Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

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  • Bascule, baby: In praise of bridges that move

    I really wanted to see the Johnson Street Bridge spanning Victoria Harbor raised. A massive steel thing going up in the air, smooth as thought. It’s saying “come on in” to the big boats, the tall-masted sailboats, the working tugs, the industrial, the commercial, the research vessels, sliding past at the harbor’s narrowest point.

    I’m a sucker for drawbridges and I blame that on Chicago and on Craig. Once, visiting the windy city in September, I learned that the 18 drawbridges spanning the Chicago River all rise up in the spring and in the fall to let the pleasure boats go out onto Lake Michigan and come back in for winter storage. These bridges sit low for ease of the downtown street traffic. Once Craig (spouse, best travel buddy, engineer and lover of infrastructure) learned there was a drawbridge museum in Chicago, we had to go. A museum’s where you get to stop and think about things you otherwise would never give a thought to and I began to think about drawbridge leaf weights, the weight of the part of the bridge that must be raised. Chicago’s Michigan Avenue drawbridge has a leaf weight of 4,100 tons. That’s over 9 million pounds, which to translate into a number I well know: 60,000 of me. Only made of steel. In Chicago that day, we had a good vantage point to watch what we thought would be a stately procession of sailing vessels coming in from the lake, bridges raised to let them through. Only one boat passed, holding up traffic, one bridge at a time, as it sailed up the Chicago River. I think sailors, being perpetually optimistic, figured they could wrangle a few more fine days on the windy lake.

    Here’s an interesting language tidbit: Bascule, the formal name for these kinds of bridges, comes from French and means “seesaw.”

    We didn’t get to see Victoria’s seesaw bridge (3,300 tons, 6 million pounds, 40,000 Susans) rise up while we were there. But we did learn, from one of the drivers of the water taxis that dart across the harbor (you can order them up via QR code from various docks around the city) that the locals call it the blue bridge because a previous iteration of it was painted blue (the color choice practical, the city had a ton of leftover blue paint from some other project). In honor of the previous paint color, the Johnson Bridge is lit up at night. In blue.

    We did take one of the little pickle boats (who knows why they call them that) that motored underneath, a mere speck on the water on a fine sunny afternoon in spring.

    Photos by Susan Palmer

  • Embedding in a field of blue

    I know these blossoms look lilac-y. That’s my dang phone camera. One of my genius photographer pals could fix it in a minute.

    Nevertheless.

    This is how you know spring isn’t kidding around in the Willamette Valley — it’s firmly settled in. Amazing meadows full of camas: think cerulean down here where you can touch it.

    This particular field is on the backside of College Hill in Eugene, just north of the Japanese immersion school on Lincoln Street.

    On a perfect blue-sky morning, it fills the heart.

    Camas bulbs were a meaningful food source for the Kalapuya, who harvested and preserved them. Oregon State University researchers have found evidence of the bulbs in Kalapuyan baking ovens going back 3,500 years.

    Don’t drive by and marvel as you go. You’ll forget what you saw in half a minute. Stop, get out, kneel beside one of these beauties. See the yellow stamens. Once you see that yellow, you’ll probably also see the tiny buttercups scattered here and there. All of that, you won’t forget.

  • Poems to go

    At the Eugene airport

    You push a button and a poem comes out on a long narrow paper like a grocery store receipt. The poem is by a self published minister. It is not a great poem. But it does rhyme. And it is a fine thing to have dispensed freely right after security.