About Bridge

Praise the bridge that carried you over.

~ George Colman

I was living in San Francisco when the Golden Gate Bridge turned 75.

May 27, 2012 was a cool day and I was still getting used to cool summer weather, having moved to San Francisco the year before from Atlanta, Georgia. I worked at the time in an upscale natural foods store in the Marina district, which is between the Bridge and the portion of Lombard Street often called “the Crookedest Street in the World”. As a result, we usually had fairly heavy tourist traffic, and I had heard all about the celebrations. It was sure to be an historic event, but it was also sure to be crowded and chaotic, so I decided against attending. I saw the Bridge from the bus every day I went to work, after all.

I remember hearing the fireworks begin after darkness fell and regretting my decision. I leaned out the open window in our living room but could only see the corner of the fireworks, hazy and shrouded in smoke. I ran to the bedroom and leaned out the bay window, hoping the extra foot would let me see more clearly, to no avail. We turned on the television and watched the fireworks on screen while listening to them out the window - the most jubilant celebration I have ever kind-of-attended.

The Golden Gate Bridge gets quite a bit of attention, well-deserved if you ask me. It is an engineering marvel and hypnotically beautiful. It is said to be the most photographed bridge in the world, and a simple internet image search for “bridge” supports this statement. It opened up San Francisco to Marin County, changing the course of history for those areas as well as other areas north of San Francisco.

The thing is, the Golden Gate Bridge is not the only bridge in San Francisco. It wasn’t the first or the most expensive, it’s not the busiest, it’s not the longest, and it’s not the most socially or historically significant. (It is the tallest, though.)

The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was originally conceived a few years after the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, in order to connect San Francisco to the terminus in Oakland. It opened to car travel the day it was completed: November 12, 1936 (five months before the Golden Gate). It cost slightly more to construct, and it employed thousands more workers than the Golden Gate Bridge.

The Golden Gate Bridge is an impressive 1.7 miles long, and was the longest suspension bridge built at the time it opened (surpassed in 1964). Each day, approximately 110,000 cars cross it. The Bay Bridge, on the other hand, is 8.4 miles long, and each day over 247,000 cars cross it. It is currently one of the longest bridges in the United States and since the new portion of the bridge opened in 2014, it is the widest in the world.

All this, and yet it seems to pale in comparison to its neighbor to the North.

Bridges are like stories, in that they connect people to one another. Like bridges, stories can be culturally and socially significant, and like bridges, some stories get much more attention than other stories, regardless of their significance. Few stories will end up on the bestseller list, and even fewer family videos will win film awards. That doesn’t make the stories less important.

Stories are crucial bridges to our history. We build the bridges for those who come after us, and we also build these bridges for ourselves, regardless of whether these bridges will lead us to a spot in the Oprah Book Club or a nomination for an Academy Award.

It is an act of love and respect for ourselves and our journey to build these bridges.

It is an act of bravery to build these bridges and share them with others.

It is an act of generosity to leave these bridges for generations to come.

Don’t worry about whether anyone will care about what you write. Consider the ghostly advice heard by the main character in the 1989 film Field of Dreams: “If you build it, [they] will come.” Write first, and your loved ones and others will read your stories.

Invite others to read your stories and cross over into true understanding of who you are as an individual. Read the stories of others and appreciate the similarities and differences between those stories and your own.

Venture into new territory. When we open our minds and hearts, we can better understand our unique journeys to ourselves and our present.

Most of all, don’t worry if you think your story is not as shocking, action-packed, glorious, hilarious, beautiful, dramatic, well-written, or impressive as someone else’s.

I promise you that it is still just as important.

We ourselves shall be loved for awhile and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

~ Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey