Hold up, Nathan. Listen!
Pick something that you can use to tell the story of your life, or at least some of the stories.
That’s the thing about life; you live one that is finite and has limits, but you can never seem to tell all the stories. You have to start somewhere and you don’t want to do too much on this little old blog, so you need a point. A principle. A place to make all the things fit into a narrative that looks much prettier than it is.
And the story you’re writing is oh so pretty now, isn’t it?
Here it is, Nathan. Your story, told in bridges.
You were born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at Magee Women’s hospital. You are one of many, many babies who have used this place as their launch point into planet earth. You have heard it referred to as a baby factory in the past. If something did go wrong at the factory, as you suspect, at least you know where to look. In a way, this factory is the bridge that took you right to planet earth. Is it fair to call a hospital a bridge?
Why not? It got you from point A to point B well enough. Here you are.
You were born in a hospital in a city known for its many bridges. It is not exactly the most exotic location in the world, but a shot of it on a clear night, with the stars from the sky and the lights from the offices reflecting off the water? To you, this is all a reminder that humans can build and do lovely things when they want to.
If your mother’s route to the hospital was as you suspect, you certainly weren’t getting there and getting born (at least in the more civilized way) without the help of a bridge. This held true for the return trip as well. Automobiles perform very poorly under water, especially with all the wiring and whatnot.
Yay for things that keep cars dry.
As a kid you would play in the woods frequently. You would hop on a bike, find your friends, and take off in a way that you imagine with the fondness of Stand by Me and The Wonder Years. You have many, many memories of sitting on makeshift bridges, looking for creatures in the stream, hoping to catch something for the sake of knowing that you could. You’d toss off your shoes and let your toes sit in the stream and that was ok. You knew the stream was filthy and didn’t care because it felt cold and nice.
When you were done with the bridges over the streams you’d take your bike to them instead. One bridge had a long fall to a side road and some railroad tracks. The height was scary but exciting, or rather, exciting because it was scary. You felt invincible that high because you had been on that structure a thousand times and it always held you.
Think on it: You cross these things so many times that you take them for granted. You feel as if they have been there all the time and will be there forever, but you know this is a lie.
If you cross enough bridges and get to Fort Pitt, located at the three river confluence of the Ohio, Allegheny, and Monongahela, you’ll find that the only remaining structure of the original fort, a key location in the long and costly Seven Years War (or French and Indian War), is the Fort Pitt Blockhouse. You have to think that those who built and defended this strategic location would be stunned at its new role as a marginal tourist attraction. Most natives of the city today probably don’t even notice it.
Fort Pitt was not always there, nor were the roads and bridges that take you in that direction. Every time you go to a concert or a football game you cross them on road and foot, always with the assumption that the bridge is going to be there next time.
Except sometimes there isn’t a next time for a bridge. You read about stories of bridges collapsing due to age; you know they are routinely targeted by airstrikes in military conflicts. In a very literal sense, a bridge can be there one minute and gone the next. Some bridges are old and rickety and have stood for hundreds of years, if not longer. Some are more recent feats of engineering that collapsed within a generation.
You never know what the next bridge is going to do for you, reliable as they are.
Your life is a story of bridges that you’ve crossed. It also a story of bridges that you’ve burned.
Except you don’t really burn bridges. That would be a polite way of putting it for someone with borderline personality disorder. In your worst moments you would hope that all you do is burn the bridge. But then you think, why settle for a simple burning when you can have a real catastrophe?
You crawl under the bridge with some fresh sticks of dynamite. For fun you space them much closer than they need to be. You don’t want the structure to simply come down; you want to pulverize it. With the charges and fuses set, you walk up to the top of the bridge with a can of gasoline. You leave a trail of it as you go, saturating anything that will burn. You toss the empty tin aside and keep walking. The smell of fuel invigorates you. You know what fuel can do to an adversary when it gets hot.
Your words are fuel, and you can render them very, very hot, and hotter still.
You step back at a safe distance and press down on the charge. It is a long T-shaped device, just like the ones in the cartoons. You press down and hear nothing. This is common for you, to not hear the disasters as they happen. The disaster still happens. There is not an explosion, really, but a sudden and oval site of orange. It swirls and rises. Clouds of black smoke climb above it, and clusters of gray ash fall below.
You survey the scene, dissatisfied. The bridge is gone, but your sense of unease is not. You pull a radio out of your pocket and press a few keys. There is muffled chatter in your ear. You spit out some numbers and some orders. More muffled chatter.
Seconds later, your air strike comes in with payloads of napalm. The jelly-like fire coats the ground in globes of orange. The entire landscape is dotted with flames. The smoke is foul and unbreathable. You cough under the weight of it all, and the heat taunts you to come a little closer and see how fast you can cook.
But you don’t need to get closer. You know how hot you can get. You know how to get rid of a bridge, and you think you can do better than a run-of-the-mill burning.
That kind of muted response is for amateurs.
Yours Mentally,
Nathan
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