Field Notes From Bad Lands

The other day, I took my family to Bridge Day.

In my home town, it is natural to want to take your wife and children to Bridge Day -- it is something attended by almost every man who has a wife and child.

At Bridge Day you'll see women walking with children in their arms, or standing hand in hand with their children at their sides. Dads follow behind carrying souvenirs bought at craft tables or plates full of hot dogs and baked beans purchased at a barbecue run by the Kiwanis club.

When you arrive, your neighbors are all there -- all of them, those you like and those you dislike. Storekeepers -- the ones you enjoy trading with and the cheats. Police officers, firemen, garage mechanics, teachers, politicians -- each dressed in their casual clothes and looking quite content.

There are few people in this town who have not been measured. Everyone's strengths and weaknesses are known. There is the man who does not pay his bills, the woman who hangs out in bars and sleeps with her neighbor when her husband is gone. The teenage girl who had a child and gave it away. On a day such as Bridge Day, everyone comes out and is recognized: good and bad, rich and poor, devout and profane. And all of them have been weighed and recorded, somehow, in the town's memory.

During the celebration, the crowd gathers on a blocked-off street at the end of the Bell Street Bridge. On a normal day, the bridge stands empty. Traffic is no longer allowed on the aging bridge, which is reserved for foot and bicycle traffic. But during the celebration, the bridge is full of people who walk from one side of the river to the other. Some of them stop and stare into the smooth water, which moves lazily below.

On the town side, the bridge contacts the bank at Clough and Bell Street. This is one of the oldest points in town. There is little here that is not touched in some way with memory, age and decay.

On the one side of Bell St. stands the ruins of the feed plant -- the tallest structure in town. It consists of a seven-story, cement elevator and two wooden buildings, one three stories tall, the other five stories tall. Openings gape in the walls of some of the upper stories of the wooden structures. Birds, indignant at the crowds on the street, circle between the three buildings. They seem threatening, though they are only pigeons.

On the other side of Bell St. sits the Krug Mansion. The mansion was built at the turn of the century by a man who made a fortune in cattle. Stately, Victorian, the building decayed around its occupants, a group of graying family members, for years -- many of its rooms unused. Since then, it has been purchased by a couple from the East, who turned it into a bed and breakfast.

Like many newcomers, this couple came here unknown and unmeasured, with a past as blank as the slate used years ago to build the mansion's steps. Because of that, many of the town's matrons, the grandfathers with their billed caps, the businessmen and sales people who drink coffee together every morning and compare notes, look on the couple with suspicion.

For most, however, it is enough that the couple has adequate money, energy and determination to wage the protracted fight needed to replace the paint and shore up the buildings' sagging foundation. They have an advantage over most newcomers -- they may be an unknown quantity, but the building they purchased is known.

Everyone knows about the merry-go-round that old Mr. Krug shipped in ages ago, when such luxuries were rare and special, to be set up in the mansion's basement for his children. Everyone knows the servants' quarters were on the top floor, and a vault was hauled from a bank in a neighboring town to be built into the basement to serve as the wine cellar.

When the couple purchased the mansion, they also purchased a history that came with it, and therefore, they need no history of their own. We watch the new paint and the repairs approvingly, but also carefully. For though few of us have actually been inside, we all feel some ownership in the old house.

This is the third bridge that has stood where the Bell Street Bridge now stands. The original was the first to cross the river in this region. It was designed so a span could be turned, allowing steam boats, which were common on the river in those days, to pass. No more steam boats come to our town -- they couldn't get here if they tried. The river is blocked off downstream.

Newspaper articles announcing the construction of the first bridge bragged that no bridge ever built by the company hired for the job had ever failed. Two years later, a river swollen with ice and spring runoff carried the bridge away. Along with the bridge, it carried away the lives of 11 family members who had tried to cross, though the water was so high that it was over the top of the bridge deck.

The second bridge was built two years later. It was a suspension bridge, like the bridge on the site today, except that it was narrow, designed for horse-and-buggy traffic. It lasted for 30 years until the present bridge was built. As the third bridge was being constructed, metal beams and cement were hauled to the middle of the river on the old structure and handed across to the new.

My earliest memories of the Bell Street bridge included walking across on the catwalk. I stopped in the middle of the bridge and looked down into the water, puzzling at the slab of cement that the water swirled around. Though I didn't know it at the time, this was the pier of the second bridge. If I walked across it now and looked down, I would see the water swirling there still, as if over my own latent memories of the decaying pier, memories which continue still, though the pier itself has been eroded and is lost below the water.

The Bell Street Bridge was quite scary when it was in use. It shook when it was crossed by trucks, pickups and cars loaded with people. It seemed incredibly narrow when my mother met oncoming traffic on it as she drove the family to the store.

But there was also a certainty that it would last. In the spring, when the thick, winter ice cracked, and the raging water, swollen with ice and runoff roared past the town, the city sounded its civil defense siren, and people gathered along the river much as they gathered during Bridge Day. They came from their jobs, they came from their beds, often wrapped in their bathrobes and with jackets pulled over, their breaths white and evident in the crisp spring air. If it was night, they shined flashlights, headlights, whatever they had available out over the raging water. They watched awestruck as chunk after chunk of ice -- many of them six-, seven-, eight-feet thick -- slammed one after another into the bridge piers. The old bridge shook, but it never fell.

It might seem strange to an outsider for a town to hold a celebration honoring a bridge. But Bell Street Bridge has been thoroughly measured in the mind of this town. Its shortcomings are known -- its narrowness, the way it groaned under the weight of traffic. But people in town have also witnessed its great strength. Which is, perhaps, why the members of the town come to honor it.