8/1/07 : Mississippi Divination

Another entry, this time non-fiction, for my writing class. I like it better than the previous story (which I was asked to read a page of in front of a 300 person lecture tomorrow), but find the repeated establishments of the themes redundant. I left out the more famous last part of the actual story due to the fact that I couldn't readily make it important to the themes, and it made me look like a total bastard.

"Like taking a thorn from a kitten's paw." That's actually how it was.

Some of it is slightly altered from what actually happened, but those are mainly small details. Here we are.
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There is a silent and selfish prayer inside of each young person that is difficult to understand and admit. It is coupled with the desire for excitement and significance with a disregard of where they may come from.


It was the late afternoon last summer. I had just returned to my apartment from a date when the girl I had just been with, Shannon, called me.
“Hello?

“Alex, uhhh…”

“What’s up?”

“I didn’t know who to tell, I just had to tell somebody… but a bridge just fell down next to my house.”

“Wait- what?’

“The 35W bridge just collapsed”

At the time, I knew the highway 35W, but had forgotten which bridge it was. There are at least a dozen from the top to bottom of Minneapolis crossing over the Mississippi. I had crossed the river a half dozen times that day for work and exploring the city with Shannon, and wondered aloud if I had been on that particular one that day. She told me that it wasn’t anything a bicycle or a pedestrian could cross, and that I was probably thinking of the 10th street bridge that I had used earlier when leaving her house. The conversation ended, and I looked at my two friends hunched over laptops on the couch.

Leland and Joelle were looking at me when I hung up, with words like collapse and repeated instances of “really?” and “holy shit, oh my god” piquing their interest over what they were looking at in their computers. I told them that a bridge within a mile of where we were had collapsed. They asked “really?”, I said “yes”, and they said “holy shit, oh my god”.
The next moment, we were outside jogging to the center of Franklin Avenue Bridge, only seeing a plume of smoke coming out from behind the distant Weisman Art Gallery on campus. A moment later we were in my car driving up the riverside parkway north towards the bridge. Sirens filled the air outside the car, and the air inside was filled with a musical radio still unaware of what had just happened. The plume grew, and the changed perspective showed its origin in tall flames behind the starting point of the 10th Avenue Bridge. In a moment of insight, I thought it might be a good idea to park a few blocks away in the event of it being an actual disaster, warranting yellow tape, emergency vehicles, police saying things along the lines of move along, keep moving, move back, all things that would entrap or tow a car. We parked beneath the Washington Avenue Bridge in a dirt parking lot, and jogged towards the plume of smoke and the supposed epicenter of the siren chorus. Helicopters joined in on the cacophony, and my running took on the stride of a man with purpose.

The scene was something I had experienced hundreds of times in television and movies: the shaking frame of vision darting around to a burning car, the smoke, helicopters saturating the air. The destination of emergency vehicles was no longer the subject of idle speculation, they were going the same way I was. I was there, I was a part of it, I was on the scene.

It was twenty minutes since I had hung up the phone with Shannon. Our bellies were pressed against the flimsy barrier of a yellow ribbon, like runners reluctant to finish the race. Within minutes a group collected behind us, and the scene below seemed to stay static. Laid across the river was a small archipelago of cracked black volcanic rock isles covered in uneven fissures. On their surfaces were as many automobiles as they could contain, with some half sunk off its shores. Small figures came to it in boats with red stripes across them and flashing lights on top, drawing other figures onto the boats. The island chain’s narrow ends were bordered by slanting walls, half-carried by a green tangle of girders that still exhaled a faint mist of dust into the still summer air, beaten with props and sirens. Here, six blocks from the Metrodome, I witnessed a scene that combined the distant, silent movements of baseball players across a field in the unsettling scene of a disaster film.

I have always thought it is a sad thing when someone sees something with their own eyes, and then say that it looks like it is out of a movie.

A film crew was now also behind us on the grass beside the parkway that ended right there. The curious things that populate television disaster coverage came out of the woodwork when the business pantskirt woman was given her microphone: a shirtless, tattooed white man with few teeth making onomatopoetic sounds to describe the event, a single man with a minor head injury shaking his head, and weeping women with a hand over their mouth. They’re all saying that they can’t believe it. They can’t believe it.

In the second week of ninth grade I sat in English class, and the lesson was disrupted. We spent the rest of the day looking at the television, with the same basic elements: fire, dust, smoke, tangles of metal, and the people on the street saying they couldn’t believe it, they couldn’t believe it.

That event belonged to that island first, and to the rest of the country second.
This was here, and we were making it ours.

Local identity and the hypothetical dispersed through the crowd. I use that bridge everyday, we said. I was just there an hour ago! We repeated: I can’t believe it! That could have been me, we concluded. I knew I must have driven on it that week to get to a house party, which seemed a trivial thing from a distant and innocent time. We took pictures, stood smoking, shaking our heads and reassuring people over telephones. As the sun set, Leland, Joelle, and I left for my apartment. The parking area that we had just two hours ago been the only occupants of was now packed to the brim, and escaping it involved difficult maneuvering. All the radio stations now spoke in somber voices about death tolls, press conferences, and not believing it. Not here. This kind of thing doesn’t happen in Minneapolis.

At the apartment, we looked online for second and third hand accounts of what we had just seen with our own eyes. Framed in a CNN dot com breaking news exclusive, with an aerial photograph, I began to believe it.

Gabe came by on his bike, and Joelle had left. He watched from the bridge I had parked under, and he described the same situation we had on both sides of the rails: the unbelievable spectacle and the crowded unbelievers. To commemorate the event, we pooled crumpled dollar bills and gave them to Gabe to buy the cheapest bottle of liquor that could satisfy three young men. A line about needing to be drunk in the wake of a sobering event like that bounced around, but failed to gain poignancy.

He returned with a dented plastic bottle of Phillips Vodka, a seven dollar remedy. A pan of cherry Jell-o scooped by hand barely helped the tonic reach our stomach. We recounted the events to each other and to others on the phone. More fantastic accounts were constructed and our involved with the disaster increased over the evening’s progression. Leland stood on a table and shouted: “Survivors!”

I do know that soon after witnessing the disaster that we, and the people around us, had become what were effectively disaster groupies. We heard exaggerated accounts of the event and people’s involvement, and knew that things like this would continue for a good long time. There is an idea among my group of friends that nearly everyone in Minnesota can link themselves to actor Josh Hartnett, and do so whenever he is brought up in conversation. Though Minneapolis certainly isn’t the middle of nowhere by any stretch, many people attribute this forced association to the desire for a life beyond what they see as uneventful and tragically Midwestern. Towards the bottom of the bottle, the facetious statements about our exaggerated involvement became indiscernible with our genuine, excited shock and unease. The frigid, conditioned apartment air seemed too far from what came to solely occupy our minds. It was three AM. We had to get out.

My apartment is a mile downriver of the bridge, and lies on the last road before the lower river side road near the banks. A short, winding walk took us to the original bridge we went to and only saw smoke. The smoke had been replaced by a glow on the horizon obscured largely by university buildings. Rescue efforts were continuing, and no complete body count had been drafted. We continued across the bridge, and looked at the wooden staircase leading to the river’s bank. Our stumbling momentum as enough to cross this strange precipice, but luckily not so much as to have us fall down the steps. In the descent we left the pavement and streetlights behind, and they now took their place overhead as the new constellations and clouds in the silhouetted forest at the edge of the river, weakly reflecting all of this.

We approached the river, and stood silent between the sand and the hardy prairie grass that lined the shore for a moment. The great bisector of the nation, to which all water poured for hundreds of miles onto the ground will return, became to our few drunken number a magic and powerful thing. With liquor in our hearts, we waxed poetic and spiritual. We spoke about the ghosts that the river must contain from hundreds of years of sinking ships, floods, and collapsing structures. As we took off our shoes and socks and rolled up our pant legs, I spoke about Siddhartha and his examination of the river while achieving enlightenment. It occurred to me as I was speaking that the level of absurdity I had just reached was appropriate for what was about to occur.

We stepped into the river.

It was cold. Even in the middle of the summer, the water, sand, and smooth rocks all around stung. We continued walking slowly towards the center. Ten paces in, the water nipped our groins, and we took our last step placing the surface at our waist. The procession was noisy, we were raucously loud about the retraction of our testicles into our body and about the fear of floating corpses and the diseases they bring. This threatened the spiritual legitimacy, so I, telephone in hand; I called my sister who was usually up that late. Already confused to get a call from me, especially at that hour, she became extremely confused when I asked her to recite The Lord’s Prayer on speakerphone for our benefit. She asked why, and I simply told her that we were drunk in the river and that she should know it because she was baptized Catholic less than ten years ago where I was not. She recited each line, and we repeated after her.
I am ashamed now to admit the level of satisfaction I got from this. I’d been so long disapproving and disconnected from ritual and spirits, and it took only the deaths of thirteen people and another kind of spirit to give me self-satisfaction and an air of importance that day.
When we reached the shore again, we saw a boat traveling upriver with searchlights prodding the darkness across the river’s jet-like surface and the length of the shore on our side. It was on its way to search for bodies in the water and on the shore, and we, the living, hid in the thick, cracking prairie grass to avoid detection. It passed us by as we lay flat like corpses in a blind. We had become intimate with the event, but we had no desire to become significantly involved.
Somewhat sobered by the icy wade and alleged poignancy of what we had just done, we walked home damp, tired, satisfied, and important.


We had successfully commandeered a tragedy.