Bridge.

I live in a South Minneapolis neighborhood that’s bisected by the highway.  I hadn’t lived here long before I learned, like a litany, the cross-streets with overpasses, the ones that could take you from one side to the other:  Lake Street.  Thirty-first.  Thirty-fifth.  Thirty-sixth.  Thirty-eighth.  Forty-sixth.   You have to memorize the numbers, it seems, if you don’t want to come up against a dead end or a turn alongside the sound wall.  I remember when I first moved into the neighborhood I kept thinking that Thirty-fourth street would get me across, and kept coming up to the sound barrier and going Damn, I have to go down to Thirty-eighth.  There’s such a great disconnect between the two halves; the neighborhood is old, and the highway is young, a wide swath of houses having been bulldozed to make way for it, and it never quite has fit into its neighborhood.

Not so with a river. 

Not that long ago, I lived as close to the Mississippi River as I live now to the highway — closer, really.  And yet I never felt the need to memorize which streets would take you from one side to the other.  It’s absurd to think that you might forget where to go to cross the river…You just drive, you just walk, and when you need to cross, here’s the bridge.  The bridges are where you need to go.    Minneapolis, of course, is here because the river is here.   It grew up here.  The busy and important streets reached across, or did the crossings make them become busy and important streets?  No matter.  The bridges are just there, spanning the gorge, making the gorge unimportant, hardly ever thought about except sometimes as a lovely vantage point, or occasionally when you go for a walk down in the gorge and look up at the shockingly immense span and remember that the land of stoplights and buses is stories and stories over your head, and part of it floats dreamlike on pillars driven into the earth down here.

From the river gorge, I always admired the Cedar Avenue bridge (also called the Tenth Avenue Bridge) that runs parallel to the highway.  It has graceful concrete arches.  Right next to it, the Thirty-five-double-you bridge was comparably ugly, a tangle of steel trusses.  Perhaps it was the contrast that kept me from noticing and appreciating the engineering feat of the long span with no piers in the water.  Or perhaps I just didn’t pass under that bridge frequently enough to notice that bit of trivia.  Nobody appreciates it today; everyone would have appreciated a nice fat pylon in the middle, I suppose, and we never would have known the difference.