Weather
The Gorge has moods. During the greyest and dampest, the bridge disappears, and everything becomes obscured and weightless. The gods prowl and shape shift in the fog, their whims untethered from any topographical accountability. Crossing is always an act of faith, but more so when the other side is shrouded, and yet you know the breadth of the gap. Headlights are useless. Sometime during the decades I was away, the derelict bridge near my grandmother's house was removed. I stand near the old guardrail probing the unexpected absence like trying to conjure a lost toy. Why shouldn't it be gone? Bridges come and go on their own geologic time, enduring the creative tension between erosion and desire. With the negative space obscured, the Bridge of the Gods becomes something else, an ambiguous, almost phantom conveyance. What's the name of the thing you see before you know what it really is? Unable to endure the ambiguity, the mind conjectures, lands on the most immediate adjacency. Lint, not a spider. Not you, but the memory of you, of us. Mid span, knowing and not knowing, tactile and cloud. The gods huddle. A toll is still required [greedy bastards]. The ore boats on the horizon taunt with a false promise of proximity and possibility. We skate. I look back, already intuitively knowing you are gone. But the bridge, modest, sturdy, useful remains. Girders, rivets, and paint. Suspended. To know not what we know, but of what we are capable. So much love.
*Visit Bridge of the Gods on the Circa 250 website to read the complete 6-installment series.
