First in a set of essays about one of Tacoma, Washington’s abandoned bridges.
Snow and Wings: Mystery on the 11th Street Bridge
by S.T. Lile
Finally, it was the wings—wing after torn wing—that made me look up. When I walk, I usually look down. Down at the new paving in front of my apartment building, down at the gravel-strewn construction zone nearby, down at the wooden planks of the boardwalk edging the Thea Foss waterway, and down at the broken pavement and cordoned-off sidewalks of the 11th Street Bridge. I’d climbed up there on a set of wood and metal steps that pass the decrepit underpinnings of a bridge understandably now closed—to cars that is. Feet are fair game if you don’t mind the wings and heads; bird parts strewn across the abandoned roadway like a cemetery of fallen angels.
That morning, as I perched on my balcony fastening snowflake lights to the metal gridwork, it snowed. They were tiny flakes, but after a cold dry night, they were actually sticking. Accumulating like powered sugar on the concrete plaza of the Museum of Glass next door, the snowflakes lingered there at five feet above sea level long enough for me to remember how much I love the snow. So, I’d decided to go for a walk and watch the snowfall from high up on the bridge.
As I reached the top of the stairs, a lone figure shuffled toward town, dark pants and tan coat soaked with grime. I walked the other way—over the bridge, toward the Tacoma tide flats filled with warehouses, pulp mills, and shipping yards. It was then that I noticed the wings. Wings are feathers not food. Especially when an abundance of pigeons roost nearby—and you have baby chicks to feed, and you’re a falcon. I remembered the peregrine falcons that got great press when they took up residence on the counterweights almost a decade ago. Evidence suggests they are still there, still hungry, and still hunting.
But even with a viable explanation for their presence on the bridgeway, the wings still haunted me. In my last pass across the bridge—I’d lingered on the span far longer than I’d intended, surveying the worn waterfront in the quiet of a snowy Sunday—the Lone Bridge Keeper—for that’s what I’d come to call him—returned in a flurry of wild scratching around the neck and chest of his cast-off Carhartt. We kept a wide berth but swapped greetings as our paths crossed, two strangers on a silent bridge. Why was he there? Why then, in that very moment?
A few days later, snow had turned to rain, but I went walking anyway. The 11th Street Bridge provided welcome shelter for about ten steps as I passed beneath it. I had no desire to hike the stairs and cross the bridge in the pouring rain, but that didn’t keep the snowy morning out of my mind. In a strange Skellig* moment, I imagined the Lone Bridge Keeper glance behind him as he reached for a pair of freshly fallen wings. He slung them over his shoulder, shrugged into them, and disappeared into the bridge’s heights.
Months later when I walked the bridge again, there wasn’t a pair of wings to be found. The Lone Bridge Keeper had vanished too, gone to wherever snow goes in summer.
*SKELLIG is a story by David Almond about a boy who discovers a lost and sick angel hiding in a tumble-down garage.
