Bridge Over the Mississippi

Editor's Note: At my request, Jonathan Stensland agreed to publish this letter written to some Twin Cities friends who currently live elsewhere.

When the bridge over the Mississippi went down, I was a few blocks away and walked over to the ruined scene. There were people on bikes, whizzing past, and others on foot, and cars, and heavy clouds building up thunder--adding what? It never did really rain--but a little lighting flashed, either in rage or embarrassment. It was as if the sky had moved in in shame to cover us up, so that some other arrogant solar system couldn't take a shot at whatever cheapness in our own way of doing things down here had been exposed--made obvious in the twisted metal, drooping concrete, smashed confidence and broken bones.

Regarding the project, it never looked wrong, but it never looked right either--the work they were doing on the bridge, jack-hammering huge chunks of the bridge away at the joints--and not pouring the new concrete in right away. The people who count as decision-makers, Gov. Tim Pawlenty, and so on keep saying that there was no structural work being done--which is just a sad re-direction of the truth. There was no work being done on the steel truss under the bridge, but the structure, slung over the truss, was being gouged and chewed and spit back into itself. A friend of mine is a driver for Metro-Mobility and had just run a MN-DOT engineer out to the bridge the day before, and the guy was clearly concerned. He mentioned that what they were doing was a "stop gap" repair, but that the whole thing absolutely needed to be reworked in TWO not TWENTY years. And there you have the flavor of the reality that is not being talked about as the ones who wear the aprons of responsibility sweat, yet pretend. Mayor Ryback is the only one who really seems to wear the event in a deeply human, intelligent, cogent way.

I read the report from 2001 done on the bridge, and you get the sense that there is probably another report, done a year or two earlier that essentially condemned the bridge--and that a new report was needed in order to justify not spending the money to rebuild the truss under the bridge. The one sentence in the report that says anything about anything says, essentially, that the new way of testing stress that they have derived can justify not re-building the truss, which can save the state all the money that would be involved in rebuilding the truss, and that the company hired to develop the test and assess the situation could use the new system to assess other bridges around the state. It is hideously transparent; they were selling their services, their wears, to a state and federal government which wanted to hear a certain result--more than hear the reality. It is like when a golden child polishes his or her responses in order to be perfectly in tune with a narcissistic parent--rather than be genuine or authentic. It is more sad than it is infuriating at this point--sad because this stuff is so pervasive right now as a way of doing life and society.

Anyway, the report, while it was commissioned by MN-DOT and relayed through the UofM Engineering Department, it was not produced by them--it was produced by a private engineering firm. And you get the sense that the "new" way of assessing the bridge was, itself, a contrivance of a kind--like how we talk about average daily temperature based, not on the last 100 years but the previous 10--diminishing the scope of attention: "well, in the last two minutes the bridge hasn't gotten any worse for wear" and "only a crazy person, looking to spend other people's money, would conclude from the evidence that there is a project, here, worth doing."

Now it would be wrong-headed of me to try and turn a tragedy like this into a travesty (if it weren't a travesty, but, frankly, I think it is). I think this is one of those catastrophic, costly sorts of failures which manifests a deeper situation, and I think a lot of people in the State and country are going to get that feeling, too--contributing to the vibe following Katrina.

We are watching "strange fruit" dangling from a tree of rhetoric which was planted in the mid-seventies by the sorts of folks that wove the words together that so excited the glass-eyed trances we saw after 9-11. If there is something true to the phrase "knee-jerk Liberal," there is also a glass-eyed conservative whose eyes only view the world through the glaze of their boyish theories about war, people, power, poverty. Democracy is not just a style, or fashion, it is a spiritual commitment--or it is nothing--it is deeper than reflexes and flexed muscles and a flat-tax.

We saw America change so much from 1979 to 1989 in how it handles infrastructure and investment questions and how it viewed wealth and obligation and taxation and so on...and Tim Pawlenty and Steve Swiggum were the guardians of a kind budgetary boa-constrictor that had tremendous consequences at every level: Libraries are closed evenings and Sundays, Parks, Pools, blah, blah, blah. It has been seriously sad to follow all that over the years, especially when seeing how marvelously the Civic consciousness in the early part of the Century functioned to produce such amazing parks and boulevards and river walks. Then, it all just started grinding to a halt--as if a generation came along that said, "Hey it's a great inheritance, let's quit working and just live off of it until it's gone." Isn't that a moral decision, too?

So at the scene (you could see it on TV), up close, it looked so normal in some way, like, "Ouch, ouch, ouch...it looks like we really fucked-up here..." The cars, so many of them, looked halfway ok...which was so unexpected...the whole way that so many survived is just tremendously exhilarating...like this incident wasn't about swallowing up life but about swallowing up a lie. People on the bridge responded to people on the bridge, and those nearby responded, prior to the emergency teams arriving. People did what they had to do, and that part of things--most of the rescuing was self-rescue, and citizen-rescue, believe it or not. Then the people who could provide triage arrived and tended to people who needed skilled attention. People who came down to witness, later, seemed as much driven by that question of whether they could help, then stayed with the sense of being damn sure to remember exactly what this was that happened here: to be witnesses! Nothing about this felt like rolling dice and dumb luck, but like a frank statement--as matter of fact as sunstroke or an exhausted three-year-old.

And the rain never came, and the lightning flashed like a wildly-intelligent eye, flinty, experienced, interpreting what was happening on the ground and on the water--neither impersonal nor personal, but as if the planet itself had a few questions that it needed to look into and a couple of modest motives to pursue and a deeper purpose, that it, like us, needed to try and pull out of the rubble.