Crossing the Bridge

A little over a mile from my home is a low-slung bridge with a checkered history.  The bridge itself is no fun to cross.  There is a stoplight at the north end; during rush hour traffic gets backed up at that light and it’s not uncommon to get stuck sitting on the bridge mid-span.  When you are stuck like that – looking out over the rippling expanse of the river and watching people jet-ski while you are trying to get back home after a ten-hour workday – you can feel the bridge shake.  Cars sluice by as I sit behind the wheel praying for that damn light to change, making the bridge bounce like it’s made of rubber.  I hate that feeling.  Concrete shouldn’t shimmy.  I sit there convinced the bridge will break apart and send me – and my car – plummeting into the current rushing below me.  

For the past three years, this bridge has been a part of my daily commute.  The day before I closed on the purchase of my current home, an abandoned building south of the bridge burned to the ground.  The fire shut down a busy road during the morning commute, and gave me a dark feeling about my impending status as a home-owner.  I moved in without incident, and started my daily trek to work over the bridge and past the charred remains of a local landmark.  No big surprise – it turned out to be arson.  The owner had burned the dilapidated building down for the insurance money.  He got a jail term instead.

A little over a week later a body washed up nearby.  On the north side of the river, men fish off of a concrete pier in the shadow of the bridge.  They spotted a limp corpse floating downstream.  Later, authorities discovered the man had committed suicide.  So soon after the purchase of my new home, I took this as a bad omen.  A few years later, that portion of the river has taken another life.  A local woman parked her car in a small riverside park down the road.  Her car was found; her body never was.  For several days, I saw the search team congregated on the pier as I crossed the bridge on the way home.  As far as I know, she was never found.  Perhaps the only witness to her disappearance was the expanse of flexible concrete that spanned the river which claimed her life.  

Another woman lost her life recently on that bridge.  It was a motorcycle accident which shut down the bridge for much of the day.  As I tried to make my way to work that morning, a phalanx of fire trucks circled the crash site, obstructing it from view and making the two southbound lanes of the bridge impassable.  When I returned home that night, orange spray paint marked out the scene reconstruction.  It was the only sign of the woman who had lost her life on the road that morning.

As I drive over this bridge every day, it’s hard not to think of all of this.  Burned boards still litter a weedy lot on one side of the road as I approach the bridge.  On the other side is a defunct marina where old boats sit up on blocks fading in the sun.  The day after Hurricane Irene passed through the area, that marina flooded, and the river came within inches of the roadside.  Near the stop light, those orange marks on the road are fading, but I haven’t forgotten how dangerous the intersection is.  I pass through the light when it turns green, and head home.

What I want to do in this blog is explore the darker corners of life that get us a little nervous.  I want to palpate those bumps I’m convinced are cancer.  I want to pick the scabs and see if they bleed.  I want to poke the pile of leaves to see if there are snakes hiding underneath.  I want to cross the bridge.