Like A Bridge Over Brown Water

 

The Golden Gate Bridge.  The London Millennium Footbridge.  The Millau Viaduct.  The Pont du Gard.  Bridges are beautiful.  They span space and time.  They're spanners.  But not "in the works" of course.  They defy the instinctual logic of my brain.  How can they hold up their own weight, let alone all the cars, trucks, and fat tourists ?  Why don't they crash into the abyss below ?  But if I accept the fact that bridges are not magic - and physics does make such a claim - that makes it all the more paradoxical and ironic that they can be felled by marching armies or tourists, or wind, or supposedly even a cat.  They're beautiful, too, as metaphors, but I won't get into all that cross-cultural bullshit.

Anyway, back to Colombia.  Barranquilla and Santa Marta are large Colombian cities along the Caribbean shores.  The Magdalena River and the Manzaranes River pass, respectively, through these two towns.  And several bridges span these rivers, the majority unremarkable.  But on our second day in Barranquilla, we did discover some rather interesting bridges built with unconventional architectural techniques.

You see, these cities have no gutters and no sewers.  So when it rains, at least once every three days during the rainy season, you get inner city flash floods.  The roads collect all the precipitation, forming hundreds of new and temporary canals after about 30 minutes.  Looks something like a dirty and shallow Venice.  But not a gondola in sight.

Most people stay put when the streets flood, and many cab drivers will even refuse to drive.  They don't drive Hummers here, after all.  Maybe they could use some gondolas after all, steered by singing Italians...  But honestly, it's very dangerous.  We heard of one motorcyclist who had been swept away the river of sediment and garbage.  His body was never recovered.  We saw a giant drowned rat that had been swept away, too.  Its body rolled in front of my feet.

So what's the solution ?  Are the cities building gutters and sewers and retention ponds ?  Ha !  Of course not !  But some enterprising citizens brave the river-slash-roads and build bridges out of pallets and crates and 2x2's and other scraps of wood, and they charge the passers-by 25 cents to get to the other side.  And not even armies of soaked Barranquilleros and Samarios marching across can't collapse it.  It's no Golden Gate, that's for sure, but these Bridges of Barranquilla and Santa Marta have their utility and, in a way, their beauty.