The Old Bridge

The Old Bridge was built in 1950, a full decade before I was born. In 1950, America entered into her first political war, but regrettable not her last. My father was just eighteen years old, and my mother fourteen. They hadn't met yet, and it is very likely neither of them had ever heard of the bridge being built in Fargo Georgia. The bridge being replaced in Fargo was one made of timber and wood planking. This was going to be a modern steel and concrete bridge. The people of Fargo must have been very excited.

I like to spend at least one day on an old bridge, after traffic has been turned onto the new bridge, and I like to look at the small things, the tiny markings, that tell me how the bridge was built, and sometimes who built it. Every bridge has the fingerprints of the men who built it on it, somewhere, and if you know where to look, you can find them. Here is the pattern of a boot print rubbed away but still visible, here is an imperfection made with the handle of some hand tool, here is the mark of a trowel, and here is the where the form slipped, and the edge is imperfect.

Years of rain, wear, and just plain time have worn the concrete down to were there are bare rocks showing up in it. The bridge deck, that part of the bridge where vehicles travel, shows signs of a thousand tiny cracks. These are but hairline cracks and they do not endanger a bridge but they are the beginning of danger. Water will seep into these cracks and perhaps freeze. Even if this doesn't happen but a few times each year, the cracks grow wider, longer, deeper and more dangerous. Summer heat brings expansion and that stresses the concrete. In fifty-seven years, there have been thousands upon thousands of log trucks driven over the bridge, too. Slowly but as certainly as time, the Old Bridge grew older.

It's odd to sit on a bridge with no traffic on it. For the better part of fifteen months, we drove over this Old Bridge each day as we built the new bridge next to it. The new bridge rose up from the ground like the malevolent offspring of the Old Bridge. The new bridge was wider, longer, higher, stronger, and as soon as the first car drove over it, the end had come for the Old Bridge. The dirt moving crews took mounds of dirt and piled them in front of the Old Bridge to keep people from driving on it. It went from a functioning part of our infrastructure to a derelict in just a few moments. The Old Bridge was stripped of its signs, its guardrail, and its identity. I sat and had lunch in what just a few moments before had been in the middle of the road. 

It's odd how sitting on a double yellow stripe of paint seems dangerous, even when there is no traffic. Every old bridge I've ever sat with during lunch seemed to have an air of incongruity about it. Each and every Old Bridge lived one moment and then the next was destined to be torn down.  We humans believe that when we build a bridge it will last so very long, but like our own lives, the end does come, no matter how long it may seem. Some of the men who built this bridge may yet live, and they may have drive over it, and remembered those long day of hard work. They may have wished for just one more day of use of that back, and those arms, to feel the essence of the bridge, the concrete, the steel, the wooden forms, obey their power, and come together to meld into this bridge.

There is something sad, and yes, to me, it is a little obscene to watch the machinery that tears apart the Old Bridge.  There is no ceremony but my final meal there, no one from the Old Bridge's crew comes to say good-bye, none of the travelers arrives at the last moment to give thanks to the concrete and steel that for fifty-seven years held firm. Like an old man who has worked himself to death, the Old Bridge is forgotten by those who used it. I stand and see sunlight silently shining through the holes in the Old Bridge, and wonder if it will ever shine through my own bones like that.

Take Care,

Mike