Many years ago when I was strictly a cultural writer, I went to Dia Beacon with the beloved aunt who raised me to cover an exhibit. Taking her on these outings was one of the great joys in my life, and as she drove, I gazed out of the window contentedly until I observed a somewhat disconcerting sight.
As we passed over a bridge under repair, two workers in hard hats with clipboards looked at one another and shook their heads. Put it this way: If the bridge were a patient and the workers doctors, the prognosis would not have been good. Suffice it to say, I was relieved that we got over it as quickly as possible.
I’ve always felt like that about bridges even though I adore their beauty. For all their steel and concrete, they are like buildings, both monuments to man’s might and fragile creatures. We know their delicacy in tragedy.
I thought about this and the collapse of the Mianus River Bridge on I-95 in Connecticut in 1983, which I covered, when the container ship MV Dali struck one of the piers of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, causing it to collapse.
Though a chunk of the northbound side of the Mianus bridge simply fell into the water, a very different scenario, on June 28 of that year, there were some similarities to the Key. The Mianus collapse also happened overnight, 1:30 a.m. to be exact, and traffic was light. Still, three died and three were injured.
Bridges are not just structures, of course. They’re symbols. People stew on them in traffic, late for work again. They work on the bridges themselves, hoping they won’t get hit by a motorist or truck. They propose on them. They gaze at them, dreamily from a distance or marveling as they cross them, transitioning to vacation or maybe a new life. And yes, sometimes they leap from them, too, choosing to end that life.
Bridges are metaphors as well. We speak of bridging a divide, but what span is long enough, strong enough to unite us now? No sooner was the Key down, a truly heartbreaking, mind-numbing moment as you watched it unfold in real time, than stupid political divisiveness set in. This is what happens with rampant immigration, one politician noted, as if the collapse were the fault of the eight immigrant workers on the bridge at that moment, six of whom lost their lives.
One woman poster on a New York Times’ thread suggested that President Joe Biden “shut his piehole” instead of promising the federal government would rebuild the bridge. Here’s a better idea: Why don’t people who don’t know what they’re talking about shut their pieholes? You know the old saying: Better to shut your mouth and be thought a fool, than open it and remove all doubt.
The financial ripple from the bridge collapse is going to produce an economic ttsunami. Litigation will drag on — forever. In the meantime, the port has to be reopened and the bridge rebuilt as soon as is safely possible. As Michael Bloomberg once said during a blizzard in New York City when he was mayor, you spend in a crisis, and you worry about paying for it later. That may not seem fiscally sound, but that’s what you have to do if you hope to stay afloat economically.
Of course, the government is going after the ship owners, who’ve already petitioned a court to limit liability. But this will take time, as I — cub reporter, looking so hopeful with her reporter’s notebook, pen and high heels, think Rosalind Russell in “His Girl Friday” — discovered in 1983, interviewing disgruntled truck drivers and shop owners along a clogged U.S. 1 that wound its way from Westchester County, New York, through Connecticut. In the end, Westchester sued Connecticut for all the disruption to local business and wear and tear on its streets. (Though the section of the interstate that crosses the Mianus River in Greenwich was reopened in September of that year, it would take nine years and $20 million ($44.5 million in today’s money) for the replacement span to be completed. The fallout from the Key Bridge destruction is going to be much worse.
The financial cost is nothing compared to the human one. A New York Times article on what the bridge meant to Baltimoreans contained a haunting photograph by Erin Schaff of a man with his head bowed as if in sorrow with the mangled bridge glinting on the waves in the background. It makes you think: Why did those six men die and not six others? Is life so random or is there something that binds us and weaves our destinies?
It’s the question that a friar asks himself as he investigates the collapse of a footbridge in 1714 Peru that killed five people in Thornton Wilder’s 1928 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Bridge of San Luis Rey.”
The friar will pay the ultimate price for his thorough investigation and Wilder leaves open-ended the question of destiny. but his story illustrates how out of tragedy come new connections.
The book ends with a paragraph that is often quoted in times of sorrow and catastrophe. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair quoted it after 9/11. It ended my eulogy for my aunt. And I quote it again now, because it always reminds me that while destiny may be unknowable, love never is:
“But soon we will die, and all memories of those five will have left earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love. The only survival, the only meaning.”