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
Look at this thing. Just look at it.
Fort Point. 1861. Built to protect San Francisco Bay from Confederate ironclads that never came. Brick and mortar, cannon emplacements, the whole nineteenth-century military industrial complex compressed into one obsolete fortress. And then, seventy-something years later, some mad genius decides to build one of the most beautiful suspension bridges in human history right over the top of it. Doesn’t tear it down. Doesn’t fill it in. Just arches the whole goddamn structure right over it, like a steel rainbow giving the finger to history.
Here I am, standing on top of this relic, this monument to wars that didn’t happen and threats that never materialized, looking up at 746 feet of Art Deco engineering genius hanging in the fog. The Golden Gate. International Orange. Probably the most photographed bridge in the world, and somehow it never gets old.
But you know what nobody talks about? That sound. That constant, relentless humming and wheezing. It’s like the bridge is breathing. Like it’s alive. Wind through the cables, metal expanding and contracting, traffic vibrating through 27,000 tons of structural steel. It never stops. Day, night, doesn’t matter. The bridge hums.
Thornton Wilder said the bridge is love. Maybe he was onto something, but standing here, I think the bridge is more like memory. It’s the past and the future occupying the same space. Civil War fortifications below, twentieth-century modernism above, all of it humming, wheezing, trying to tell you something.
My grandfather. Opening day, May 27th, 1937. Two hundred thousand people showed up to walk across before they’d even let the cars on. Can you imagine that? The whole city turning out to see if this crazy thing would actually hold. And my grandfather was there, one of the first humans to cross, walking on a bridge that didn’t exist six months earlier.
Fifty years later, 1987, the anniversary, me and my father, doing the same walk. Except this time, three hundred thousand people had the same idea. So many bodies packed onto that deck that the bridge flattened. The arc disappeared. The engineers probably had heart attacks watching their beautiful suspension curve go flat as a Kansas highway.
Three generations. Same bridge. Same Pacific wind. Same fog rolling in like it’s been doing since before there were people here to see it. My grandfather probably couldn’t have imagined I’d be standing here decades later. And I can’t imagine what my kids, if I have kids, what they might feel if they stand here in another fifty years.
What’s the fuck is it saying? Maybe that everything we build is temporary. Maybe that beauty and paranoia can coexist in the same square mile. Maybe that the most important things in life are the ones that connect us, to each other, to history, to the other side of the bay.
Or maybe it’s just a bridge. But standing here, taking this photograph, listening to it breathe…
I don’t think so.