The Imagination of Fear

Here's a picture of the Bay Bridge. It's a pretty bridge, rather majestic and totally unsafe because it hasn't been fixed since the Loma Prieta Earthquake in the 80's. So I'm always a little bit afraid when I travel across it. I don't particularly trust bridges, since our infrastructure in America is not well maintained (I read an article about how some 30% of bridges needed to be repaired.)

I like the view from a bridge; until I look down. When we lived in Brooklyn, Cam and I would walk across the Brooklyn bridge, there's a part in the center that you can walk along. It is made of wooden planks. You can look down between the planks and see the East River as you walk on wooden planks that have not been replaced since 1883 when the bridge was built. It was there, in the middle, standing on old wood looking at frosty cold currents swirling that I would get a touch of vertigo. Nothing too bad or crippling. Just a sense of fear and dread, the possibility of calamity.

The Bay Bridge, besides being beautiful and part of the optimistic era of american engineering, is tall. It affords you a lovely view of the city and the bay. It cruises the top of Angels Island (where I breathe a sigh of relief) and then continues outwards and upwards before depositing you in the mess that is San Francisco's traffic system. I always imagine the big one happening. The fall where your stomach decides to stay much higher than you. Even though both you and the car, as Galileo points out, fall at the same pace, in my imagination the car falls a little faster so I am pushed up against the roof. Bridges, I imagine falling off them. It's a possibility.

The Chesapeake Bay Bridge is not tall, it is close to the water. But it is long, and when you are on it there are places where you can not see land. You are driving along, skimming the water, no land in sight when suddenly there is no bridge. The "and Tunnel" part is never quite highlighted so you can be surprised when you realize that you are about to be submerged. The tunnels allow the BIG ships to pass over the tunnel into the bay keeping the port active, since the bridge is so low. Well, I'm not particularly fond of tunnels. Seepage, leakage, catastrophic breaks, water rushing in. But this tunnel, it was built in 1965. Things have gotten BIGGER since then. What if the hulls of container tankers and cruise ships have gotten deeper and bigger and what if they've been chipping away slightly at the tunnel. You see where I'm going? What if, when I'm under it, the tunnel fails? I can imagine it.

Basically, I can imagine disaster at any given point. I can imagine that it would be a bad thing to change lanes while driving fast on the freeway when another car is in the next lane. I can imagine the car in front of me stopping suddenly, and so I don't tailgate. I can imagine bad things and I can imagine consequences, and so I am mostly careful.

And I stay away from bridges.