As part of my graduate school studies, I spent the summer in Paris. Though only there for six weeks, it was long enough to add Paris to the short list of places I’ve lived: Ithaca, the small college town where I grew up, San Francisco, my post-college West Coast trial run, and New York City, my home for almost twenty years. In late March of this year, as NYC became the epicenter of the Corona pandemic, we made the decision to move our family to my father-in-law’s summer home in Ventnor City, New Jersey, a beach community for the Philadelphia area. As our weeks displaced marched from six, to seven, to eight, the Jersey Shore inched out Paris for fourth place on my list. I had to face the fact that we were well past visiting, but I still wasn’t ready to say we had lived there.
Summers at the Jersey Shore had become the norm since the birth of my twins eleven years ago. We regularly visited the house built on a barrier island, sandwiched between the ocean and the inlet. It wasn’t that I felt like I was arriving someplace completely new in that cold, panicked spring, but I strained to recognize a place I thought I knew. The beach itself was completely closed for the first few months, so our walks were limited to the quiet back streets, running along the bay. Four blocks away was the Dorset Avenue Bridge. As the weather warmed, I pushed to get us out of the house more regularly, and our morning walks coalesced into a routine with the bridge at the center.
For my summer in Paris, I had a single room in a dormitory on the Left Bank, a block below the Pantheon. A few mornings a week I walked ten minutes to the Luxembourg Gardens. The dirt path surrounding the gardens provided a popular place to run. It was through that morning routine that I got to know Paris beyond her tourist wonders, and turned her into my home. In my mind’s eye, I can still retrace my route step-by-step: the narrow street leading towards my dorm always dripping in runoff from the street cleaning of the boulevard up the hill; the English pub I often closed out with friends as our final stop of the night; a group of French joggers, in their Keds and casual wear — high tech running gear had definitely not caught on with the middle-aged and elderly Parisians with whom I circled the gardens.
According to my Garmin, it was 2000ish steps round trip to the Dorset Avenue Bridge, close enough that my four-year-old could walk, but far enough to seem like an adventure. He picked out a favorite boat, small but red, which bobbed in a slip just past the bridge. Even when the season brought people to their summer homes with bigger boats, he held fast to his first love. As he stared at it longingly, I started to fall for the bridge.
The Dorset Avenue Bridge is a Strauss Bascule bridge, a drawbridge with one side swinging up like a seesaw to allow for boat traffic underneath. In the cold weather, I only caught it up once, but in the high season, it switched to a schedule, rising twice an hour. We walked to the end of our street and waited, along with a growing line of tall boats in need of the clearance. It made for quite a show, at least by Corona standards.
Looking up the waterway towards the low blue steel deck perched between two stocky beige towers, the bridge appeared dressed in London fashion. Of course, the bridge wasn’t quite that old. A plaque attached to one of the towers told that she was erected from 1929–1930, planned for, ground broken in an economic boom but birthed on the eve of total economic collapse. The sign made me wonder what would be the dominant comparison for the year 2020: the flu pandemic of 1918, the social unrest of 1968, or the economic depression of 1930? I imagined that even in the midst of the economic chaos of that year, the new Dorset Avenue Bridge must have provided an uplift to the locals, ease of transit, a connection to the coast, something as simple as a new place to walk. Though small as bridges go, it is still an engineering feat, a mark of progress, a structure that has endured for almost a century, reminding us that life will go on.
The view from the bridge was as much a confrontation to my peace of mind as the sign. Looking at the bay, north towards our home, a monstrous house on the right flew a huge “Trump” flag, while across the water, a smaller more weathered home answered with an array of pride and social justice flags. The scene was a study in the haves and have nots, large houses with boat slips, facing a house falling into the bay. The metaphor of a bridge connecting us is ripe, but it couldn’t overcome the real-life view of 2020 America. The bridge was after all just a bridge. (For pictures of the images from above, please visit my travel blog: derelictionofduty.)
Even though we had been displaced for almost four months, the slip into summer was also finally the slip into something familiar. The cold, frightening months of March and April were behind us, a separate time already melding into the time we lived in Ventnor City. As temperatures rose and the town opened up, we traversed it to our favorite ice-cream parlor: Custard’s Last Stand — Even that establishment’s name was fraught. It may outlive the Washington football team’s name, but for how long? — For those on the mainland side, the bridge provided direct access to the beach, demonstrated by the veritable parking lot of bicycles stacked at the Dorset Avenue boardwalk entrance. The heavy uptick in (mostly-unmasked) bike and foot traffic on the narrow wooden planked walkways rendered social distancing impossible, and so the bridge lost its gravitational pull over our morning routine, replaced by the beach itself.
After twenty-four weeks displaced — but who’s counting — we were heading home, but the bridge seemed reluctant to let us go. On our final trip to Custard’s the bridge rose, separating my husband and me from our children who had biked ahead to the other side. The following morning, after the car was packed, seatbelts fastened, as we rode the final waves of tearful goodbyes and ecstatic joy to finally be headed home, flashing lights stopped us from making our final turn onto Dorset Avenue. The bridge was up yet again. A desperate attempt to keep us? Perhaps, but it was to no avail. The bridge had to lower, and we went home.
