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Sunday, February 9, 2025
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Bridge Song

Gephyrophobia (noun) (ja-firo-fobia): 1. Fear of driving over bridges, eliciting symptoms of panic. Prevalence unknown, but thought to be common.  2. Perhaps a primal fear, humans having evolved a dread of high places as a survival mechanism.  3. In folklore, evil trolls live under bridges, exacting tasks or tolls from those wanting to cross. In ancient times, bridges were said to be haunted by apparitions trapped between life and death.

Transmit (verb): 1. Cause to pass from one person or place to another. Phobic tendencies can be transmitted through families, experience, or learning about the phobias of others. 2. As a child in the passenger seat, I watched Mama’s jaw tighten, her lipsticked mouth set in a hard line. Leaning forward, her hands formed a death grip on the steering wheel as we traversed Nashville’s Cumberland River bridge. She let out an audible sigh when we reached the other side. 3. My family traveled home from a Florida vacation when I was 13, Daddy driving the station wagon that towed our rented camper. My brothers slept in darkness as we crossed over the mountains between Chattanooga and Sewanee. Mama lay on the front seat sobbing, terrified of falling off the mountain. Wide awake in the back seat, I imagined, in a repeating loop, the car and trailer tumbling into the ravine below, killing all six of us.

Collapse (noun, verb): 1. To suddenly fall down or give way, fail.  2. In fifth grade, I read Thornton Wilder’s novel, The Bridge at San Luis Rey, which takes place in 1700’s Peru. A priest watches as an Inca rope bridge high above a gorge gives way, sending five people to their deaths. The priest sets out to learn the life stories of the victims, hoping to show that all lives are subject to God’s plan. The story haunted me, the bridge in my mind dropping into the canyon with its random victims clinging to the ropes. 3. I watched a televised black and white film clip from 1940 of the Tacoma Narrows twin suspension bridge spanning the strait of Puget Sound, as it dramatically collapsed in high winds. Because of a phenomenon known as “aeroelastic flutter,” its deck oscillated and the pavement formed waves like the ocean, twisting the bridge until it tore apart. I could never unsee this. Later I learned that three vehicles occupied the bridge, but no one died except a cocker spaniel named “Tubby,” left behind in an abandoned car. 4. London Bridge is falling down, children sing. And yet it never did, though it has been repaired and replaced many times.

Escape (verb): 1. To break free from captivity or control. 2. When I was a young teen, Mama speculated that her own bridge phobia originated with her fear of divorcing Daddy and living on her own. For years, she imagined a life outside the marriage, because of his cheating, profligate spending, and limited empathy. Eventually accomplishing the divorce when I was 18, her bridge phobia vanished soon after.  3. In the life space between adolescence and adulthood, I moved to New Mexico with a controlling boyfriend who ridiculed my determination to take college classes in the evening. Driving a rusted truck with faulty steering, I made my way home from “Abnormal Psychology” class in Los Alamos, down a winding mountain road in the dark. My small hands tight at 10 and 2 o’clock, heart in my throat, I pictured the valley floor far below, the metal guard rails insufficient, my vehicle careening out of control down the incline and flying out over the valley to my premature death. In time, I abandoned this boyfriend and all of his rules.

Relocate (verb): 1. To move one’s home or business to a new place. 2. Driving across the Hudson River to Manhattan on the upper deck of the George Washington Bridge, I grasped the steering wheel until my hands ached, knuckles whitening, heartbeat accelerating, chest tight, adrenaline rising. My gold Honda hatchback hugged the median, my speed just below the limit, eyes trained straight ahead to avoid glancing at the inadequate railing or the river below. Images cascaded into my mind: losing my grip, lurching across the outer lanes, my car plunging through the concrete parapet and steel barrier, endless seconds of plummeting, crashing, immersion, death by impact or drowning. Terror.

Bridge: (verb): 1. To join together. 2. To connect across differences or unite opposites. 3. To soar across a divide.

Jumper (noun): 1. A person who dies by suicide leaping from a bridge.  2. The Washington Avenue Bridge spans the Mississippi River between the East and West Banks of the University of Minnesota. On a bitter January day in 1972, the poet John Berryman climbed onto the bridge railing, waved to onlookers, and jumped, soaring across the divide between life and death.  He fell 100 feet and died when he hit the river bank.  3. I traveled on foot over the bridge as a new student in 1976, my mind’s eye generating pictures of Berryman’s freefall, my footsteps far from the railing.

Symbolize (verb): 1. To represent something by means of symbols. 2. Bridges symbolize transitions, a passage or initiation into unknown territory (see Escape). To pass over a bridge is to exist in-between: having left the old behind, not yet arriving at the new. 3. The Tappan Zee Bridge spans the Hudson River between Westchester County and Rockland County north of New York City. In 1986, I traveled over the bridge to work at my dream job, later gathering my courage to drive a rented moving truck across, take up solo residence in Nyack, and leave another boyfriend behind. Living alone for the first time at 33, I thought of my mother, celebrating her independence in a new home with a new job. A mother and her only daughter bound together by the steel suspension cables of fear and longing. From the window of my new apartment, I looked out on the bridge, my badge of courage, shining silver in the afternoon sun. 

Sage (noun): 1. A very wise person. 2. A Jewish scholar of the early 1800’s, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov famously created the saying: The whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the main thing is to have no fear at all. A song containing the Rabbi’s words is sung by children at Jewish summer camps: Kol ha olam kulo, gesher tsar meod.  3. Some faiths, such as Islam, Zoroastrianism, and certain Native American religions, have portrayed the way to the afterlife as a razor-thin bridge, from which only the righteous will not fall.  4. Attending the sudden funeral of a young family friend who had suffered a catastrophic brain aneurism at his father’s shiva, I sat with my husband and sleeping newborn in a front pew. As his closest friends sang Rabbi Nachman’s bridge song, tears streamed down my face.

Steep (adjective): 1. Rising or falling sharply or abruptly. 2. Florida’s Sunshine Skyway Bridge connects St. Petersburg with Bradenton across lower Tampa Bay. In 1980, an earlier version of this bridge collapsed when a freighter collided with it in a thunderstorm, killing 35.  Now the steepest bridge in Florida, it features an incline in the center that appears, driving up, to drop off into nowhere. 3. When my husband drove us across this bridge on our way to Sarasota for vacations, I unconsciously held my breath all the way up. In my nightmares, I drove off the edge at the bridge’s crest, dropping into the bay, over and over. 

Wonder (verb): 1. To ponder, be curious about. 2. At rush hour in Minneapolis on August 1, 2007, what did drivers experience as the ground fell away from under their cars on the collapsing 35-W Bridge? Was it like my stomach dropping on a roller coaster, or in a fast descending elevator? Did they hear crashing concrete, wrenching iron girders, asphalt sliding into the Mississippi, honking horns, terrified voices calling for help? Could they smell cement dust, gasoline, the fresh or fetid scents of the river on a summer day? 3. Survivors describe the sound of a snapping beam, the bridge bouncing, concrete buckling as wave after wave lifted cars; an enormous dust cloud, a bread truck on fire, vehicles freefalling more than 11 stories into the river, “the loudest thud I ever heard, followed by five seconds of eerie complete silence, then screaming.” Thirteen of my fellow Minnesotans died and 145 were injured that day.

Escort (noun, verb): 1. A person accompanying someone to protect or honor them. A guardian. 2. On the New York State Throughway, drivers who fear the Tappan Zee Bridge can call ahead for a bridge escort to ferry their vehicles across. The Mackinac Bridge Authority in Michigan charges a fee to accompany drivers across its 5-mile span. 3. No escort could have saved the drivers or passengers who died on the 35W bridge.

Exposure (noun): 1. Left or being without shelter or protection; vulnerable. 2. When driving over high bridges in fierce winds, I felt exposed, fearing I’d be blown off the bridge. In sustained winds above 40 mph, drivers are advised to avoid bridges such as the Verrazano Narrows Bridge between New Jersey and Staten Island. 3. A therapy for bridge phobia that involves exposing the patient to bridges in imagination or in vivo, while using relaxation and self-talk to prevent the usual feelings of panic. With practice, the person learns to associate bridges with relaxation instead of fear. 

Liminal (adjective): 1. Of or relating to a transitional or intermediate stage; existing at the threshold or border between one thing and another.  2. Leaving my mother, returning to college, I drove my old Volvo from Nashville to Minneapolis. On the way, I unknowingly practiced exposure therapy by breathing deeply and reassuring myself while driving over countless bridges, finally taming my gephyrophobia. 3. I crossed the border between inherited fright and ownership of all my emotions, tasting freedom.

Soar (verb): 1. Fly or rise high into the air; ascend. 2. In my new dreams, I take to the sky. Standing on tiptoes and raising my arms, I launch myself forty feet above the earth.  I kick my feet like a frog and sweep my arms back as though swimming the breaststroke.  3. Gliding through the night’s hush, I slip over the treetops on my way into a fearless future.

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Lucinda Cummings
Lucinda Cummings
Lucinda Cummings is a writer and retired psychologist who began publishing her writing after turning 50. Her essays have appeared in Hippocampus, Baltimore Review, Glassworks, Woven Tale Press, and other publications. Her writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and recognized as "Notable" in Best American Essays 2023. She lives in Minneapolis. Read more at lucindathewriter.com.
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