Steel Resolve
“If dreams are like movies then memories are films about ghosts
You can never escape, you can only move south down the coast.”
I wasn’t going to let it get to me. In fact, I had hardly even thought about it for most of the day until I had to plan my route from Andover to Oakdale in evening rush hour traffic to retrieve my souvenir from the 35W Bridge collapse. It would be just another errand, a stop at the bank, a gallon of milk from Kwik Trip.
But it wasn’t.
As Bubba and I pulled into the Minnesota Department of Transportation parking lot around 5:30 p.m., the KSTP news van parked near the entrance pulled the PTSD trigger. “Let’s go get dinner,” I said, craning my neck toward the toddler immersed in the iPad while strapped in the car seat. He didn’t look up, and he didn’t object.
We sat in a booth at McDonald’s as the clock struck 6 and the evening newscast began. It also just so happened to be the time of day when the bridge fell almost 73 months ago. We ate patiently. 6:15. 6:30. 6:45. “Let’s go,” I told my son, assuming with the news program over that the media had left the bridge debris graveyard. I wasn’t sure who trudged to the car more slowly – him or I.
We returned to the MnDOT facility. “In and out,” I thought as we slid from the car to the expansive metal shed that housed the corpse of the bridge. It large doors sat open, and the rust and green of the beams and other assorted parts burst against the off-white backdrop of the building’s walls.
I was struck by the fact that everyone there knew who I was, from the MnDOT representatives to others there collecting their artifacts. There were a few other bridge survivors among them that I knew. Small talk echoed through the tin shed. Cooper sat down and raked his pygmy fingers across the dirt floor.
One person planned to weld some of the metal into jewelry crosses. Another planned to take a section and make an end table. I planned to use pieces as show-and-tell for presentations. I was told to grab anything I wanted as long as I signed a waiver due to lead paint. (And here I thought the bridge was done impacting my health!) I really had no idea what to take. Before we left, a DOT official stopped me in the parking lot. “You’re Garrett, right?
“Yes,” I said. “This is Cooper, but we call him Bubba.”
“I just wanted to let you know that a co-worker of mine checked your book out at the library and I now have it. I plan to start reading it right away,” she remarked.
I sheepishly thanked her and said goodbye. I just wanted to get out of there and head for the sanctuary of home.
The feeling was surreal, which bothered me as Bubba and I drove away. I was at a rummage sale. And I was at a cemetery. What had I just held? A momento? A chunk of history? A piece of evil? A handful of junk? At that instant I felt broken again. All those pieces I had just laid eyes on – mangled, irreparable, twisted, permanent. How was I different, really, six years after the fact?
I know I – and so many others – have come a long way from that day. The proof was sitting behind me, kicking the passenger’s seat. Yet, I’m feeling sorrow tonight. Broken. Yep, it got me.
“Well there’s a piece of Maria in every song that I sing
And the price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings.”
– “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby,” Counting Crows
