Bridge Over Troubled Water

 Week Eleven: Bridge Over Troubled Water

When you’re weary

Feeling small

When tears are in your eyes

I will dry them all

I'm on your side.

Oh, when darkness comes

And pain is all around

Like a bridge over troubled water

I will lay me down…

Like a bridge over troubled water

I will ease your mind.

—Simon and Garfunkle, Bridge Over Troubled Water, 

from the album of the same name

(Note: I have several favorite stations on Sirius XM radio. I tend to listen to rock and roll, classic rock, blues, and R&B/soul music. Recently I’ve used a station that advertises itself as soft rock of the 60’s and folk rock of the 70’s. 

The channel’s name is The Bridge.

For reasons that go scarily past coincidence or irony, this Simon and Garfunkle masterpiece all but demanded that I address the recent tragic loss of life in the water of the Port of Baltimore.)

Unless you count the repeated nocturnal visits by my dear, departed mother, I can think of three recurring dreams. All three are unpleasant, but one of them truly frightened me for years. Although I cannot remember when I last dreamt any of them, on Tuesday March 26, 2024 my nightmare came true in the Baltimore harbor.

Two of the three recurring dreams are not so bad. I sometimes dream that I am in a play, which is not so unrealistic as I have actually been in many. In my recurring dreams the play is never identified, but in every case I cannot remember my lines or my cues. The panic-stricken me grows increasingly stressed until the angst becomes so great that I wake up. Another dream I’ve had many times finds me leading off first in a baseball game. As the pitcher throws over to “pick me off” I am unable to return to the base safely. In fact, I am unable to move, as hard as I struggle, I cannot move. In both dreams I am unable to act when the moment of truth arrives, and both seem to reflect my deep-seated fear that I won’t respond when such moments happen in  reality.

The third recurring dream was my childhood terror. I say ‘was’ because until last Tuesday I rarely even thought of how often I had drowned in my sleep. In my dream I walked along a very tall metal bridge—until I didn’t. In every case the bridge would collapse, and I would free fall toward the water below. In every case when I struck the water I would continue to fall through the water at the same speed as I entered it. The difference, of course, was that I could no longer breathe. (I sometimes wonder if my almost clinical fear of heights was instigated somehow by these nightmares.)

———

On Tuesday 26 March 2024 as I greeted my wife who was already in the living room, she asked me if I saw a text from our son-in-law. I opened my phone and found this: The Key Bridge was struck by a container ship and the entire bridge has collapsed into the water. His message also included a video of the collision and the collapse. We could see several vehicles that appeared to cross successfully before disaster struck. As it turned out, a quick-thinking supervisor halted traffic and no pedestrian vehicles and their occupants were lost. The same cannot be said for eight employees of the Port Authority who were on the bridge when the ship hit it. Unlike two of their colleagues who somehow survived the fall and the water and were rescued, six people lived my nightmare.

———

For me, not being prepared on stage, not being able to react in a baseball game, or suffocating as I “fell” while I drowned all ended with a scared, breathless little boy staring into the darkness of his bedroom. For Alejandro Fuentes and Dorlian Cabrera, two men trapped in their red pick-up truck as it sank into the dark water, the nightmare was short-lived. Their terror is ineffable.

As brave recovery workers search for Miguel Luna and Maynor Sandoval I can only hope they died in the fall. There are also two other yet unidentified victims of this accident. My hope for them is the same. 

As I rode along hearing the words to the song Bridge Over Troubled Water the memory of my childhood struggle with a tall metal bridge that tormented my sleep came flooding back. Funny though, it’s a song about providing comfort, a song about reassurance that when tears are in your eyes, I will dry them all. Funny how a song that is not about an actual bridge can easily make me think of one. Even the one that woke me up countless times.

The iconic Francis Scott Key Bridge is no more, and the people of Baltimore will feel the effects for a while, but the families of all the folks who did not survive will suffer indefinitely. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G-YQA_bsOU