I love the back-to-school photos I’ve seen in the last few weeks. Whether kids have combed hair or messy bed head, new backpacks or hastily-thrown-together lunches, first-day ties or old t-shirts, their back-to-school smiles fill up more than just my Facebook feed. I’ve caught the hopeful feeling that I usually miss, being out of school—that I’ll have the chance to learn something new, or to go somewhere I’ve never been before, or become someone new entirely.
There’s also been another set of photos that have caught my eye. They started last week, with shots of tail-lights and license plates and steel trusses. “Last trip over the old bridge,” my Bay Area friends wrote, somewhat wistfully. After years of challenges—everything from funding to political wrangling to bolt failures–the old span was finally shutting down. The new one would open five days later.
Some photographers also bid a heartfelt adieu to the wrong side of the span—only the eastern side, between Oakland and Yerba Buena Island, has been replaced. I’m sympathetic: the bridge has always confused me, too. I can always manage to cross it to San Francisco, but when I try to return on the way back all of the on-ramps seem to vanish in a Bermuda Triangle built of one-way streets. Perhaps this was the work of the Bay Bridge troll—a metal sculpture that ironworkers installed on the bridge after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, when a section of the span collapsed. Troll fans had been worried for months, setting up a campaign to move the troll and its protective mojo to the new bridge.
Just before the old bridge closed, we went to the Lawrence Hall of Science, a kids’ science museum in Berkeley. I’d spent a lot of time there growing up; it was a little disorienting to see the familiar building with its angular, mid-century light fixtures and retro-futuristic architecture (it’s supposed to look like a molecule) filled with nanotechnology exhibits and touchscreen computer games. Then I stumbled on one of my old favorites: a low-tech spinning cylinder with slits in it that you can use to animate stick-figure drawings.
One of my other favorites had been an enormous periodic table. You could press buttons on a console and various elements would light up. I remember liking the elements named after things I knew: Berkelium, Californium, Lawrencium.
I didn’t realize they were radioactive. I only knew that once, a summer camp that I’d been going to at the museum (I think it was “Bubbleology” or “Math for Girls”) was cancelled because there was a bomb scare.
I was scared: I thought this meant there was a cartoon bad guy standing on the museum’s large concrete deck with one of those black bowling ball-sized bombs with a lit fuse. He would hold it over the edge, the city of Berkeley below, and laugh maniacally while deciding whether or not to drop it. My parents told me whoever it was didn’t agree with the things scientists were working on at a nearby lab. I didn’t want to go back to camp, and every time we got near the museum I started to feel quaky.
This summer when I looked for the periodic table, it was gone. Instead the room was filled with an exhibit about the building of the bridge. Instead of pressing buttons, you could stand and wave a hand at the screen and see the enormous machines that put each section of the span in place. In another section, kids could construct their own suspension bridges. Elsewhere, they could build whirligigs and tiny machines and cars to zoom over bridges. (If you can’t go to the Lawrence Hall, or the bridge, in person, check out this most-excellent time-lapse video of the eastern span’s construction.)
On Facebook, the photos of the old bridge vanished. Then this week, new ones appeared. Interwoven with photos of excited kindergarteners and their parents’ bittersweet reflections were chronicles of the first passages across the new span.
There were photos of taillights, and blue skies, of suspension cables and the bay in the distance. And then there were people, too—on foot and by bike on a new section of the eastern bridge—some in full cycling kits, some wearing turbans, some bare-chested, at least one carrying a large cross. On Twitter, CalTrans posted a photo of a brand new troll that a spokesperson later said revealed itself, under cover of darkness, to officials the night the bridge opened.
This time of year seems to be the start of new roads to somewhere. And we start off together, with new shoes and old ones, with notebooks of blank pages, with an open lane and our destination in the distance. Whatever bridge we’re on, whatever trolls hinder or help us, there will be earthquakes. And like the eastern span, maybe we can ride the seismic waves as they come, and then journey on.
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Images
Bay Bridge images from Flickr users Marc Flores and Bryan Chan. Troll image via Save The Bay Bridge Troll Facebook page, possibly through the troll’s handlers at the Metropolitan Transportation Commission.