Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

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 come down the river, bridges raised to let them through. Only one boat came through, 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) underneath, a mere speck on the water on a fine sunny afternoon in spring.

Photos by Susan Palmer