That dream you can't wake up from

I remember the date, May 1, 2005, because my father-in-law had just died and I had just returned from a soul-shredding trip back east for his funeral. I had nothing left in me, but was in that wild, I've-got-to-get-out-of-here state that always makes me slam the door behind me and travel.

On foot. I went off into the woods, and around here that means I went down the street and turned left, but these were public spaces, dog paths, old-lady-jogging places, and I needed far more surcease, more refuge. I needed to get away from the whole damn human race.

I kept walking, and once more turned left.

I was on a bridge. I was aware that a year or so ago, there was no bridge here, never had been. I had a vague memory of someone building one. Why? It led to nowhere.

Or had I tried it once, and found the rough path over the bumpety old tree-roots just too creepy and uncomfortable? I was on that path, and soon borne up by the rushing of streams.

These were hissing, shisshing, fish-and-glitter streams that rushed through my ear canals and rattled the tiny tympani behind them as if gushing through my skull. Suddenly I had the sense of smell of a horse, and, snorting, lifted my head.

The path led ever on. It twisted and wrenched. I was aware of civilization not far away, as if I could even see houses and hear lawnmowers through the cedars. But it couldn't be so, for these woods were primeval, pulling me deeper in. My feet were in a state of hypnosis. I could not refuse.

I went over bridge after bridge. Where had this path been all my life, I wondered  -  inaccessible to the dogwalkers, the granny-runners. Sealed off, yet here. One stream roared like traffic in a tunnel. It was awful, and I sped on.

As if pursued. But look. Here was the place I always turned back. Or not? I had never been on this path, so how could I remember turning back?  My scalp was electric. Beyond this twist lay the place of the faeries.

I can't describe how each tree seemed inhabited, not by a human or a squirrel but by its own fleshwood-spirit. I can't explain how each tree seethed, how burls swelled like pregnancies, wood cancer that somehow popped out of the symmetry of the trunk and made it look hideously deformed.

Then I stopped at the sight of a massive, salmon-coloured stump, the fleshy remains of a huge fallen cedar. It seemed to hum and swarm with life. I wondered where the tree had fallen, and when. And the sound it must have made, and what pushed it over. The tree-flesh seemed vital yet, not grey but livid red, full of ant-tunnels and probably housing one of those termite queens the size of a rat.

I walked beside a huge gully. I have always hated the word gully, it's ugly and hollow and hellish. I remember when I was about two or three, it could be my first memory, falling down into a gully in Delhi where my grandmother lived, and my sister, who was about 15 at the time, bending over me and saying, "Are you wounded?"

My feet slipped in spongy moss and slime. It was a pleasant day, but I was menaced. Something veered and eered. I could not see it. I turned around quickly, and it vanished.

Now strong cords pulled me, whipcords snaking out from under the ground to yank my feet out from under me. I burst into a clearing, and -

I stopped, then stepped, as cautiously as Pocohontas. The ground sank and groaned under me, giving way with each step and leaving a dark depression.  I stopped uncertainly and looked up and all around me.

I stood in an exact circle of tall cedars. I lifted my head and felt a crackling charge of energy whizzing clockwise around and around me. I chanted some sort of prayer that I wish I could remember now, something about my father-in-law. My temporal awareness had burned away like fog.

As I stood in the electrocharged circle I noticed a squirrel violently frisking its tail, jerkily making its way toward me. But it did not stop. It crept and stopped, crept and stopped until it was only a foot away from me. Then another squirrel appeared, and began to creep towards me. They sat up on their hind legs with their tails jerking and their beady eyes glistening in the sun, waiting.

I walked. Huge fallen logs, roots of trees just jutting up in the air: how had they been uprooted? Why were all these trees laughing at me? Then I saw or felt with my foot the weathered slat of an old ladder. Or something like it.

But it wasn't a ladder. It was a bridge. It was a bridge that lay flat on the grass. And it went on and on. I stepped on it and began to walk.

Perhaps the ground wasn't level here. But it was. Perhaps the ground was marshy here. But it wasn't. This thing was, it just was. I wobbled along on the rickety old slats, cursing the fucking little gnome who had put this bizarre useless thing here just to freak me out and make my hair stand on end.

Then. Then I did see something, a minor gully ahead of me where the ground fell away. But the rickety little bridge remained level. Like a horse stepping on a live power line, I jumped back.

Had I walked on it, I surely would have tumbled in.

This was some booby-trap set by a vindictive fairy tale witch, some Tenniel nightmare ink-drawing designed to scare the living shit out of innocent children. I wheeled and ran. And ran and ran, and it was a good thing that no bear ran after me. Everything unspooled and unreeled and unhappened, so that by the time I got home again, 
I was not even sure any of it had been real.





But I went back a few days later. I had to know. Yes. It was all there. I noticed a humming and a cracking. A subtle sizzling in the air, something that I picked up with the tip of my nose.

This was once a place deep, deep in the black-green uterine core of British Columbia, before the white man came and ripped the hell out of it, as he continues to do. It was a place where you had better not go, not even if you were aboriginal and knew the danger. The place of Goldilocks and Little Red Riding Hood and the Handless Maiden and all those other sweet children who started out innocent, but ended up lost and devoured.

Don't go there. Don't go there, my girl. This is a place of enchantment, but in the archaic sense, the faerie chant seducing you with coils of magic that will never set you free.

All is changed, changed utterly. I go to that place sometimes still, and like a soft drink left out too long in the sun, most of the fizz has gone out of it. But the trees are still murmuring to themselves, nasty little things they don't want me to hear
.

One day I realized the weird wooden bridge on the grass was gone: just gone, and then I wondered if I had imagined it. So I decided to go a little farther, clambered down and up that gully, and kept going.

A few minutes later, I had no idea where I was.

This was a profound disorientation. I couldn't turn in any direction. The view behind me was even more unfamiliar than the view in front of me. Panic crept up my scalp and I started running, desperately running. Like a hunger, like a thirst, like a stab of unbearable desire, I needed something, anything that looked familiar.

I ran until my lungs ached, and then: I burst out. Burst out of the forest, as if the forest had an actual door. I found myself on a road, a main road, paved, travelled, but completely unfamiliar. I had no idea how I would ever get home.

I walked and walked. I didn't have the nerve to flag a car down. Then I saw something. A bus stop. But I had nothing with me. I wriggled my hands into the pockets of my jeans and came up with a frayed yellow bus ticket that had probably gone through the wash.

I waited and waited. A bus came, a bus I had never heard of before, but it had to take me somewhere, somewhere familiar, somewhere in the civilized world! I made myself look normal, or hoped I did, and got on. I had the thought that I should have some sort of passport, to take me from one mode of being to the next.

I went home to recover, then as I was getting ready for bed I discovered a small bulge in my jeans pocket. I took it out and turned it over. It was a small stone in the exact size and shape of a cat's paw: neat toes and pads on one side, smooth elegance on the other. I didn't remember picking it up. For some reason I put several coats of nail polish on it. I have it still in a case with my jewelry, a bizarre trinket that wouldn't mean a thing to anyone else.

A bridge made of tacos

http:www.wsdot.wa.gov/tnbhistory/default.htm

Gather 'round, all ye children, and listen to my tale. Collapsing bridge stories have always intrigued me. Here you have structures that are carefully designed and built, gazillions of dollars spent. Only in rare cases do the builders cut corners. But wait 'til you hear about this one.


I became fascinated with the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a.k.a. Galloping Gertie, about ten years ago. I did all sorts of research on the net, then forgot all about it and deleted all my links. Enough of that, I said, and went on to something else.


I don't know what brought it back. Looking for something to blog about besides my limp, depressed, tail-end-of-summer mood, maybe. Rather than go back over all that shit from ten years ago, I'm a-gonna tell you all about MY version of Galloping Gertie.
This was the late '30s, and nobody had any money because World War II hadn't properly started yet. At this point, Hitler looked like a swell guy who was just getting rid of the riff-raff.

But the folks in Tacoma, Washington needed a new bridge. The proposed model, a nice conservative squatty indestructible thing, looked like a safe deal. Then someone else stepped up to the plate: Elmer Fartsworthy (not his real name: I'm protecting his estate), who had this sleek new design for a modern bridge, an elegant bridge, a Bridge of the Future.

This thing used about half the materials of the other one, a real advantage during the Depression. It was something like 12 feet wide - OK, I exaggerate. Maybe 13. A long, thin ribbon of a bridge that Fartsworthy assured everyone would do the job, and look modern and bragworthy in the bargain: great for civic pride, the envy of two-bit towns everywhere.

Since Mr. F. had a hand in designing San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, everyone felt very enthusiastic. They were even more enthusiastic when F. said he could build his structure for $6 million, not the $11 million of the original. This six million dollar bridge was looking better all the time.

A funny thing, though - as they built it, the workers kept saying, "Hey. Is that supposed to happen?" The bridge kept swaying, even before it was completed. It kind of went side to side. The architect assured them this was only a standard lateral flexo-torsion with a side of fries, so they kept on with it. But the workers were so nauseated from motion sickness, they had to suck lemons to keep from throwing up.

When it opened with great fanfare in 1940, the thing was heaving up and down like a seasick sea serpent, but people soon flocked to Tacoma to take the wild ride. Galloping Gertie was so unstable that the car in front of you would literally sink and disappear. Never mind, said the designers and engineers. It would hold. This was just a normal variation of the flexor chattahoozus. The beast had more torque than any goddamn Golden Gate pussy bridge. It might whip back and forth like a double-Dutch skipping rope, but this only made the drive more interesting.

Until.

Until, one day, only a couple of months later, the wind began to blow.

There was no traffic on the bridge that morning. Just a car with a dog in it, mysteriously parked. The dog's name was Tubby. You have to know this, because it's the most important part of the story.

The bridge began to, well, not sway exactly, but flap back and forth like a bleeping pancake. It was heaving 30 feet in the air, first on one side, then the other, with a bizarre still point in the middle.

All over the world, architects and engineers had the same nightmare.

Violently it flew up and down, pitching and bucking. The guy who owned the car/dog actually walked down the middle of this thing, trusting soul, but his terrified dog practically bit his hand off. There is archival footage of him running his ass off to get away.

The seasick sea serpent continued to heave up and down in the most nauseous fashion, making a hideous shrieking sound that made bystanders plug their ears. At one point it looked like it might stop, but another gust of wind got it going even more violently.

Finally, the inevitable: one rivet flew out. Then a strip of metal sheared off. Then another. Wires snapped like spaghetti. With a deafening roar, the entire middle section of the bridge crumbled into the water like an overdone piece of toast. A moment later, another span groaned and gave way.

The thing just snapped like a bundle of twigs. I wonder what the designer was feeling, watching all this: how could this happen? Where did I go wrong? How soon can I get out of town?

Tubby didn't make it, but he was the only casuality. If this had happened at rush hour, who knows what the death toll would have been.

Supposedly, the disaster (still being dissected by engineers 70 years later, though not the same ones - maybe their great-grandchildren) would have happened even without the bargain basement price of the thing. Some said the bridge would not allow wind to pass through the sides, pushing it around like somebody blowing on one of them pinwheel things. Others said it was sexually aroused by a first cousin of the Loch Ness Monster which had taken up residence in Puget Sound, and was shimmying in a kind of frantic mating dance.

Others said it was just an atypical aeroflexomotor screw-up, with shi-fa-fa on the side. There followed a storm of accusations and counter-accusations, denial of all wrongdoing, exposure of corruption, and all that sort of thing.

An inspector who had been hired to make a safety assessment of the bridge before it opened had issued a severe warning that it would inevitably fail, but because the bridge was more popular than Seabiscuit, City Hall opened it anyway. After the failure, this same guy immediately had his ass fired for embarrassing everyone. No good deed goes unpunished.

I like this story. I like weird, atypical things happening, and mighty structures collapsing. I like the fact that there's lots of video (someone had the presence of mind to grab a camera and get some very tasty shots). Maybe it's my sense of anarchy.

But I do feel bad about the dog.