In these days of solitude and separation, driving seems a gift. Yesterday I drove to Stonington. The last time I drove over the Deer Isle bridge was when Henry played at their summer jazz festival. I picked him up at the airport, and as we drove, I narrated the landscape as I often did. Then as we passed over the bridge, I translated—or tried to translate—the sky-bound rootlessness I have only experienced on this bridge. For those readers who may not know, Henry had been blind his entire life.
A few years ago I wrote the following about this very bridge:
I have a friend who is petrified of bridges—well, not the teeny ones you hardly recognize as a bridge, but the identifiable ones. She will do anything to avoid them, even driving 50 or more miles out of her way. Sometimes she doesn’t do something she’d love to because she can’t determine an alternative route that makes sense even to her and she can’t find someone else to drive. At least riding enables her to close her eyes.
I, on the other hand, am right now wondering what the possibilities are for me to travel to Dubai when the world’s biggest arch bridge is scheduled to open to traffic. I am no world traveler, but WOW! The bridge will be one mile long, 670 feet tall, with 12 traffic lanes. And the design is absolutely breathtaking.
I am such a visual person. It’s how things look, not how they work, that intrigues me. I rarely consider the functionality of bridges, but the truth is a bridge is something that provides passage over some obstacle—a river, a valley, a road, railroad tracks. I have to concede I’ve even built a couple of bridges by that definition.
The last must have been over 25 years ago when the kids were young, and the entire roadbed was washed out where Fish Hatchery Brook crossed the Owlsboro Road, 10 miles outside of Patten. All the dirt and gravel, along with the exposed culvert, shot straight downstream, leaving no way to navigate to or from town. We put planks over the chasm of raging water and walked across the “bridge” for weeks.
The bridges I now cross are not even close to the magnitude of the Dubai one but, much like it, I identify most of them by place: Bucksport, Belfast, Deer Isle, Madawaska, Bangor/Brewer (yes, I know there are two close to the cities, but, much to the consternation of others, I call both bridges by the same name).
Over the last year or so, my favorite has been the Deer Isle bridge. A narrow 1,088-foot-long suspension bridge that bounces up and down on gusty days, it straddles the sometimes spectacularly foggy Eggemoggin Reach, joining Sedgwick on the mainland with Deer Isle. I’d driven it a number of times, but it wasn’t until last summer that I fell in love with it.
Under repair, it became a one-way bridge day and night with workers always at the ready to prevent cars from driving into each other. An already narrow bridge, the project made it even narrower, with sometimes a dozen workers maneuvering all manner of equipment and materials a breath away from our cars. My first “under construction” crossing made me drive so slowly that, at one point almost mid-bridge, the known world of trees and grass, people, houses, lapping waves, ground was gone. It was like driving straight up into the sky—a magical impossible journey. I was E.T.—in a car. I literally gasped. Every time I drive across the bridge now, I am aware of that moment of leaving earth—if only for a split second.
For the people who had to drive the bridge regularly, I’m sure it was a pain, adding perhaps an hour or more to their roundtrip journey each time they left or returned to the island. Now that the bridge has resumed its normal two-lane pattern, I can only hope that every one of them experienced the same magic I did at least once. Once is always enough for magic. I wish I had taken my friend just once—even if she closed her eyes.
