01 September 2006

Six Lanes Both Ways

I'm not depressed, though the atmosphere is. I'm actually feeling pretty good, all things considered. I am not going anywhere in the rain or the rising wind. The tropical depression that is the remnants of Hurricane Ernesto will be arriving at Big Pink through the rest of the day.

The good people at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are quite explicit about what is going to happen. Light rain now, thunderstorms and a heavy downpour by lunch, and then misery and wet in bands through midnight.

The dog and I greeted the first of the storm long before dawn. The mist was not enough to discourage him. The moisture seems to bring out important new scents. I wore my BBC ballcap and clutched my umbrella. The rising wind was cool against my skin, and the paradox of chill coming with tropical air made me shiver and think of fall.

As we accomplished our mission, I wrote the morning news in my head. There would be a bomb blast in Baghdad, of course, something calculated to kill many civilians and emphasize the ineffectiveness of the increased security effort in the capital.

Something would be said about the Iranians, and their intransigence over the UN deadline to abandon their weapons program.

And then there would be the traffic. I warmed to that, imagining the effect of the light rain on the asphalt around the capital region, bringing up the oil and grease. Someone would be overturned on Georgia Avenue, and there would be a mess on I-95 coming up from the distant suburbs to the south.

Big Pink is right next to the city. We can see the monuments from the roof, or we could if it wasn't closed after that resident jumped and the insurance company got nasty.

When the dog and I returned to the unit, I discovered that I no longer need a radio. Everything was playing out right on schedule. The mayhem and bluster continues around the world. Here in DC, despite the reduced number of commuters on the eve of this last long summer weekend, cars were overturning and the backup had begun.

I shuddered a bit, thinking of the week beyond this one. Everyone back, school in session, the snarl extending from the 14th Street Bridge right to my door.

I sighed. They had warned me about the traffic long before I first arrived in the capital city. It was the primary negative to an otherwise exhilarating town, and it is why the real estate was so expensive.

I was young then, and much stronger than I am now. I thought I could master it, bend it to my will. Or at least endure my time in the transient city. I did not know that it would be a life sentence.

On a business trip to one of the Spook Agencies in Maryland I took my rental car and drove the routes to Fairfax County, where the better schools were located. I was warned about the Wilson Bridge, which has been disintegrating since it was dedicated in the year of the Missile Crisis.

It has been controversial since the beginning. Mrs. Wilson was a hard case. She was the first female President of the United States, during the time her husband was recovering from a massive stroke. She was miffed that the bridge was the only thing they could think to name in honor of her contrarian husband.

The circular bas-relief of President Wilson's bespeckled visage is the first thing you see on the span leaving the Virginia side.

It is enough to distract you from the pot-holes that could grab a wheel and rip it right off the frame of your car.

I think they built it as well as they could, but it was a compromise. The city of Alexandria insisted that there be a section that could be raised in the middle to accommodate ocean-ships that periodically called at the mysterious Inter-Arms warehouse complex on the river.

The bridge crosses Jones Point as an elevated structure, and there is a pleasant park to the south. Walking under the span to reach it the sound of the traffic was frightening. The trucks boom as they pounded the concrete, and things fell from the decking under the onslaught that went on, 24 X 7 X 365.

We all shared in the bridge crisis, every one of us. There was danger in every crossing, what with all the roads coming together to cross, and the heavy trucks, and things flying off the loony loads the optimists piled on their vehicles.

The Wilson Bridge is a political structure, in addition to its crumbling physical infrastructure. Ah, the festival of special interests contained in it's fragile rusting girders!

The great East Coast Freeway was supposed to slice right through the heart of the capital, and the builders almost got there. The northbound eight-lane passes the shadow of the Capitol dome and ends abruptly at the Anacostia River.

Neighborhood activists managed to prevent the construction of the final bridge after all the rest of the havoc had been wrought. With no way through, the arterial traffic of the entire eastern seaboard is pressed across the Wilson's weakening spans.

The poor managed to stifle the alternate path through the city, and the rich fought the bridge replacement project to a standstill for more than a decade. “Too much noise,” they objected. “Too grandiose!” they shouted.

The wealthy activists even brought the Civil War dead to the fight, right from the lavish town-homes that marched south past the warehouses toward the construction site. They claimed the graves of Union Troops would be disturbed.

As the circus continued, we all suffered.

The Wilson Bridge was the single point of failure for traffic in the entire region. I missed the collision of the tractor-trailer hauling horses, which froze traffic for hours, freeing several of them to gallop past the stalled automobiles.

I was very much here for the blizzard of 1987 that trapped drivers on the bridge all night, watching the fuel gauges to down to empty as they tried to stay warm.

There were thousands of minor outrages on the bridge, daily, actually. The last straw might have been 1999, when a man brandishing a handgun seized control of the middle spans and stopped traffic for seven unbearable hours before he threw himself off the side.

He lived, but public opinion was nearly unanimous that the cops should have shot him down in the first few minutes.

I don't know if that is what did it or not. But finally the last opposition was bulldozed out of the way, and the $2.4 billion dollar project to replace the Wilson began. It will be six lanes in each direction, twice the capacity of the old bridge.

The solution, of course, is its own nightmare. We have been watching, all of us, the slow progress of the building of the piers and arches of the great new edifice. They completed the first of the two parallel spans this summer, and opened it with great spectacle.

Then came the laborious task of re-routing the inter-state to the new bridge. Traffic crept in anguish, and preparations began to demolish the original bridge to begin work on the modern second span. The old Wilson was finally closed to traffic last month.

The final span will not be complete until 2008, and some of the interchanges not scheduled to be done for five more years. There will be another two years of creeping across the Potomac. In order to keep our spirits up in this time of trial, another spectacle was conducted this week.

The multi-jurisdictional Bridge Authority conducted a contest to find the most aggrieved commuter. They found a man who is sane in many other respects who has been traveling across it for nearly thirty years, from his home twenty miles south of the bridge in Virginia to the Maryland suburb of Rockville, due north of the District.

He was severely injured in a crash with a truck that had stopped on the bridge for no discernable reason. After his recuperation, he still he came each day, leaving his house each morning before five o'clock with a big travel mug of coffee to arrive at work a few hours later.

Daniel G. Ruefly was given the honor of symbolically pushing the plunger to detonate charges on the mile of bridge that cross the land. They did around midnight, to minimize the inconvenience to the traveling public.

Still, despite the lateness of the hour, hundreds showed up to watch the rippling explosions. It was pretty neat, and something I would like to do myself.

When a public work takes most of your career to complete, it gives you some perspective on the span of a human life.

It is encouraging to know that the new Wilson Bridge, six lanes in both directions, is going to be complete before global warming raises the level of the Potomac to flow right over it.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com


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