Requiem For A Bridge

The town where I grew up was built between two rivers, and when I was a little older we moved to a house just one street over from one of them, the Susquehanna. We lived about a block and a half from the bridge that spanned the river there, and I spent a lot of time walking across it. My grandmother lived a mile away on the other side of the river from us, in a rural area full of farms, old houses like hers, and the occasional trailer belonging to a family a little less well-off in the world. I adored my grandmother and walked to her house most days. Other times I just spent my afternoons on the bridge, looking at the clouds reflecting in the wide water and, if I was looking north, watching the river come at me. That was my preferred view of it, but if I turned south I could watch it flowing away and that would make me wonder whether there was a different message I was supposed to be getting depending on which way I watched the water go, up, down, toward, away. The best reflections came near sunset, which must have been early there since the town was in a valley and the high hill to the west obscured the sun fairly early on. At sunset, the sky to the north grew pink. A few years ago I learned this pink band appearing on the horizon is considered an astronomical phenomenon and is called the Girdle of Venus. I was not surprised to learn that there was a goddess muddling about there. The name Susquehanna means "muddy water" and is Algonquin. And the water is dark and silty in a lot of places, silty and slow and deep. But that also makes it reflective, and from above it looks as though it is made of clouds or shimmering blue molecules or whatever the sky happens to be doing at the instant you look down. If the people who named the river had had access to a bridge the way I did, and if they could have seen it from that vantage point, I think they would have named the river after the sky, instead.

The bridge that was there when I was growing up was an old steel truss bridge and not long ago, someone made the decision that it had to come down. This caused many of us to shake our heads. My friend Dennis, who grew up in that town with me and walked there a lot with me too, says that steel truss bridges should be put on the endangered species list, that they were the product of work and accomplishment and gave families their living. Nowadays they replace them with sleek arcs of concrete. On the old bridge you could look down and see the water running by below because the floor of the bridge was an open grate. Horses didn't like to go across it. The new bridge ran right into a slew of problems when they started to build it, and was many months delayed. There was a flood; there was the discovery of the corpse of the previous bridge still down on the bottom of the river, where they'd let it fall when they put the steel one up all those decades ago. Maybe they thought it would never be a problem; maybe they thought the bridge they were building then would never come down. I've driven over the new bridge once since it opened, but haven't had occasion to walk across it yet. As with all bridges in this style, there is a pedestrian walkway only on one side, the north. Harder to turn your back on the water now, and let it carry your thoughts on away from you.

I miss the great metal heft of the old bridge, but I miss other pieces of it more, and I want you to know that there were things that happened on that bridge, and under it, and on the way there and the way across. There are plenty of pieces of history that no one ever writes down. I can tell you that it was walking across that bridge that taught me how to write a poem, or at least gave me the idea that I wanted to write poems. It's what I imagine crystal-gazing is like, and to this day I can't look at a body of water without seeing little lines or words or sometime syllables, depending on the water I'm looking at, starting to break out and organize themselves on the surface. Early evenings after supper I'd go out and walk to the midpoint of the bridge and look at the water until I was pretty sure that when I returned home and opened the notebook I used to write in, I'd be able to summon something to the page. It was unusual to encounter other pedestrians there, and I liked that. Sometimes in the summer kids would jump off the bridge. I never dared--it was a 30 or 40 foot drop and you were taking your chances, there were spots in the bed of the river that were deep enough to catch you up, holes, they must have been, but other parts were shallow. Especially in the summer. Come August you could see right to the bottom along the river's edges, look down and see the sluggish whiskery carp nudging along in the few inches of yellow silt.

I want to tell you that the bridge is gone, but when it was there, things happened on it. Once I had just won a poetry contest, and as I walked across the bridge, on my way to tell my grandmother the news, I encountered a boy I went to school with, and told him about it first. He reacted by dropping the bicycle he was riding, pinning me against the rail, and kissing me full on the mouth--this from a boy who barely spoke to me most days--I don't know, maybe he thought that kiss was the correct pronunciation for congratulations or maybe he'd heard that girls who write poetry were easy. I pushed him off. This happened at that exact early-dusk hour that I loved so well, though, so later I just filed it away on an inner note card and sometimes now I take it out and think about it.

On the far side of the bridge there was a steep path you could climb down and that would lead you to the riverbank directly under the bridge's far wall. Dennis was my close friend in high school and the two of us had another close friend, Ed. Dennis and I got ourselves entwined on some level that has stayed solid and endured, but Ed and I had a relationship that was complicated and sexual. Dennis and Ed were best friends; the three of us made quite the constellation. One afternoon Ed came to my house and we watched a PBS show about artists, and then walked over to the bridge and climbed down to the bank underneath. We talked until it got dark, and then we took off our clothes and climbed into the water. The riverbank at that spot was crowded with large trees; we found the root system of one of them reaching out into the water, and sat down on the slippery steps it made. Ed had a taste for having sex in odd places, preferably out-of-doors: on the rocks of a dry creek bed, on the forest floor at night, me picking the sticky slugs off his back in the dark. We had made love in his swimming pool before but that night, it was living water, and its current made me feel a little scared and a little high. We sat on those submerged branches back-to-belly, while he held my hips and pinned me to him and my legs floated free in the slow current and eventually, the fish either got curious or accustomed to us and started bumping my legs. Later, we climbed out of the water and stood in the dark, waiting to dry off again. Because it was August, and humid, it was a long time before we were able to put our clothes back on.

When the three of us were together we spent a lot of our time walking around and in my memory, at least, mostly we walked by the river. Some twenty or more years later Dennis's father and my mother died a few weeks apart; that summer I spent many weeks at her house trying to clean it out, settle her estate. On the morning of the summer solstice, which wasn't quite three weeks after my mother's death, I got up early and went for a swim in her pool, and though I meant to work very hard then I spent nearly all day walking back and forth across the bridge, watching the sun at the height of its powers hammer the water there, and after hours of that I went back to my mother's house and wrote a 3-sonnet series about her death, about summer's longest day. It's the only time in my life I've written a sonnet. I still do not write about my mother's death easily or well.

That same summer Dennis spent time at his mother's house, using the days to work on clearing his father's things but spending his nights with me. We took a walk; we took a walk that lasted for many hours across multiple nights. On one of those nights we walked over to the other river, which was spanned by an old stone bridge, and stood over those waters and pretended it was a wishing well and we both threw something in, I don't remember what. I do remember what I wished for, and though we didn't tell each other, I know that Dennis knows what I wished for, too. What his wish was, I'm not so sure. I have my ideas. We walked back around the corner from that bridge and paused in front of the town's library, a columned building that I, a solitary girl with a tilty life, had spent a lot of time in. We looked across the street and there were three teenagers walking, two boys and a girl between them and for a moment, I thought that perhaps I was seeing our ghosts, but Dennis saw them, too. What would you say to them, I asked Dennis. He shook his head; he didn't know, and neither did I. Now, several years later, I do know. I'd tell her, the destination is not going to be at all what you imagine. Enjoy this, hang onto this walk down the street as long as you can, remember how it feels to be next to that boy in the dark summer night. It's the part you're going to want back.

As we had crossed the bridge, my bridge, earlier that night, the large florescent lights that illuminated it had been swarmed by even larger clouds of white-winged insects, not quite moths, not even quite of-this-world looking. We came across the bridge around nine in the evening, both a little hungover from having had too much to drink together the night before. Three people sat on folding chairs on the side of the bridge, fishing poles in hands, talking in low voices and smoking in the dark. We said hello but they didn't say it back. By the time we returned across the bridge, it was long past midnight and a waning moon had risen, orange over the hills. The fishermen were gone, and the lights were clear because all of the white insects had disappeared, too. As we stepped onto the walkway of the bridge, we discovered where the insects had gone: they had all died, and the path was ankle-deep in their thousands of wings and ghostly evacuated bodies. I am sure an entomologist would know what that was all about but to us it was--is--a mystery. As I said, things have happened on that bridge. We walked across it that night kicking up that white mystery like summer rain turned to leaves, and I imagine that as we moved across, we also caused those little bodies to sift through the open grating of the bridge floor, eventually falling to the depths of the wishing stream that moved unseen below us.