Steve West - No bridge too far

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, March 15th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Time now for commentary. Here’s WORLD’s Steve West.

STEVE WEST, COMMENTATOR: Bridges, like other parts of the urban landscape, go largely unnoticed. Even iconic spans, like the Golden Gate Bridge, may become just a blur in the background for commuters who traverse them every day. Awe accommodates itself to repetition, like floaters in the eye, largely unnoticed after a time.

"Bridges," says Bruce Jackson, "are perhaps the most invisible form of public architecture." What is common and ordinary disappears. Familiarity breeds contempt.

The first bridge I recall was one from my early childhood. My bonneted grandmother, hands on her hips, let us wade and play in the stream that pooled beneath the trestled bridge of the Southern Railway tracks. As the train passed overhead, the conductor waved and the trestles seemed to shake.

Later, friends and I waded through the stream flowing through the twin tunnels of a bridge over the creek that flowed through our neighborhood. We caught tadpoles, skipped rocks across the water's surface, and let our voices reverberate off the tunnel walls.

Great and even tragic stories are built into some bridges, like the Brooklyn Bridge or Golden Gate, where many lost their lives in their construction. On the historic Charles Bridge, in Prague, statues of saints look down on walkers.

Other bridges carry tiny stories largely unrecounted and forgotten. Most embodied very pedestrian hopes, like better traffic flow or safer passage. Maybe the bridge was nothing more than just a way to get home or even, for a homeless person, a shelter from the storm. And some, like the one over the stream in my neighborhood, started as a squiggly line on a developer's subdivision plan and then, for many a parent, became a place to pause with a stroller and let a child hear the gurgling water and dream of all the places to which that water may travel.

And then, there's another kind of bridge altogether, like the one that one of my friends heard about in his college years. While ambling through a mountain music festival in the early 70s, a bearded man said to him in passing, "Jesus is the bridge, man." After dropping that metaphor, the bridge-tender walked on. But the promise of that one bridge reverberated in my friend's mind the rest of the day and on into the early hours of the morning, when, full of hope and in trust, he walked across it into another country.

“A traveler comes to a bridge," muses essayist Don Waldie. "As the traveler starts to cross, one foot is still earthbound. Empty space is beneath the other. The next step requires trust.” You could even say it takes faith.

I try not to take any bridge for granted. It holds me up. It gives me a perspective on the flow below. It carries me to where I need to go. It absorbs my weight, carries my burdens, and reminds me to look forward to that final bridge that takes me Home.

I’m Steve West.

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