Nov 02, 2008 - 04:05:28 CST
Last things matter.On Wednesday I went up to the bluffs just west of Bismarck State College to watch the final two spans of Memorial Bridge come down. The implosion was scheduled for 10 a.m. It actually occurred a few minutes after 11.
A quiet crowd of more than 1,000 was strung out along the ridgeline. Some people stayed in their cars, more stood or sat on the prairie grasses sipping coffee out of high-end Styrofoam cups. There were a dozen or so boats in the water half a mile upriver from the bridge, including a red canoe. The minute I saw it, I wished that I had taken my kayak down to the river in the morning and witnessed the bridge come down from the water's surface. A couple of folks were standing like sentinels on a slender sandbar in the center of the river. How I envied them.
I was surprised and pleased that so many people came to watch the last gasp of Memorial Bridge. Implosions always draw a crowd, I suppose. The mood was festive in a muted sort of way. I tried to reckon what percentage of the crowd felt sad to see the venerable old bridge spans collapse into the river. Not many, I think. It was more about spectacle than loss.
BSCPresident Larry Skogen had invited folks to watch the implosion from the splendid new energy building on campus. The view from the fourth floor is magnificent. Both of our colleges, BSC and the University of Mary, have buildings with spectacular views of the Missouri River. That is incalculably important in the education of our youth - as important to the spirit of our place as the neoclassical colonnades are to the spirit of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville.
However much the Missouri has been compromised and degraded by industrialization, it is still - even in its Corps of Engineers straitjacket - one of America's greatest rivers. Not even the notorious Flood Control Act of 1944 and the Pick-Sloan Plan, which threw up six giant mainstem dams between Fort Peck, Mont., and the bottom of South Dakota, could quite destroy the romance of the Missouri River or its extraordinary heritage. North Dakota is fortunate to be bisected by what Meriwether Lewis called "the mighty and heretofore deemed endless Missouri River," even in its domesticated state. Try to imagine North Dakota without it.
When John Steinbeck came through in 1960 in his pickup camper Rosinante, doing the field work that led to "Travels with Charley," he instantly recognized the importance of the Missouri River. "Someone must have told me about the Missouri River at Bismarck, North Dakota," he wrote, "or I must have read about it. In either case, I hadn't paid attention. I came on it in amazement. Here is where the map should fold. Here is the boundary between east and west. On the Bismarck side it is eastern landscape, eastern grass, with the look and smell of eastern America. Across the Missouri on the Mandan side, it is pure west, with brown grass and water scorings and small outcrops. The two sides of the river might well be a thousand miles apart."
Sarcasts put it more rudely in my youth: "Mandan, where the West begins, and the East dumps its garbage." I have always loved Mandan, mostly because it is not Bismarck.
Memorial Bridge was the arched symbol of Steinbeck's line of demarcation. It was, with our unique Capitol building, the most widely recognized landmark in Bismarck. The three more recent highway bridges at Bismarck are efficient and structurally sound, but essentially invisible. You can cross them without really thinking about what you are doing, because they do not scare you or make odd humming noises or call attention to their engineering. Memorial Bridge was a kind of clunky 20th century exclamation mark that said: "Hey, pay attention, you are now crossing one of America's major rivers, and it wasn't easy to build a crossing here, so don't ever take the Missouri River for granted."
Those days are now gone forever.
When I got to the energy building, I hesitated a second too long at the door, and discovered that I actually had no interest in going inside. I didn't want even a remarkable 18-foot-high pane of glass to stand between me and the bridge. Besides, it was just about as beautiful a late fall day as I have ever seen - 50 degrees (above!), a gentle breeze, a dry, breathtakingly clear sky, crisp as Halloween time generally is. It was jacket weather, just this side of chilly. It just felt glorious to be alive on such a morning, and everyone who gathered on the ridge knew: Not much longer now.
By Wednesday morning, I had long since come to terms with the fact that Memorial Bridge was going to be erased from the Bismarck-Mandan landscape. Like many others, I hated to see it go, because it so thoroughly represents my idea of Bismarck. Until the other day, it had never not been there, in the whole course of my life.
I believe the bridge should have been preserved as a monument to our past - the Capitol will be obsolete one of these days too, but I bet it will not be imploded to make way for some gleaming State Bank of North Dakota-like building. At least one span of Memorial Bridge should have been lovingly placed on a river ridge, like the old threshing machines that punctuate our lost homesteads. Or parked downtown as a pedestrian plaza, the way the old "Biggest Little City in the World" signs are preserved on Reno's back streets. But there was no sufficient public outcry to save the bridge - or a chunk of it - and everyone understood the structural challenges it presented to those who maintain our infrastructure.
I made my peace with the loss of Memorial Bridge on the last day it was open for traffic, July 31. I drove across it twice that morning, half an hour before traffic engineers closed it, and I walked across it from east to west and back again. Only a handful of people walked the bridge that day, though hundreds queued up to make their last drive across the bridge, which opened for traffic in August 1922.
Still, I feel great loss, in a very personal way, the way one feels when one of the Beatles dies or a venerable president or movie star from the golden age of film. I can remember in my youth riding in the back of our Ford Falcon from Dickinson to my grandparents' farm in Fergus Falls, Minn. In my childhood the only way to get there was old Highway 10. The Memorial Bridge was the only way across the Missouri in this part of the world. It still had its steel mesh roadbed then - which frightened but fascinated my sister and me, and just frightened my phobic father. The hum of the car's tires on the bridge delighted us. Crossing the great bridge was an event then, a marker of the progress of our journey, perhaps because we were not in the back seat fumbling with iPods and Nintendo DS.
I am feeling old today. Some of my spans are showing signs of fatigue.
Rest in peace, Memorial Bridge. You will be much missed.
(Clay Jenkinson is the director of the Dakota Institute. He is also the Theodore Roosevelt Scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Clay at Jeffysage@aol.com.)
Chet wrote on Nov 3, 2008 11:59 PM:
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