A Bridge or Two

I HAVE always liked bridges — whether for the water that swirls under, as Melville suggests in Moby Dick, or for the structures themselves, I cannot say. But this I know: given a free hour for a walk, my way would take me, not to the open fields and the stretch of road, but down into the ill smells of wharves and the dirty reach of backwater, to the barges and tugs tied under bridges, or to the middle of some steel span which cuts from shore to a liberty of mid-river daring, where water slips between arches and ships pass and repass at my feet. Bridges exhilarate. A sailor must feel the same on the mizzen; a rower on the jumping current of narrow streams; a pilot looking over the prow of a great liner getting home from sea.

As I say, whether bridges take power from the waters they arch or from the gauntness of steel bands in mid-air, I do not know. The charm is there; and that should, anyway, be quite enough. It is present in new bridges and in old, in wooden bridges and in steel suspension. There is as much satisfaction in weak, swaying spans as in strong ones.

I like the old bridge at Seventh Street. It satisfies me, not because it will carry thunderous traffic in the years to come, — already it has been condemned as an inadequate creation of a half-century ago, — and not because, when a big boat is to go by, it gyrates upon one leg with the mad fling of an immense harlequin, as I am told bridges in Chicago sometimes do. Such antics would be suicide for its stiff and rheumatic steel trusses. It does take me to work in the morning and to my home every night, but this is unimportant. I could go home across the Sixth Street span with more assurance and a deal more speed. Neither do I like it, as some poet might, for its beauty or for a hidden suggestion of tawny strength. Poor thing! A six-ton truck and two street cars make it groan and tremble; and as for beauty, its narrow iron rails and its awkward end towers are like the bony anatomy of some vagabond living without enough bread.

But this is why I like it. In the evening, when I go home, traffic floods across its narrow width. A jam of autos thunders over it; one street car grinds in the yellow wake of two or three ahead. Crowds of six-o’clock stenographers and clerks strain home to Allegheny and warm suppers. Underneath it the currents tug at stone pillars and whirl round the central span. Above and below, countless forces are pulling at it — and at its rusted shackle bolts, at its old steel rods, at its narrow beams, and at its flood-worn masonry. As I have said, supercilious city inspectors have marked it for death. Yet in winter and summer, in snowstorms and thundershowers, year in and year out, it carries its evening rush and its unfair load, and blinks valiantly at the oily river with its red and green signal lights. It is old, — ugly, if you will, — without reason for existence; but it does exist. It goes on doing its duty and is damned for its struggles. What more could be said for a bridge?

Yet bridges have qualities other than tragic endurance. They have efficiency, and picturesque beauty, the ability to meet all requirements, and the power of stirring the imagination. That is why the Brady Street bridge across the Monongahela is as great a favorite of mine as it was of Pennell’s, who sketched it one misty day when it was all smoke and black lines. At night it is at its best, when the halflights and shadows of Soho add a background of mystery to its geometric symmetry. From the Boulevard of the Allies it fills the street and river below with vague black marks and dark blotches. Like Mirza’s bridge, it is founded upon this substantial earth and leads out into the mist. When I am on it, I look along its beams and I try to trace its course to the other shore, but the end is lost in the dancing reflections and willo’-the-wisps that gleam and sparkle in the channel, and I begin to think of it as a fairy bridge — until a three-ton truck thunders past with scarcely a vibration of the arched floor on which I stand. Street cars rumble along; four refuse wagons jerk past in a line; touring cars and sedans weave in and out impatiently; an ambulance with yellow flag and red signal light rings a nervous way through the jam of traffic. I look at my bridge again. It is no longer a thing of mists and phosphorescent haze; it is steel, it is concrete and stone. It leads from factories here to factories there. It is a link in a chain of mills unfortunately separated by water.

Below my place at the rail, one black roof after another rises; black stacks varying like the pipes of some infernal organ stick up. From one chimney purple tongues lick out into vivid greens; a bright pink runs the length of another. It rises from goldand-white steam at its base like the pistil of some giant flower, blooming for the moment and dying with the fall of the flame. Across the river, five miles up, another blast is poured. The light rises; it spreads into the black sky, breaks into showers of gold sparks, flickers along the dull waves of the river. I look out through the bridge at strange colors. I see a midnight sun crossed and cut by sombre bars of enclosing steel. This, I tell myself, is not the real world. This bridge, this strength, this flaming beauty, this is the spirit of steel — steel which men make with hatred and curse with the familiarity of the lover.

Efficiency and beauty, ugly crudeness and tenuous delicacy, I find them all about me in the bridges I see or walk to look at in passing. I can go from one to the other, from the little spur bridge at the refinery to the great Point Bridge where the ancient rivers join, and I never weary. Perhaps it is an obsession, a love of color which I centre improperly about definite things. Sometimes I know that this is so. When I go over bridges in street cars and strain my head around to watch the place that I am crossing, I see my neighbor reading the Saturday Evening Post, and the conductor talking to the telegraph messenger next to him. Bridges to them must be a means from one place to another. Are they right and am I madly trailing clouds of glory? I sometimes wonder. Then I see a girl turn round in her seat to glance up along the beams of a bridge to its middle span of steel rods. She looks out up the river where a dredger ploughs frothily along the green water. She looks long and hard at the house boats and factories. Then I feel better. ‘Ah, my dear,’ I remark, ‘you too have the fever. You too should be out walking. You are one of the wise.’ But I never say this aloud.

Some day I may; and I am hoping for an understanding response. I could not well bear up if she should say, ‘Do I look as if I wanted company? Of all the nerve! ‘ After all, she might only be thinking of the next payment on her fur coat; but I hope she will be gracious, for bridges, it seems to me, should make brothers of us all.