Quantcast
Channel: The Hudson Valley Chronic » Volume II No. 5
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 4

Bridge To the Past, Bridge To the Future

0
0

For all the comments I get from people about how they’re jealous of my seeming to have done just about whatever I wanted and lived a pretty interesting and varied life compared to their more settled, responsible paths, I still feel sometimes like I missed the experiential boat. Truth be told, the first thing I ever wanted to be was an architect, a road I was talked off of by a crooked guidance counselor getting kickbacks for shunting kids into certain schools. I ended up not going to college at all in the normal sense, but that’s another story.

More specifically, I really wanted to build bridges. In fact, when I was about 8, I designed and built a span across a sandy ravine with a creek running through it. It was made from a pair of long, straight trunks from fallen pine trees, cris-crossed with boards stolen from a construction site and packed with mud, sticks and rocks. It had railings, and was sturdy enough to last a couple of years until the banks eroded out from under it.

So here I am nearly 50 years later, a crackpot journalist pontificating about bridges in my own gonzo newspaper, which serves as a sort of bridge to sanity and quasi-respectability during these terrible, harsh times.

I still love the things. They’re a big reason I’ve lived 90% of my adult life within five miles of the Hudson River. I like to walk on them, bicycle over them, stop on them and smell the brackish air, watch the boats and ships glide beneath them, stand under them and admire the superstructure. I’ve commuted across them on my bike when living in Brooklyn and Queens. I dragged a fat lawyer over the Brooklyn Bridge in a pedicab, probably the single greatest physical feat of my life.

They pack an air of mystery: For many years when I lived near Troy, I would see the same homeless, wild-haired old Black man walking slowly across the Congress Street Bridge between Troy and Watervliet, no matter what time of day or night it was. He would always see me, nod and smile knowingly. Was he real, or a ghost? I never stopped to find out.

I can’t tell you how pleased I am that in this year of the Hudson-Fulton-etc. Quadricentennial, people are paying attention to bridges again, at least for a little bit. That the event was used as an excuse to fund the construction of a walking/bike path over a glorious old railroad bridge. That a musical juggernaut took it upon himself to turn one of my favorite bridges into a musical instrument.

This may even inspire me go back to school and become an architect. Thomas Paine was a writer and crank, too, and he somehow got it together to go to France and sell them on a pretty good bridge design of his own.

Weirder things have happened. Ask Joe Bertolozzi.


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 4

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images