“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.”
—From Mending Walls by Robert Frost
Gaps and bridges.
A beautiful bridge in the middle of the woods.
Connecting two peninsulas making up the 146-acre Ovens Mouth Preserve, with sturdy pine foot planks running perpendicular to well-proportioned rails, a gentle arc to its span, copper-covered bench seating on one end, it’s a crossing as well-crafted as it is useful.
An unexpected little miracle on a forest walk.
At low tide, all is serene. The mouth across the way still as a lake, the inlet under the bridge but a trickle of water, stones from a long-broken 19th-century dam exposed nearby. It is a different story during flood and ebb tides: the trickle becomes a rapid flow one way, then another; the mouth alive with current, seabirds upon the sparkly surface transported left to right, then right to left.
Drama and flux.
I have been thinking a lot about separation. This side apart from that side; the space between.
Robert Frost wrote of walls—the opposite of bridges. “Good fences make good neighbors,” says one neighbor in Mending Walls, and yet notes the other:
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
Gaps even two can pass abreast.
Nature’s power and will—ice heaves from below—want a breach; an opening from here to there. A joining.
I have been on the bridge at Ovens Mouth Preserve. Poised in bent repose, Ovens Mouth West shrouded in the shadows of its rising pines to my left, Ovens Mouth East with its easy trails to my right, ever-shifting waters all around, I have stood poised between west and east.
Choices and connection.
There is something to love in a bridge.
I have again been dreaming of my passed daughter, her scent and sound but memory, no choice in this gapless wall eternally between us.
(“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” say I.)
Gaps and bridges.
Caught between the before and after of the coronavirus pandemic—this bridgeless caesura between here and there—we wonder: what is to come? COVID-19 leaves us no choice of back or forth, over or around, left or right or returned again. We weigh economies and lives, risks and factors, science and impulse, wit and reason our only guides. We think of our loved ones, missing touch.
We can only go on.
Oh, for a miracle bridge!
