Originally published in the 2023 edition of My Hometown, a special supplement to The Daily Home.
“Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.”
~ A. A. Milne
We ask a lot of bridges. Every day, we walk, bike, and drive across them, trusting them with our lives without a second thought.
While I don’t know who constructed the first bridge in history, I’m fairly certain a nearby log and good balance were involved. But some of the first real evidence of bridge-building technology can be traced back to Babylonian society in 4000 BC. A single brick arch a little over 700 feet wide spanned the river that flowed through the center of the ancient city.
These remarkable marvels of human ingenuity not only span rivers and gorges but also vast expanses of time, connecting civilizations and helping to shape the course of history. Bridges in all parts of the world have witnessed the footfalls of armies, the migration of peoples, and the plodding progress of trade.
But it’s not enough that we ask bridges to carry our physical weight safely across a river or gorge, we ask them to carry our emotional weight too. We’ve made bridges our time-worn idiom of choice for every aspect of the human experience.
We bridge the gap between strangers with warm smiles, extending olive branches to build bridges of friendship. Or, for better or worse, we burn bridges behind us, leaving a fiery wake but no way to reach us.
Sometimes we realize that a situation is out of our control, that it’s a bridge too far; or, maybe we’re just not prepared to face that problem yet, so we wait and cross that bridge when we come to it. Occasionally, we learn to take the high road, forgiving one another of past wrongs realizing that it’s all water under the bridge…
We ask a lot of bridges.
These physical symbols of our inventiveness, strength, and perseverance serve as more than a mere means to safely cross. Maybe they hold the answers to all of life’s problems. But, hey, if you believe that, then I have a bridge to sell you.
