The Bridges of Manchester County
"She always expects
surprise, even here, in the
rows of corn and wheat"
-- Cade, "City of Bridges: A Postcard from Saskatoon"
I have a thing for bridges. I'm not entirely sure why - somehow they have the suggestion of power about them, of standing against something [who knows what? gravity, perhaps, or the elements], of being tall and proud and indomitable. One of the images from Atlas Shrugged that moved me most was the picture of Nat Taggart standing alone and abandonned at sunset, still building his bridge - bridge-builders are great people, I think. There is something rooted in defiance at the core of people like that, people doing the impossible for the ungrateful and the unknowing, people who make connections and forge links. Craftsmen and visionaries share much the same set of tools, I think.
I came across the haiku at the beginning of the entry a couple of years ago, and was immensely moved. My mother comes from Saskatoon, and everything about our holiday visits leads me to agree with the writer wholeheartedly: it is a simple, unassuming prairie city after the old fashion of small, remote Canadian frontier towns, and yet - and yet, you can never be quite sure what you will find. She's quite correct in calling it the 'City of Bridges', too - seven major crossings in a city of just over 200,000 is impressive, and a little bizarre. There is one in particular that holds a place in my heart, the Grand Trunk Bridge on the corner of Sapadina and Power - built in 1907/8, it's a grand old steel-trestled train bridge that straddles the river at its widest point, just south of the city proper. Let me tell you: there is very little better than sitting out on a hot Canadian summer day above the river, legs swinging into space, with a notebook and a pen, completely lost to the world. It is [something I have yet to use it for - oneday!] the perfect spot for a romantic post-dinner evening, sat watching the sun go down over the river, talking about everything and nothing. It is inseperably entwined in my head with perfect hot summers and the endless sweep of the prairies, golden and dusty and beautifully simple. Some things never leave you.
Manchester isn't particularly famous for its bridges - no Golden Gate, no Grand Trunk - just a few functional stone and brick pieces here and there. There's still a certain mystique to some of them, however, as I discovered last night.
Stag parties are not my natural habitat, I'll be honest. I am bad at partying: I have a low tolerance for alcohol, no 'and-then-she-took-it-off-and-she-was-a-MAN!' stories to tell, and roughly zero desire to bring anyone [male or female] from Manchester town home with me. As depressingly cliched as it is, I am far more comfortable curled up with a good book, or at the very least drinking whiskey with a few people I actually know. Crowds of strangers don't scare me like they would have done a few years ago, but they don't excite me either - they just make me feel old and cynical.
As I made my excuses for the second half of the night's revelries and started the hour-long walk home [because the only thing worse than the city centre on a saturday night is the bus leaving it] I did what I do as a defence against the crowds of people hell-bent on seduction and sex, the desperate and the unthinking and the unstable and the whole unpalatable explosion of people's hopelessness and willful ignorance - I set out walking in one direction, any direction, and I kept going until I felt like I could think straight again.
A few miles out of the town centre, down Deansgate and nearly to the motorway, there's a quiet stretch of road the branches out over one of Manchester's innumerable tiny rivers - the bridge that holds it up is fairly recent, probably only a couple of decades old, a classic '80s brick ediface, solid and squat and unimposing. The guardwall is about seven feet high and a foot or two thick, all solid, slightly blackened bricks. Sitting on the top of it, staring out over the sluggish riverlet and the Saturday night revelries going on behind it, I sat there and tried to figure out how I feel about my city. And it is my city, as these things go: thirteen years of my life this summer I will have lived here, including the year I was born; as much as I might identify very strongly with wide-open prairies and the Rocky Mountains [and I do - they are a part of my bones and my blood and if I am away from them too long, those deep and tightly-knit features make themselves known, to my immense spiritual discomfort] there is nowhere else that I can call home in quite the same way I call Manchester home. Let me be very clear: there are plenty of times I wish it wasn't so, but I'm not one of those people who believes you can change where home is just by moving - if you run away, you will have to deal with that struggle sooner or later.
What I thought, looking out on the explosion of blue neon and breathing in the strong, heady smell from the profusion of honeysuckle growing wild all along the banks, was that I hate this place with a passion. It feels like such a natural reaction. Every morning I catch the bus into the centre of town to work, and it strikes me over and over again: the hundredweight of bitter, angry people covering every inch of pavement, snapping into mobile phones with their cigarettes dangling unsmoked, burning their fingers; people's faces are twisted into their public face, their city face, eyes downcast and features set in a neutral, formless expression that says don't notice me, don't talk to me, don't hurt me, don't make my day and more stressful and painful than it already is; the tramps who swear at you when you tell them you don't have any change, the mobile phone salesman and charity workers and public survey monkeys out in droves for your time, your money, your opinion, things they seem to believe inexplicably that they have a right to - when I want to give you my point-of-view, lady, you'll know it, believe me. And coming home at night, exhausted and bone-weary from eight or nine hours of dealing with the whole coffee-drinking, sugar-eating, hyped-up and downtrodden mass of English humanity, it's all the same: middle-aged women with so many shopping bags I'm surprised they don't have a little hired slave to carry it all around with them; teenage girls in layers of makeup shrieking aimless words across the city's squares, boys who don't know what it means to grow-up trying to hard to be men, laughing too quickly and too loudly, instantly in your face and up close and looking for trouble - I've broken a man's skull with a baseball bat, I said to one punk, quietly and with the perfect East-coast accent, I've put a bowie knife through a man's wrist and skewered it to the wall, stood there and laughed while he ripped one of his fingers off trying to get it free. I've put a bullet through a man's eye and felt his blood on my face. What do you want? He must have seen something he didn't like. He left without laughing. Afterward, sitting on the bus and shaking slightly, I thought, "what on earth possesses a sane person to say a thing like that?" I was a little younger then, than I am now. Perhaps that contributed, in some way, to my growing up.
There is a place out on the edge of Northenden, along the Mersey close to where I used to go to school, called Simon's Bridge. It's a little footpath that runs along by the water, little more than a glorified stream at that point, and over an old cast-iron trestle, rusting and slightly green with age. People walk their dogs down through the nearby fields - kids go to make out or smoke weed, whichever vice is more attractive at the time. But at dusk, just before dark and with what little sun the clouds have allowed in lighting up the river, it is quiet and usually abandonned. If you have someone with you, you can play Pooh Sticks, dropping twigs and branches over the one side and spinning around quickly to see which makes it out of sight first - if you are alone, the top of the old, worn abundments makes for a good place to sit and think for a while. I used to go there very occasionally when I lived closer, if I needed some time to myself and my feet happened to take me that way. Now, I'm further away. Things are a little less peaceful out here: the constant wailing of police sirens, the rough barking of stray dogs out in the alleyway, the roars and howls of the lower-middle class creating drama to make their lives interesting. I ought not to complain, of all the ills in the world, of not having a bridge nearby to sit on. But if I am to hate this city a little less, it is important to focus less on its faults, and more on its... inconsistancies. Little victories.
Really, what I think of this place matters very little in the grand scheme of things, or in any smaller schemes for that matter. Manchester will take no note of the boy who dreams of Saskatoon's railway bridge. I live here because there are things and people that I love and because [as much as a rail against the fact sometimes] if I am ever to escape this place - and that is an if - I have some reconciling to do.
The nature of a city is tied to the nature of its people, past and present, and also vice-versa. I can only imagine as much as we try to change this place, hopefully for the better, that as Nietzsche put it, he who battles with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster; when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. It is a quote that applies to a lot of situations. Who am I to tell people how to live?
"Past the derelict mattress
and the overgrown pavement
over the tracks
and through the hole in the fence
Past graffiti-bright buildings
and the junkyard alarm bell
and the screaming police cars
and it's all present tense
It's my beat
In my new town
Past the drunk woman reeling
with her bag of provisions
Down through the tunnel
with the stink-fuming bus
On to the bike path
where it's something like freedom
and the wind in my earring whispers
Trust what you must
It's my beat
In my new town
Ancient and always
The wheel's ever whirling
Today I'm riding
Tomorrow I walk
Step through forever
into this very moment
The heart is pumping
and the heart rocks
It's my beat
In my new town."
-- Bruce Cockburn, "My Beat"
surprise, even here, in the
rows of corn and wheat"
-- Cade, "City of Bridges: A Postcard from Saskatoon"
I have a thing for bridges. I'm not entirely sure why - somehow they have the suggestion of power about them, of standing against something [who knows what? gravity, perhaps, or the elements], of being tall and proud and indomitable. One of the images from Atlas Shrugged that moved me most was the picture of Nat Taggart standing alone and abandonned at sunset, still building his bridge - bridge-builders are great people, I think. There is something rooted in defiance at the core of people like that, people doing the impossible for the ungrateful and the unknowing, people who make connections and forge links. Craftsmen and visionaries share much the same set of tools, I think.
I came across the haiku at the beginning of the entry a couple of years ago, and was immensely moved. My mother comes from Saskatoon, and everything about our holiday visits leads me to agree with the writer wholeheartedly: it is a simple, unassuming prairie city after the old fashion of small, remote Canadian frontier towns, and yet - and yet, you can never be quite sure what you will find. She's quite correct in calling it the 'City of Bridges', too - seven major crossings in a city of just over 200,000 is impressive, and a little bizarre. There is one in particular that holds a place in my heart, the Grand Trunk Bridge on the corner of Sapadina and Power - built in 1907/8, it's a grand old steel-trestled train bridge that straddles the river at its widest point, just south of the city proper. Let me tell you: there is very little better than sitting out on a hot Canadian summer day above the river, legs swinging into space, with a notebook and a pen, completely lost to the world. It is [something I have yet to use it for - oneday!] the perfect spot for a romantic post-dinner evening, sat watching the sun go down over the river, talking about everything and nothing. It is inseperably entwined in my head with perfect hot summers and the endless sweep of the prairies, golden and dusty and beautifully simple. Some things never leave you.
Manchester isn't particularly famous for its bridges - no Golden Gate, no Grand Trunk - just a few functional stone and brick pieces here and there. There's still a certain mystique to some of them, however, as I discovered last night.
Stag parties are not my natural habitat, I'll be honest. I am bad at partying: I have a low tolerance for alcohol, no 'and-then-she-took-it-off-and-she-was-a-MAN!' stories to tell, and roughly zero desire to bring anyone [male or female] from Manchester town home with me. As depressingly cliched as it is, I am far more comfortable curled up with a good book, or at the very least drinking whiskey with a few people I actually know. Crowds of strangers don't scare me like they would have done a few years ago, but they don't excite me either - they just make me feel old and cynical.
As I made my excuses for the second half of the night's revelries and started the hour-long walk home [because the only thing worse than the city centre on a saturday night is the bus leaving it] I did what I do as a defence against the crowds of people hell-bent on seduction and sex, the desperate and the unthinking and the unstable and the whole unpalatable explosion of people's hopelessness and willful ignorance - I set out walking in one direction, any direction, and I kept going until I felt like I could think straight again.
A few miles out of the town centre, down Deansgate and nearly to the motorway, there's a quiet stretch of road the branches out over one of Manchester's innumerable tiny rivers - the bridge that holds it up is fairly recent, probably only a couple of decades old, a classic '80s brick ediface, solid and squat and unimposing. The guardwall is about seven feet high and a foot or two thick, all solid, slightly blackened bricks. Sitting on the top of it, staring out over the sluggish riverlet and the Saturday night revelries going on behind it, I sat there and tried to figure out how I feel about my city. And it is my city, as these things go: thirteen years of my life this summer I will have lived here, including the year I was born; as much as I might identify very strongly with wide-open prairies and the Rocky Mountains [and I do - they are a part of my bones and my blood and if I am away from them too long, those deep and tightly-knit features make themselves known, to my immense spiritual discomfort] there is nowhere else that I can call home in quite the same way I call Manchester home. Let me be very clear: there are plenty of times I wish it wasn't so, but I'm not one of those people who believes you can change where home is just by moving - if you run away, you will have to deal with that struggle sooner or later.
What I thought, looking out on the explosion of blue neon and breathing in the strong, heady smell from the profusion of honeysuckle growing wild all along the banks, was that I hate this place with a passion. It feels like such a natural reaction. Every morning I catch the bus into the centre of town to work, and it strikes me over and over again: the hundredweight of bitter, angry people covering every inch of pavement, snapping into mobile phones with their cigarettes dangling unsmoked, burning their fingers; people's faces are twisted into their public face, their city face, eyes downcast and features set in a neutral, formless expression that says don't notice me, don't talk to me, don't hurt me, don't make my day and more stressful and painful than it already is; the tramps who swear at you when you tell them you don't have any change, the mobile phone salesman and charity workers and public survey monkeys out in droves for your time, your money, your opinion, things they seem to believe inexplicably that they have a right to - when I want to give you my point-of-view, lady, you'll know it, believe me. And coming home at night, exhausted and bone-weary from eight or nine hours of dealing with the whole coffee-drinking, sugar-eating, hyped-up and downtrodden mass of English humanity, it's all the same: middle-aged women with so many shopping bags I'm surprised they don't have a little hired slave to carry it all around with them; teenage girls in layers of makeup shrieking aimless words across the city's squares, boys who don't know what it means to grow-up trying to hard to be men, laughing too quickly and too loudly, instantly in your face and up close and looking for trouble - I've broken a man's skull with a baseball bat, I said to one punk, quietly and with the perfect East-coast accent, I've put a bowie knife through a man's wrist and skewered it to the wall, stood there and laughed while he ripped one of his fingers off trying to get it free. I've put a bullet through a man's eye and felt his blood on my face. What do you want? He must have seen something he didn't like. He left without laughing. Afterward, sitting on the bus and shaking slightly, I thought, "what on earth possesses a sane person to say a thing like that?" I was a little younger then, than I am now. Perhaps that contributed, in some way, to my growing up.
There is a place out on the edge of Northenden, along the Mersey close to where I used to go to school, called Simon's Bridge. It's a little footpath that runs along by the water, little more than a glorified stream at that point, and over an old cast-iron trestle, rusting and slightly green with age. People walk their dogs down through the nearby fields - kids go to make out or smoke weed, whichever vice is more attractive at the time. But at dusk, just before dark and with what little sun the clouds have allowed in lighting up the river, it is quiet and usually abandonned. If you have someone with you, you can play Pooh Sticks, dropping twigs and branches over the one side and spinning around quickly to see which makes it out of sight first - if you are alone, the top of the old, worn abundments makes for a good place to sit and think for a while. I used to go there very occasionally when I lived closer, if I needed some time to myself and my feet happened to take me that way. Now, I'm further away. Things are a little less peaceful out here: the constant wailing of police sirens, the rough barking of stray dogs out in the alleyway, the roars and howls of the lower-middle class creating drama to make their lives interesting. I ought not to complain, of all the ills in the world, of not having a bridge nearby to sit on. But if I am to hate this city a little less, it is important to focus less on its faults, and more on its... inconsistancies. Little victories.
Really, what I think of this place matters very little in the grand scheme of things, or in any smaller schemes for that matter. Manchester will take no note of the boy who dreams of Saskatoon's railway bridge. I live here because there are things and people that I love and because [as much as a rail against the fact sometimes] if I am ever to escape this place - and that is an if - I have some reconciling to do.
The nature of a city is tied to the nature of its people, past and present, and also vice-versa. I can only imagine as much as we try to change this place, hopefully for the better, that as Nietzsche put it, he who battles with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster; when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. It is a quote that applies to a lot of situations. Who am I to tell people how to live?
"Past the derelict mattress
and the overgrown pavement
over the tracks
and through the hole in the fence
Past graffiti-bright buildings
and the junkyard alarm bell
and the screaming police cars
and it's all present tense
It's my beat
In my new town
Past the drunk woman reeling
with her bag of provisions
Down through the tunnel
with the stink-fuming bus
On to the bike path
where it's something like freedom
and the wind in my earring whispers
Trust what you must
It's my beat
In my new town
Ancient and always
The wheel's ever whirling
Today I'm riding
Tomorrow I walk
Step through forever
into this very moment
The heart is pumping
and the heart rocks
It's my beat
In my new town."
-- Bruce Cockburn, "My Beat"
posted by backgroundbob at 10:48 pm
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