That Confounded Bridge
In 1980 the old silver erector-set Sunshine Skyway bridge at the mouth of Tampa Bay was rammed by an errant ship, shaking chunks out of the southbound span and sending people — men, women, children, maybe a pet or two — plummeting to their deaths a short distance from Hernando de Soto's somewhat differently grisly landfall of 450 years previous.
The Skyway was actually two identical, two-lane bridges right next to each other, and the northbound span was unscathed. I was in grad school at USF at the time, and in a bit of morbid tourism a few of us took a break from pondering Sophists and Social Constructivism and drove down in the VW bus for a transit and a look-see.
As we crossed the good span, the bus rocked in the wind whistling through the open metal-lattice roadbed far above the green water. Alongside us was the place of horror, a great vacant space bracketed by twisted girders on the sister span less than a hundred feet away.
This I saw and knew only from the corner of my eye as I battled the wheel and felt the breadth of the missing span in the pit of my stomach, a Peterbilt on my ass the whole white-knuckled way.
The bridge was like people I'd known, their lives for a time parallel to mine, maybe even indistinguishable from mine if viewed from enough distance—then something happens: a misguided freighter, a failure of will, a character flaw—whatever—and suddenly there's this great yawning space where that other life was. Maybe some twisted remnants, but you can only glance over quickly because all your attention's on your own road with that Truck behind you.
This is an excerpt from my prize-winning essay Maintenance, first published in the 1990s. The Skyway incident happened on May 9, 1980.
Joe Who? Learn more at Tallahassee Beach.