bridges: apex, apogee, vernal, vertices

I am great believer in Spring. as a notion, sure. but as a visceral fact, better still. I am even a more earnest believer in believing it might be Spring. Sunday might have been the start, the honest-to-goodness one. or maybe. Two things in particular press themselves as sure symptoms in my mind: (1) daffodils blooming in the yard, and (2) the urge to casually bicycle around indefinitely without destination.

With this working assumption, me and the Sears bicycle took off around the ‘hoods. Down Lakewood towards James St., some questions prepared for this trip included: Do other houses have flowers going on? Who’s hanging around outside? Is that dumpy little street Cecil Rd. a dead end or what?



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Today’s route brought me passed the Apex Street Bridge, a small but high concrete and steel structure that is now only a pedestrian crossing, cement pylons put in the middle. But I don’t know how many ever really cross it, over the old train tracks-cum-bike trial.

If you look up the phrase “other side of the tracks” in the Encyclopedia Britannica, there is a photograph of the Apex Bridge. nothing more epitomizing of the idea exists, no sharper a gradient, I am pretty certain. But of course, there is a historical society organized around the bridge. and I found this out just now, the internet told me so. These folks seem to have a pretty certain take on the two sides that are connected by the ASB, though :

“One community, soon to be designated a historic neighborhood that surrounds a park; the other of which suffers from boarded up houses, rampant crime, and blight.”

I’m curious to see what happens to this idea of the “community of the bridge” this historical society has in its vision. Will preserving the bridge really do something for engendering that possibility of a community there? I’m doubtful, but I want it to be true; at least truer than it has been for like minded projects around Durham.

...
A new crossing also caught my attention this trip. my bike homed onto it, and I saw something shining past the trees in the park mentioned just above, Forest Hills Park. You see, they re-graded the stream that flows there, and put new bridges to span it.



This one, the shining one, was quite a fancy number. Unpainted and unvarnished, from a good 20 feet away you could actually smell the wood. Pine. so strong a smell, I wondered if maybe the thing was still breathing and moving sap.

It is a very nice bridge, and I can tell you the following about it:

--it is fragrant.
---it has 6 sets of posts that anchor the handrails.
----it takes me exactly 18 paces to cross it, end to end.

Since it is a bridge, the next logical question would be: Is their a troll living underneath it?

I can tell you this: No. However there was occupancy, use, and some presence apparent. the tracks along the mud tell us the raccoons have been around, poking at the night water, shuffling their feet in the cool soil.




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From around the bridge, things sure looked like Spring. It is almost a postcard, with it green grass, gentle curve of the water, the light.



I crossed the shiny bridge, repeating the sound of the word “bridge” in my head with my steps, inducing my memory to think of Die Brücke (the Bridge), a german artist movement that made me realize that block-printing is the bomb. Apparently they named it so with intimation that the movement was to be “their bridge of common interests and their link to the future.”



A link to the future! what a sense of optimism. Could such a thing be accomplished in just a simple 18 paces? The Red Queen told Alice you need to run as fast as you can just to stay where you are. Surely, no truer now than ever - a casual 18 paces might still land me firmly in the past – or at best the present. The present is a “community of the bridge,” and now is a matter of successfully making it from then, with a stream of a single moment to cross on the way.

What are the chances then, that when - every 10 seconds or so- one blinks their eyes, that upon opening Here will still be here? The chances are very, very high, no doubt. but I maintain it is a probability nevertheless. Certainty left you about 2 minutes back as dusty historian fodder.

You cross and think about all the bridges you build through the day, or through some course of years. And there are a number I wish all concerned had taken more seriously, as much so as the Apex Street Bridge seems to be. then the others I now regret not having just torched with more of a conflagratory abandon, to see the big fast flames. otherwise, some of the bridges just seem creaky.

I guess the sturdiest and most flexible are those suspension bridges. but even then, as the Tacoma Narrows Bridge taught all of us inexcusably awake for the film in physics class: better to “cut once, measure twice.”



I’d prefer to cut twice and measure once, personally. I rather have two goes minimum at most things. Because my eyes were closed the first time. because I forgot to try harder. because I simply want more.
As for bridges, just remember there may be a giant fish, or pirate treasure underneath. so whatever else you do, always take the opportunity to look down.