparent that she had been carrying on an exclusive, intimate relationship with nearly everyone in town.
It was the same sad statement echoed over and over again by everyone who showed up:

"My bridge is gone."

Never our bridge.

My bridge.