Tag: tower

A Fever of Stingrays

I just heard on the radio that a group of stingrays is called a “fever”. I don’t know why, but that just makes me really happy. I love how creative our language can be.

But it makes you wonder, who got to decide the “official” name for each grouping of animals? Was it a person? A committee? If so, that had to be the most delightful job in the world. (I think that’s the only occupation that’s cooler than my own.)

I can just imagine some people sitting around a table in silence, and then one of them perks up and says, “I know! Let’s call it a Tower of Giraffes!”

After general chuckling, someone else says, “Motion carried!”

Brilliant. And it’s quite obvious that this person or group had a lovely sense of humor. How else would they come up with a Confusion of Guinea Fowl or an Intrusion of Cockroaches? How about a Rhumba of Rattlesnakes? A Wisdom of Wombats?

I feel like jumping on the bandwagon, so I am coining a phrase that I can’t seem to find anywhere on the internet. Let it be known throughout the land that henceforth a group of Bloggers shall be called a Rambling.

A Rambling of Bloggers. Yup. I quite like that.

stingray

Advertisement

The Eye of the Beholder

The other day a dear friend pointed out to me that the bridge tower I work in is basically the aesthetic equivalent of a concrete bunker, and the green and rusted girders make the bridge itself rather ugly.

That really took me by surprise (and even hurt my feelings for a hot second). I had never looked at it that way. To me, my bridge is gorgeous. I suppose this is how mothers of unattractive children feel. Yes, my baby may be butt-ugly to you, but he’s the most beautiful thing on earth to me.

I know every bolt and girder on this bridge intimately. When something goes wrong with it I can feel it in my bones. I climb amongst its greasy moving parts. I know every creak and groan it makes while moving. I sway with it when a heavy truck travels past. At night, the sparks from the passing trolleys cast a silvery glow upon my skin.

And yes, the room I spend the bulk of my time in isn’t particularly large, but its four walls don’t limit me. After gazing at this view for so long, the horizon is my boundary. My sense of place extends from the Cascade Mountains to the far shore of Lake Union. It is the deep blue canal and the dome of the sky. I have the most beautiful workplace in all of Seattle. Fortune 500 companies would pay millions for a view like this.

And I’ll never get over my amazement at how gracefully such a huge object can move. Every drawbridge is a miracle of engineering. Every drawbridge is a work of art.

While I am grateful for the insight that not everyone sees my bridge the way I do, I will always be proud to know that I am this bridge’s protector, its maintainer. I keep it safe.

In exchange it provides me with a way to support myself, literally and figuratively, and a place of blessed solitude where I can muse and write and dream. It’s one of my most intimate relationships. That means it will forever be a thing of beauty to me.

IMG_1276.JPG

 

My Career from Above

I’ve been opening drawbridges since September of 2001, and I love it. I’ve opened 9 different bridges in three different states. I only know one other bridgetender with better statistics than that, so I’m kind of proud.

I’ve been going down memory lane quite a bit lately, so I decided to check out all my bridges on Google Maps. Ah, what memories.

Mainstreet from the sky
Main Street Bridge, Jacksonville, Florida

My first bridge was Main Street Bridge in Jacksonville, Florida. That’s the only lift bridge I’ve operated to date, and it was kind of fun. It’s like being on the world’s biggest elevator. The tenderhouse was suspended about 25 feet above the roadway and it would rise with the bridge. It would also shake and sway when traffic was going over the bridge. I’ll never forget the sound of all our padlocks clanking on our lockers.

The down side to working on this bridge is that they required three bridgetenders per shift because the court ordered it after a drunken sailor drove his car into the drink when the bridge was open. So two bridgetenders spent a lot of time climbing up and down the ladder to act as flagmen at street level during openings. Quite the workout. This three person operation meant that you had to sit in a little room with two other people for 8 hours. That was fine when you got along, but when you didn’t, it was hell. Some of the drama and foolishness that happened up there could constitute a blog all its own.

Ortega from the sky
Ortega River Bridge, Jacksonville, Florida

From there I went to the Ortega River Bridge in Jacksonville. I loved that little bridge. It was a one person operation, but the tenderhouse was smaller than your average walk in closet, so a lot of people couldn’t take it. You had to step outside to change your mind. But it suited me just fine. I liked that I was sitting on sidewalk level, so I got to know a lot of the people in the area. You sort of felt as though you were part of a community. The downside was the bathroom was across the street, which was no fun in the pouring rain or the bitter cold. (Yes, it does happen sometimes in North Florida, believe it or not.)

Eventually, though, the horrible pay and the worse benefits started to get to me, so I decided to go back to school for a third degree. Part of that time I still worked at Ortega. Then for a brief period I moved to South Florida to be closer to school. But even then, bridgetending was in my blood. My employer asked me if I’d like to go spend the summer working the Ben Sawyer drawbridge just outside of Charleston, South Carolina.

Ben Sawyer from the Sky
Ben Sawyer Bridge, Mount Pleasant, South Carolina

I jumped at the chance! I’d never been to Charleston, so when I wasn’t pulling a 12 hour shift on that bridge, I was exploring the city. What an amazing place! And what an amazing bridge! It’s the first time I operated a swing bridge, and the octagonal tenderhouse was right at the pivot, so when you did a bridge opening, it was such a smooth operation that it felt as if you were standing still, and the world was revolving around you. (Finally, some vindication in that belief!) I loved that bridge. I miss it. But it was only a temporary job, and alas, school was calling.

Once I got my third degree, it became painfully obvious that it was going to be as useless as the first two, so I came crawling back to Jacksonville with my tail between my legs and begged for my old job back. Fortunately I had left on good terms, and I was back working at Ortega River Bridge in no time. I also worked a few days a week at Sisters Creek Bridge.

SistersCreek from the Sky
Sisters Creek Bridge, Jacksonville, Florida

This drawbridge no longer exists. It was replaced by a flyover, and that’s a shame because it was a nice quiet bridge. It spanned the Intracoastal Waterway way out in the middle of nowhere, north of Jacksonville, so mostly you opened for barges and the like. But I really got to focus on nature out there, and found a great deal of peace. The only negative thing about that bridge was the long commute.

The horrible pay was killing me, though, so when I heard of a job opening here in Seattle, Washington, for 3 times the pay and more benefits than I know what to do with, I jumped at the chance. Westward ho!

Fremont from the Sky
Fremont Bridge, Seattle, Washington

When you are a bridge operator for the City of Seattle, you get trained on all 5 of their bridges. So I was trained on the Fremont Bridge, which is the most stressful bridge I’ve ever worked on because pedestrians and bicyclists take scary risks, and it opens quite a bit.

Ballard from the sky
Ballard Bridge, Seattle, Washington

And I also trained on Ballard Bridge. I love that bridge because you get to watch the locks, the commute is short for me, and the view is a delight, but walking to your car at night can be scary.

spokaneStfromthesky
Spokane Street Bridge, Seattle, Washington

And I trained on Spokane Street Bridge as well. That’s a very unique swing bridge, and the tenderhouse (here they call it the tower) is so high up you practically get a nosebleed. It’s the only bridge I’ve ever been in that has an elevator. It’s a complicated bridge to operate. I haven’t been there in so long that I’m not sure I’d remember how to do it.

But now, the two bridges I work most often are South Park Bridge—which is state of the art, but a very long commute…

SouthParkfrom the sky
South Park Bridge, Seattle, Washington

… and University Bridge, which I absolutely love. I love the neighborhood, the community, the view, the tower, and it’s busy enough to keep me interested, but not so busy that I get stressed out.

UNI From the Sky
University Bridge, Seattle, Washington

So the next time Google takes its satellite imagery, maybe I’ll pop my head out the window and wave. It’s pretty cool to look at all these places from the sky. I can imagine a little tiny me sitting inside, making the bridge safe for the traveling public. I have a lot of great memories.

Bridgetender [sic]

Recently someone quoted my WordPress blog tag line like so: “The random musings of a bridgetender [sic] with entirely too much time on her hands.” For the uninitiated, “sic” is basically latin for “Okay, I’m writing it this way because it’s a direct quote, dude, but it’s WRONG.” I wanted to scream when I saw that sic. I’ve been fighting this battle for over a decade.

It’s true, bridgetender cannot be found in any dictionary. But neither can bridge tender. I’ve brought that up to the people at Oxford English Dictionary and gotten no response. Because most people don’t think about us. We don’t exist, except when we cause a delay in your commute. Then we’re reviled.

It’s time that this situation be rectified, so I’m going to do it right here and now. It’s bridgetender. One word. No hyphen. Just like bartender. For that matter, just like drawbridge. Historically, words make it into the Oxford English Dictionary, and then on to other general usage dictionaries, because they’ve been used. Words don’t get used because they’re in the dictionary. Well this is me using the word bridgetender, just as I have for the past 13 years.

And now let’s put it in the proper emotional context, shall we? In the Western US, people who do my line of work call themselves bridge operators, and scoff at the term bridgetender as if that would make them some sort of second class citizen. I find this to be absurd. On any given shift, I may only actually “operate” the bridge for 15 minutes. What would that make me the rest of the time?

Oh, and the building we sit in? That’s the tenderhouse. Again, no space, no hyphen. These silly Westerners call it the tower. But then how do you explain the fact that some “towers” are at ground level? Whatever.

I’m a bridgetender, and I work in a tenderhouse. I’m proud of it, and it’s high time we got some grammatical recognition for the work that we do. Can you hear me, OED? We’ve been around since at least the Middle Ages, for Pete’s sake! Recognize us!

A drawbridge over a moat to a castle.

[Image credit: marvimarti.com]