| |
|
|
 
HOUSTON, TX Eulogy for the Hazard Street Bridge
I miss my bridge. Okay, so it wasn't "my" bridge, technically, but I felt like we were friends, at least. I've lived on or near Highway 59 the entire time I've lived in Houston - it's hard to get away from, cutting diagonally through the city like a giant, pothole-ridden artery, angling from the northeast and downtown across to Sharpstown, Alief, and then Sugarland on the southwest edge. Roughly at the midway point, just one block east of Shepherd, one of the main north-south streets in the city, Hazard Street runs south from the run-down Shepherd Plaza area to the leafy streets on the edges of Rice University. The highway dips down right there, and the Hazard Street bridge spanned the gap, just a big, ugly bridge between the fancy houses where all the Rice professors live on the one side and the sometimes scary neighborhood of tattoo parlors and liquor stores on the other. The city tore all the bridges out a year and a half ago, now, closing off 59 in both directions and shutting off Hazard Street completely. Now, in the place of the Hazard bridge, sits another bridge - a fancier, newer, somehow soulless bridge. My bridge wasn't much to look at, I'll admit; there was graffiti, trash, and all the rest all over it, and it was just a big hunk of concrete that stretched across a busy freeway. It was in pretty bad shape as well, as I learned one morning when a tractor-trailer ahead of me actually hit the bridge, knocking a football-sized chunk of concrete right onto my windshield. The powers that be had installed some beaten-up chain-link fencing on the sides, probably to keep people from jumping off. I can't count the number of times I drove beneath, heading toward downtown on 59, and saw a banner tied to that fence, proclaiming somebody's love for Jana or wishing Tommy a happy birthday. That doesn't happen with the new bridge, though; the way they've built the fences, you can't tie anything to the wire, and I'm not sure anybody would, even if they could. It's new, almost antiseptic in its cleanliness, like a brand-new car still sitting on the lot, unused. Some audacious graffiti artist has already hit the new lights that now line 59, but nobody seems brave enough to do anything like that to the bridge itself. It feels like it's off-limits. These days, I don't pass that way very often - the roads are all open, finally, but I'm so used to the bridges being closed that I just go around, out of habit. Occasionally, though, I drive by, or under, and look up at the grand, smooth metal span of the new bridge, with the walkway on either side that's actually wide enough for more than one person at a time and not full of broken bottles, and the huge red balls that make me think of video game joysticks at either end, and I feel like something's missing. Like I said, the bridge wasn't mine, but over the years it had become a friend. I moved down near Rice University and the Medical Center a year after graduation, just before my life hit pretty much rock bottom. My most recent girlfriend had dumped me, I felt stuck in a dead-end job that required a half-hour commute from home, and most of my friends from college had moved off to places like Portland or Boston. My life had settled into that horrible routine of waking up, rushing to work, feeling miserable all day long, making the long drive home, and then watching television till I fell asleep, only to wake up the next morning and having to do it all over again. It was a bad time. I lived barely ten blocks south of 59, and on nights when I'd feel depressed, melancholy, or just plain lost in the world, I'd take a walk, and no matter what direction I went, I always seemed to end up standing on the Hazard bridge, looking out to the west. That was the best part: if you picked the right spot, you could stand literally on the median - on top of it, really - between the eastbound and westbound lanes, watching the headlights and taillights rush both towards and away from you. It was one of the most beautiful things in the world to me, the kind of sight you normally only see in staged, arty photographs. I would squint my eyes until the lights all blurred together into streams of yellow and red, each one flowing past the other. And I knew, because I drove home from work on 59 every evening, that nobody in the cars rushing by below could see me, standing up there against the black sky. I felt like an invisible, detached observer, like some sort of otherworldly spirit, just taking everything in and adding it all up. I felt safe. Naturally, time moved on, and the city officials and people from the Texas Department of Transportation decided that 59 needed to be widened, and the bridges improved (and it's true, again, that they weren't in the greatest shape). The workmen carved about twenty feet from people's back yards on either side of the highway, ripped up that spooky old abandoned strip of railroad track that ran east from behind the comic book shop on Shepherd just south of the freeway, and then they blew the bridges one night when nobody was on the road. I didn't even realize it had happened for a while, because I had just moved, myself, shifting across town, up to Montrose, the arty, gay-nightclub district on the edge of downtown where all of Houston's young professionals seemed to want to live, on the edge of downtown. By the time I happened to wander down near the Shepherd/59 underpass, running an errand or something, it was all over. It was the end of an era, both for me and for the bridge. Time to move on. The funny thing, though, is that the bridge figured into my life even in the transition. Time passed, I met a wonderful girl who would a year later become my wife (hence the move to Montrose), and one afternoon we took a walk down by where I used to live, by 59, and it turned out that she had lived near there, too, right about the time that I had first moved to the area. I started to tell her about my late-night walks to the bridge, and about watching the river of lights flow beneath me, and she laughed and told me that she'd done the exact same thing. She had walked her dog down across one of the 59 bridges - not my bridge, but the next one, at Woodhead, an identical strip of concrete just one street east that had suffered the same fate as the rest - many times when she lived near there, and had stood in that same perfect middle spot, with roaring streams of cars going in either direction. We never met, not until years later, but there were probably nights when we passed one another in the dark. I wonder how differently those years might have gone, if only I'd looked the other direction one night, east instead of west, and caught a glimpse of that girl with the dog, a vague reflection of myself barely a bridge away. 
|
|
|
