ABSTRACT
Much has been written and spoken about building bridges in these middle years of the last decade of the century. We've had a president who made “a bridge to the twentieth century” the keystone of his second campaign for the White House. Like rain seducing mushrooms out of their spores, that phrase forced countless columns and editorials with bridge metaphors to pop from the soil of our psyches, or at least those cultural outlets of collective psyche we call writers. In this atmosphere of rhetorical bridge building, I found it deliciously appropriate that San Francisco, the state, and to some extent the nation, became embroiled in discussions over what to do about replacing the Oakland side of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, one of the most photographed bridges in the world. It was damaged in the Loma Prieta quake a few years back. The governor, showing his usual aesthetic taste, wants the span replaced with a flat, gray, soulless causeway kind of thing. Others with more, shall we say, taste and vision, want a gossamer cabled roadway in the sky. The difference is a few measly millions, and the final decision will be with us for nearly another century.
