Bridge Out

The bridge over the MacDowell spillway, connecting Vatcher Road and Windy Row, is closed indefinitely to anything but foot or bicycle traffic, cutting off one motorized route of escape from Hancock in the event of a zombie apocalypse. Otherwise, we shouldn’t be too inconvenienced. For the foreseeable future, Vatcher will be a dead end. I am happy for the people who live there, less happy for the people who will have to absorb the diverted traffic passing through their neighborhoods.

I stopped using the spillway bridge a few months ago as talk circulated that its condition wasn’t funny anymore. It’s been a nasty looking crossing for years, eaten by rust, and restricted to one-lane of traffic. It hardly contributed to the scenic route of travel, back and forth to West Peterborough. I have no real fear of bridges, but it will be forty-three years in June that I drove with my wife across the Mianus River bridge on route 95 in Cos Cob, Connecticut, on the way back and forth to the New York Hospital to deliver our first child. A week later, the northbound lanes (as I recall) of the Mianus bridge fell into the river, taking cars and trucks with it. Everyone was of the same mind after that catastrophe: bridges are not meant to fall down.

We have lived through a couple of bridge replacements in Peterborough the last few years. The Main Street bridge was finally rebuilt after being on the endangered list, and then the route 101 bridge. Next up, hopefully, will be the route 202 bridge crossing the Contoocook River, which has been on the red list for fourteen years (since 2012). The 202 bridge is a state bridge. Maybe it is the same elsewhere, state-to-state, but New Hampshire’s red listed bridge report was twelve pages long at this time a year ago, bridges in our Monadnock region buried among them. It amounts to a schedule of major repairs guaranteed to stretch across generations of workers. Indeed, when the state gets around to the giant undertaking of fixing the 202 bridge, potentially moving it downriver, it will unquestionably rely on young workers who were born the year—or later—it went on the naughty list.

I think we should not build any additional bridges until after the next epoch, whatever that is. Maybe after the next ice age. It is clear we can’t afford to maintain the ones we have with preventive maintenance. Someone may hasten to tell me there is no such thing as preventive maintenance with respect to steel structures spanning open spaces. The only solution to old steel is new steel. Old bridges will always be left to carry on until they die. In which case, okay. Fine.

This is, more-or-less, a column about the weather, and other things I can comment on by looking out the window at a pond and the woods. Occasionally, however, I have to shop for groceries and gas-up the car. In this watery part of the world, that means crossing bridges. When those are suddenly left for dead, they become part of the natural order of all things—the things that happen outside my window as they enter the world, endure for a time, and perish.

Huckleberry and I walk regularly in the woods behind Vatcher Road and along the MacDowell spillway. He will be most interested to walk across the bridge the first time and sniff the other side—which he has only, ever, been able to admire from the near shore.

This was a good idea, he’ll be thinking as we cross. Why haven’t we done this before?