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Fascinating Pride
On my recent drive across country I found myself in the middle of nowhere, South Dakota when it was time to stop for the night. Fortunately I’m quite the planner, so I had already made reservations. Where else would a drawbridge operator stay but at a motel called A Bridge View Inn? The website made…
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Sympathy vs. Empathy
The other day I witnessed something awful. I was working on the Fremont Bridge here in Seattle. It’s 30 feet off the water. Right next to it is the Aurora Bridge, which is 170 feet off the water. Before they put up the higher railing on the Aurora Bridge, the only bridge in the world…
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Throw Me a Bone
I just finished training on the University Drawbridge. That’s two Seattle bridges under my belt. So if you count the three bridges I was qualified on in Jacksonville, Florida and the one in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, that’s 6 bridges I’ve operated, and that includes all three main types of bridge (bascule, lift, and swing).…
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Drawbridge Tao
People can take it very personally when you interrupt their morning commute. Even though the average drawbridge opening takes only 4 minutes from start to finish and they should know to allow for the fact that their route crosses a drawbridge, when those red lights start to flash and that bell starts to clang, people…
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Drawbridge Style
It has been my privilege to be one of the few bridgetenders on the planet to have had the opportunity to operate all three of the most common styles of drawbridges. So here is an extremely basic primer. This is a bascule bridge. These come in the form of a double span, like the…
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The Death of a Drawbridge
It’s official, and it doesn’t come as any great surprise for those of us who operate the Sisters Creek Drawbridge here in Jacksonville, Florida, but it will soon be going the way of the Dodo Bird. Construction will begin soon, and they anticipate that the fixed flyover bridge will be completed by the summer of…
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Portents of Summer
Summer is only a month away, but as usual here in Florida we get it early. People envy us, until the temperature tops 100 degrees Fahrenheit with 100 percent humidity. Then, not so much. (And I want to know how it’s possible to have 100 percent humidity without having rain. Could someone please explain that…
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Obsolete Jobs
Sometime within the next four years yet another of the drawbridges that I work on here in town will be replaced by a fixed span flyover bridge, thus putting quite a few bridgetenders out of work. Bridgetenders worldwide are becoming as rare as hen’s teeth. The only chance you have of any future in this…
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Gender-Specific Jobs? Pffft.
It happened again this morning. I was leaving the bridgetender house at the end of the shift, wearing my extremely unattractive uniform and safety vest, and someone drove by and looked at me in shock. Fashion police? I doubt it. For some reason some people don’t expect women to be bridgetenders, as if it takes…
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Bridge Nightmares
It happened again last night. I had the nightmare that never fails to make me sit straight up in bed, bathed in a cold sweat with tears flowing down my cheeks. Whew. That hasn’t happened in a while. Post Traumatic Stress is such a lovely experience. In this case it‘s caused by an incident several…