Chapter 9
HypheNations: Canadian and Canadian-American Bridges

by D.M.R. Bentley

It has been said, that there is always something about a bridge which interests, more or less. If it be not picturesque in itself, it may be curious in its structure; or high; or long; or may possess something or other to attract attention.

–Basil Hall, Travels in North America in the Years 1827 and 1828 (1829)190

They’ve pulled thee down, my poor old friend,
And torn thee up from end to end …
          ·           ·            ·
’Till not a vestige has been left
As record of the cherish’d past….
          ·           ·           ·
Emblem of human life, thou’rt gone!

–William Pittman Lett, “To the Rideau Bridge” (1872), 3

Perhaps in your city there is a structure so potent and glorious that its existence in your mind becomes the actual architecture of your mind – a structure through which all your dreams and ideas and hopes are funneled.
     In my city, Vancouver, there is one such structure, a fairy-tale bridge called Lions Gate Bridge. Its three delicate spans link the city of Vancouver with the suburbs of the north shore ..., and with the mountains and wilderness of British Columbia beyond those suburbs.

–Douglas Coupland, Polaroids from the Dead (1997) 69

For Helen, the journey is not complete without bridges and their possibilities.

–Lynne Davies, “On the Train,” The Bridge that Carries the Road (1999) 85

In “Poetry Dwelling Thought,” Martin Heidegger uses the construction of a bridge as an example of the way in which “building” transforms “space” into “location” and thus performs a function that is essential to human “dwelling” and emplacement. A bridge “does not just connect banks that are already there,” argues Heidegger, it “designedly causes them to lie across from each other” by setting “one side against the other” and, in so doing, “bring[ing] to the stream the one and the other expanse of the landscape lying behind” its banks (Poetry, Language, Thought 152). More than this, a “bridge lets the stream run its course and at the same time grants the way to mortals so that they can come and go from shore to shore” and, through its connection with the metaphorical bridge from life to death, “gathers to itself in its own way earth and sky, divinities and mortals” (153). Using Heidegger’s very suggestive remarks as a point of departure, this chapter examines some of the ways in which bridges have functioned in Canada and Canadian literature, focusing first on bridges within Canada and then on bridges between Canada and the United States. As will be seen, both as “thing[s]” in the world (Heidegger 153) and as an inspiration for architexts, Canadian and Canadian-American bridges have indeed done much more than “connect banks”: they have contributed to nation-building, strengthened provincial rights, bolstered local economics, served as identifying icons, cemented and symbolized Canadian-American relations and, for at least one writer, thrown into relief the arbitrary, artificial, and even destructive nature of the border between the two countries. Since the events of September 11, 2001, they have also been a focus of anxieties and tensions that perhaps have distant precursors in John Richardson’s Wacousta; or, the Prophecy. A Tale of the Canadas (1832), where bridges are places “at which something stops ... [and] from which something begins its presencing” (Heidegger 154), liminal spaces where the comfortably known may encounter either a friendly or a terrifying “Other.”

     Heidegger’s observation that a bridge is always in and of itself a “thing” that “gathers” existing entities together into new relationships is especially evident in the Union Bridge, the main span of a chain of seven bridges that was built between 1826 and 1828 across the Ottawa River at Chaudière Falls to secure supplies for the men building the Rideau Canal (Ottawa, the Future Capital 7) and provide “‘the first land communication between the two provinces’” of Upper and Lower Canada (John By qtd. in A.H.D. Ross 80, and see Brault 12-15). Very likely inspired by a design in Andrea Palladio’s Quattro Libri dell’ Architettura (1570) (Leggett 53, 59), the Union Bridge displayed a Palladian simplicity and symmetry of form that led the Montreal Herald to describe it on February 12, 1827 as a “beautiful arch” (qtd. in MacTaggart 1: 344, and see Mark Andrews 138).¹ More prosaically, it was a wooden truss of some 200 feet (61 metres) mounted on dry stone pillars that “was suggested by Lieutenant-Colonel [John] By; planned by Mr. [John] MacTaggart; and executed under the ... superintendance of Mr. Thomas MacKay, of Montreal” (qtd. in MacTaggart 1:344) – that is, conceived, designed, and constructed by three men who played central rôles in the creation of the Rideau Canal (By and MacTaggart, his Clerk of Works) and the Lachine Canal (MacKay). “[A] Bridge from land to land ... Connect[s] shores by easy intercourse / Which distant lay and were to others strange,” MacTaggart would write in his long, unfinished poem “The Engineer,” and this was at least partly true of the Union Bridge: completed twelve years before the Act of Union (1840) officially transformed Lower and Upper Canada into Canada East and Canada West on either side of the Ottawa River, it served for eight years until its destruction by ice on May 18, 1836 as neither “a mere bridge” nor “exclusively a symbol” (in Heidegger’s definition, an “express[ion] [of] something that strictly speaking does not belong to it” [Poetry, Language, Thought 153] ), but as a gathering place that brought to the site of what is now Ottawa the landscapes and peoples lying to the east and west and “caus[ed] [them] to lie across from one another.” As Gertrude Van Cortlandt would write in Records of the Rise and Progress of the City of Ottawa (1858) of the more durable structure that replaced the Union Bridge in 1844, a “suspension bridge erected by the Provincial government at a cost of $66,448, spans the foaming chasm [of Chaudière Falls], and unites Upper and Lower Canada” (x, and see Brault). No more than the first Union Bridge did the Suspension Bridge or any of its successors near one of Canada’s two “national” capitals eradicate the fact that places and peoples can be both connected and “strange” to one another, but this surely inheres as much in the nature of borders and differences as in the structures that span them. A border or boundary is certainly a site “from which something begins its presencing,” but it is also a site that demarcates the distinction between A from not-A, “us” and the “Other,” perhaps “us” and all “Others.”²

     Even when they cross borders, however, bridges put places that were separate in touch with one another in a way that substantiates a bond and holds the promise – or threat – of a unity. In “Phosphor Ghost” (1991), the Ottawa poet Mark Frutkin (1948- ) writes of the fire that in 1900 “burned down two-thirds / Of the city of Hull” on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River as an “Indelicate consummation” that it “Swept across the Chaudière Bridge / – / To cut a mile-width swath / Through the city of Ottawa”:

In “provencher bridge” (1998), the Manitoba poet Patrick Friesen (1946- ) is less ironical about the connective power of bridges, specifically, the one that spans the Red River between the historically English-French-speaking areas of Winnipeg: “[S]he’s the stranger / across the river / the other one,” he writes of “suzanne from le havre / montreal or brest”:

“The arts are a bridge between the possessive, acquisitive profit-making instincts of mankind and the free realm of the spirit,” suggested Lawren Harris in a notebook;

An engineer builds a bridge – and when it is completed he surveys the thing he has designed and sees it is not only adequate for its purpose, but sees that the bridge expresses it, then he is thrilled. He is thrilled not so much by the usefulness of the bridge but at its expression of function, of meaning – its spiritual side, as it were. And that thrill is the thrill of art. Now, in this we see two realities: the reality of the bridge as a means of crossing over a river, and its reality as an expression – its reality as a symbol, which can stir us inwardly. (qtd. in Colgrove and Harris 4)

In Harris’s view, as in Heidegger’s, bridges are not merely the “dominant connecting structures” akin to “roads and high-tension cables” that Herman Hertzberger describes in Articulations (2002) (57), but elevated and elevating conduits or conductors of emotion and spirituality, expressions and generators of mental as well as physical states. As “the bridge now crosses” Davenport Road in Toronto, writes bp Nichol about a section of Martyrology 5, “this bridge must / connect states of consciousness … form a link your mind can follow” (Chain 1). “Haven’t you ever noticed that the bridge joins them together?” asks a character in Margaret Atwood’s “Polarities” (1977) after explaining that Toronto is “‘split in two’” by the Don River and “‘polarized north and south … [by] the gas plant and the power plant’”: “‘[t]hat’s how the current gets across. We have to keep the poles in our brains lined up with the poles of the city, that’s what [William] Blake’s poetry is all about. You can’t break the current’” (Dancing Girls and Other Stories 58).

I

One of the most accomplished and probably the longest treatments of a bridge in nineteenth-century Canadian writing came from the pen of Barry Straton (1854-1901), a cousin of Charles G. D. Roberts, who described him as “deficient [in] education” but credited him with “a fine ear for melody” (Collected Letters 84). Published in Saint John, New Brunswick in 1887 and dedicated to the province’s Attorney General and premier, Andrew George Blair, “On the Occasion of the Opening of the Bridge at Fredericton, November 27th, 1887,” The Building of the Bridge. An Idyl of the River Saint John was inspired by the construction between 1884 and 1887 of the two-arched bridge that was “[d]ubbed ‘Blair’s Paper Bridge’” by critics because it consisted of “cribwork piers [or Burr trusses] and a wooden superstructure” rather than the “more expensive stone and steel” that were then becoming common (Young 77, Hall 435).³ Intended by Blair “to link Fredericton to the villages growing up around the railway line and the factories of Alexander Gibson, his more prominent supporter” (Young 79), the Fredericton Bridge was built of wood for two additional reasons: wood was readily available locally, and the logging, milling, and utilization of it would provide much needed work at a time when New Brunswick was suffering from severe unemployment and an economic depression as a result of the decline in the wooden shipbuilding industry. (The Broadway Bridge [1933] in Saskatoon, which has since become of that city’s “landmark[s],” was similarly conceived as a “labour-intensive design” and “Depression-relief project” [Ball 90-91].) This helps to explain Straton’s close attention in the central section of the poem to the various types of wood (birch, cedar, pine) that have been “Called from the eloquent solitudes / Of fair New Brunswick’s wealthy woods” for the building of the bridge and his subsequent praise of its builders as exemplars of “the dignity of toil! / ...our country’s flesh and bones,– / ... the nation’s beams and stones” (247-49, 299-301). Political and economic reasons may also have dictated the choice of a local engineer, Alfred Haines, as the bridge’s designer and Straton’s praise of him a “skilled, ingenious Engineer” whose “plans for strength and grace combined” display an understanding of the merits and uses of different woods (see 225-98). Perhaps because Straton had direct or indirect knowledge of the essay that David P. Billington regards as the seminal document in the “new art of structural engineering” (36) – the entry on “Bridges” by the Scottish architect and civil engineer Thomas Telford in the 1814 Edinburgh Encyclopaedia – his praise of the bridge and its designer comes close to reiterating Telford’s “three leading ideals” of bridge design: “efficiency, economy, and elegance” (Billington 5, and see 31).

     The selection of local materials and a local engineer was by no means the only political dimension to the Fredericton Bridge. When Blair announced plans for it in 1884, the federal authorities objected on the grounds that because the Saint John was a navigable river “the province had no authority to pass legislation for the construction of a bridge” over it (Young 77). “[A]s construction proceeded in 1884-85 Blair made his peace with the federal government,” but not without “reserving the right, ‘if occasion arises,’ to dispose of the legal or constitutional matter in the courts” – a position that reflected his leanings towards radical Liberalism (see Young 76). Little wonder, then, that Straton follows his account of the construction of the Fredericton Bridge with a paean to the “Elected Architects of State” who “caused this Bridge to be” and who “plan and build our Country’s fate” as the custodians of “The people’s sacred, governing will” and enjoins them to mould a “purer Union” by “Expounding our full Provincial Rights” and countering “jealousies and slights / ... with State-craft wise and bold” (373-86). Straton concludes his paean to the “Elected Architects of State” by urging them to higher and greater things in diction and a sentence structure appropriately reminiscent of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer⁴:

Extravagant (not to say Heideggerian) as this is in its allegorical extrapolations and elaborations, it pales in comparison with Straton’s progressive and Platonic vision of Fredericton Bridge earlier in the poem as one of “The pleasing structures of this land” that will assure “That people shall not retrograde” and, rather, lead the “soul” through “The love of beauty” to “higher altitudes” (235-46). In the context of The Building of the Bridge, Heidegger’s writings about bridges seem almost understated.

     And there is more. Before embarking on his description of the construction of the Fredericton Bridge, Straton presents the reader with a “Poem” addressed “To the River Saint John” and with a history of “the Bridging Art” from “barbarian years” to the mid-nineteenth century (76, 37). With his eye already on the longue durée, he opens the former with an allusion to the origin of the river in the separation of “waters ... from the black night of chaos” in Genesis 1 and proceeds first to characterize the building of the Fredericton Bridge in terms of a marriage service that will “bind” the river’s “tides despotic” “like a golden ... band” that “no stress of weather” shall “Put ... asunder” and then to characterize the river itself as the muse who will provide him with the “knowledge” and “inspiration” to “sing the bridal” (1-15). Unguardedly optimistic as it proved to be (the Fredericton Bridge was destroyed by fire in 1905), Straton’s epithalamic conception of both the bridge and his poem is merely a somewhat sentimental version of the traditional and still commonplace notion that bridges “join together” (5) or unify entities that are opposite but complementary to one another. Less venerable and enduring is his plea to the river to “Move [his] soul to song as strong as [its] resistless flow” (11), though this also has numerous precedents, most notably in the famous and extremely influential lines in John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill – “O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream / My great example, as it is my theme!” (Denham 77) – that John Hollander identifies as the locus classicus of “the idea that lines of verse should move like flowing water” (151, and see Bentley Mimic Fires 42). From his figuration of Fredericton Bridge as “a golden marriage band” on the finger of “Fair New Brunswick’s proudest stream” (19), it seems clear that in designating The Building of the Bridge an “Idyl” Straton was using the term in the traditional sense of a “composition which deals charmingly with rural life” and “ordinarily ... describes a picturesque rural scene of gentle beauty and innocent tranquillity and narrates a story of some simple sort of happiness” (Congleton 362).

     Although Straton’s history of “the Bridging Art” purports to be inspired by the Fredericton Bridge itself, it is in fact a versified form of the sort of article that he could have found under “Bridges” in any number of easily available reference works such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Its primary interest for the present discussion lies not in its details (some of which would nevertheless be fascinating to a reader unacquainted with the history of bridges),⁵ but in its insertion of the Fredericton Bridge into a narrative of progress that is almost as firmly grounded in the four stages theory of social development as was Thomas Cary’s Abram’s Plains almost a century earlier. Just as the construction of a “quay” and the building a ship were evidence to Cary that by 1789 “commerce” had gained a “footing” on “both sides” of the St. Lawrence and, that Lower Canada was therefore attaining the highest stage of development (100-115), so the presence of a “graceful bridge” across the Saint John is for Straton proof of New Brunswick’s “prosperity” and confirmation of the ability of its “lumberers” and “panting mills” to “Coin ... / That wooden wealth which, shipped o’er seas, / Or to our growing towns supplied, / Returns in golden treasuries” (20-21, 414-22). In Cary’s terminology, the agricultural and commercial stages of social development see the “rudeness” of the savage and barbaric stages replaced by civilized “polish” and “refinement.” In Straton’s terminology, the “grace” of Fredericton Bridge is the product of a “prosperity” born of new Brunswick’s natural “bounty” and its “perfect” “piers / And airy spans” the evidence of progress far beyond “barbarian years” when bridges consisted first of “treacherous stepping-stone[s]” and then of “safer fire-wrought beam[s], / Reared by the rude arch-architect” (431, 37-44). As late as 1911, Henry Grattan Tyrrell, a son of the Ontario civil engineer, northern explorer, and mine promoter James William Tyrrell (1863-1945), would begin his magisterial History of Bridge Engineering by observing that “[p]rimitive races were content with rude structures made of logs and trees thrown across streams, or with slabs resting on stepping stones in the water, but the development of civilization and the beginning of commerce created a need for more secure and better crossings” (15).

     The Building of the Bridge ends as it began with an address to the Saint John River. Having fleshed out his portrait of the river as a site of “grace and bounty” and filled in its background with depictions of its natural attractions in the manner of Roberts and Isabella Valancy Crawford,⁶ Straton delivers himself of an “Envoi” while purporting to “Lean o’er [the water] from th[e] bridge,” a position not possible prior to its construction (431, 557). Thus situated, he construes “the mystic River” as a figure of “Time” that will continue to pass after the passage of “bridge and toilers” and will “abide” even “the unbuilding of the spheres” (552-53). By availing themselves of the position near but above the water that the bridge affords, people may “con [the river’s] song aright” and be “Oblivious, for a little while, of Time’s strong westering flight” (557-60). In other words, the bridge makes spatially possible as apparently never before the achievement of both a proper understanding and a temporary transcendence of the flow of life, an apprehension of Time as both transience and endurance. Straton might not have agreed with the teleological aspect of Heidegger’s argument in “The Origin of the Work of Art” that by standing where it does a “building” “first gives to things [in its vicinity] the look and to men the outlook on life” (Poetry, Language, Thought 41, 43), but on the evidence of The Building of the Bridge. An Idyl of the River Saint John he fully appreciated the power of a bridge to bring into existence a new spatial and, therefore, perceptual relationship between people and their surroundings.⁷

     Exactly a century after the appearance of Straton’s poem, Michael Ondaatje published the novel that contains what is now surely the best-known description of a bridge (or viaduct)⁸ in Canadian literature: In the Skin of a Lion (1987). Set mostly in Toronto in the early decades of the twentieth century, Ondaatje’s best-seller takes as one of its focal points the Bloor Street (later Prince Edward)Viaduct (see also: i), a high-level bridge that was built during the First World War to overcome “the dual geographic obstacles of the Rosedale ravine and the Don valley” that were hampering urban expansion to the east of the city (Carr 165). Designed by the Toronto architect and urban planner John Mackenzie Lyle (1872-1945) (who is briefly characterized as a visionary in the novel),⁹ the Bloor Street Viaduct consists of six concrete pylons supporting five steel spans that carry “a concrete-slab roadbed ... accommodating two [traffic] lanes ... two sidewalks,” and a “formal balustrade” (165-65). Beneath this top level, a lower deck makes “[p]rovision ... for a rail line in anticipation of the city’s future transportation needs” (166). As Angela Carr observes in her study of Edmund Burke (1850-1919),¹⁰ the Toronto architect who at the time chaired the transportation subcommittee of the city’s Civic Improvement Committee, the structure of the Bloor Street Viaduct has “the substance and permanence of its Beaux-Arts models – models which provided the forms of the urban planning movement of the period” (166). In other words, the Bloor Street Viaduct was a product of the functionalism and the designs favoured by Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814-70) and his followers at the École-des-Beaux Arts in Paris and of the City Beautiful movement of Daniel Hudson Burnham (1846-1912), Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), and others whose aim was to redesign cities in accordance with the aesthetic principles of harmony and organic unity.¹¹

     This is not how Ondaatje presents it, however. Placed by the novel’s epigraphs from The Epic of Gilgamesh and John Berger’s G: a Novel (133) in the twin contexts of city building and recuperative working-class history, the Bloor Street Viaduct of In the Skin of a Lion is primarily a futuristic structure built by workers whose names are absent from contemporary accounts of its construction:

As described by the novel’s anarchic narrator, Patrick Lewis, the festivities surrounding the opening of the Viaduct were merely “political ceremonies” whose only memorable moments were provided by figures that, not surprisingly, reflect the novel’s underlying Bergerian and postmodern assumptions: an “anonymous” cyclist who “escaped ... through police barriers” to be first across the bridge (“[i]n the photographs he is a blur of intent” and, it hardly need be added, Heraclitean process) and “the workers” who, during the previous night, had “arrived and brushed away officials who guarded the bridge ... [and] moved ... like a wave of civilization, a net of summer insects over the valley” (27). As blatantly as in Straton’s poem a century earlier, the building of the bridge serves in Ondaatje’s novel as a pretext for social and political commentary. The Building of the Bridge and “The Bridge” section of In the Skin of a Lion differ in almost every other way, yet both surround their accounts of bridge building with celebrations of the men who did the building.

     A juxtapositioning of In the Skin of a Lion and The Building of the Bridge can only confirm Ondaatje’s stylistic brilliance but in two other respects it is less flattering. First, it draws attention to the way in which, by projecting the aesthetic and ideological assumptions of the nineteen eighties onto the Edwardian period, Ondaatje’s novel breaks historical fiction’s pact of verisimilitude with the reader and, in doing so, condescends to the people of that era and provides a woefully inadequate understanding of their ideals and aims.¹² Second, it throws into stark relief the extent to which the assumptions of postmodernism and social realism thus projected are at odds, not only with the novel’s historical subject-matter, but also with one another, postmodernism being coeval and consonant in many respects with the neoliberalism of the nineteen seventies, ’eighties, and ’nineties and social realism being, of course, the preferred aesthetic of most socialist and communist régimes in the ’thirties, ’forties, and ’fifties. The problems that flow from this ideological and aesthetic concatenation have been discussed by numerous critics¹³ and are unwittingly present even in the admixture of postmodern and social-realist terminology that renders almost comical the blurb on the back cover of the Penguin edition of the novel: “In the Skin of a Lion weaves real and invented histories with a moving love story.... [B]oth the harsh world of labour and the magical theatre of the human heart are hauntingly entwined.”

     At the “haunting” centre of “The Bridge” section of the novel, one of its principal characters, the as-yet-unnamed Macedonian construction-worker Nicholas Temelcoff, is hanging in a halter “in mid-air under the central arch” of the Viaduct at precisely the right moment to catch a nun who has been blown off the concrete slabs above by a strong wind (31). When the two are safely on the “catwalk” she, in turn, “save[s] him from falling back into space,” thus generating the mutual indebtedness that undergirds one of the “invented histor[ies]” to which the cover blurb refers. Following this extraordinary – some might say, ludicrous¹⁴ – instance of a bridge as a unifying device, Lewis/Ondaatje provides a vignette of Temelcoff in which a third aesthetic thread is introduced to the weave of the novel:

An allusion to the title of Berger’s “The Moment of Cubism,” the sentence fragment that concludes this passage locates the construction of the Bloor Street Viaduct in the artistic movement of 1907-14 that Berger plausibly interprets as a momentous turn or shift in Western culture, a “moment” in the temporal, mechanical, and prophetic senses of the word at which “the promises of the future were more substantial than the present,” a “convergence” and a beginning that “defin[ed] desires which are still unmet” (5, 6, 32). Seen in this light, the Bloor Street Viaduct ceases to be the product of the Beaux-Arts aesthetic and City Beautiful movement that it, in fact, was and becomes instead a participant in the artistic endeavours that, in Berger’s words again, “constituted a revolutionary change” in Western sensibility: “[t]he concept of painting as it had existed since the Renaissance was overthrown. The idea of art holding up a mirror to nature became a nostalgic one: a means of diminishing instead of interpreting reality.... [Cubism] re-created the syntax of art so that it could accommodate modern experience” (4, 30). In short, the construction of the Bloor Street Viaduct in In the Skin of a Lion is allied with a futurism that understands Modern art as an expression of unfulfillable desire – that is, as a precursor of postmodernism.

     It is now clear why Lewis/Ondaatje’s opening description of the Viaduct places far less emphasis on what it is than on what it “will” do, including “carry trains that have not even been invented yet.” It is also clear why the Viaduct subsequently becomes the site of the convergence of Temelcoff and Alice in a “moment” that comes to be less important to their relationship than “moments since” (32, 49). Like the “strangely placed moment” that is Cubism itself in Berger’s analysis (5), the Bloor Street Viaduct in Ondaatje’s novel does not merely vault over the Rosedale ravine and the Don valley. It vaults from an occluded past over an unsatisfying present (Lewis ultimately fails to effect change through violent action) towards a future that will always be in the process of becoming. In part a product of the Modernist fantasy of a complete rupture with the past, it is even more obviously a manifestation of the self-serving postmodernist notion that, in the words of Robert Kroetsch (“Mr. Canadian Postmodern” [Hutcheon xiv, 160]), “Canadian literature evolved directly from Victorian into Postmodern.... The country that invented Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye did so by not ever being Modern” (“A Canadian Issue” 1).

II

When the critics of the Fredericton Bridge dubbed it “Blair’s Paper Bridge” because of its wooden construction they were holding it up to ridicule through comparison to the metal bridges that by the early eighteen eighties – more than three decades after the completion of Robert Stephenson’s famous tubular plate Britannia Bridge (1846-50) over the Menai Strait in Wales¹⁵ – had become the bridges of choice for most purposes on account of their strength, durability, and modernity. Two of Canada’s earliest and most acclaimed metal bridges were the Victoria Bridge over the St. Lawrence at Montreal, a tubular plate structure designed by Stephenson and built between 1854 and 1860 (see Hodges passim, Tyrell 199-200, and Vance 6-9), and the Niagara Suspension Bridge (see also: i) over the Niagara River below the Falls, an iron girder and cable structure designed by John Augustus Roebling (1806-69) and built between 1851 and 1855 (see Middleton, passim, Tyrrell 226-27 and Stamp 21-27).¹⁶ “A bridge on the tubular principle, which will be the largest in the world, is begun,” wrote the aristocratic Amelia M. Murray while visiting Montreal in September 1854; “it is to unite the town with the railroad over the St. Lawrence ... and may vie with [the] Crystal Palace in the enterprise and skill it will call forth” (60).¹⁷ A few weeks later, Murray was not quite as impressed by the Niagara Suspension Bridge (“one of the wonders of the world!” according to Frances E.O. Monck [169, and see 158]), but her account of it provides a vivid picture of its innovative, two-tier design:

And did: the Niagara Suspension Bridge was not replaced until 1895-96 and Victoria Bridge was not rebuilt (using its original piers) until 1897-98 (see Tyrrell 340, 187).

     Although Roebling himself conceded that the two-tier structure of his bridge made it less “beautiful than a single-floor structure” would have been (Stamp 23, and see Billington 77), its aesthetic shortcomings were all but eclipsed in the eyes of most of its beholders by its technical accomplishment and by its proximity to the sublime spectacle of Niagara Falls. That “[s]omething so slight” did not “give way beneath ... so heavy” a weight as a train “seemed pure magic,” and its height and form “seemed to make the whole breath-taking panorama [of the river and Falls] all the more magnificent” (David McCullough qtd. in Stamp 27). An icon of the natural sublime had been supplemented if not surmounted by an “icon of the technological sublime” (McKinsey 256), and the result was a magnet not only for tourists, but also for artists and writers, including Walt Whitman, who described the view from the train’s platform as it crossed the bridge as a “picture” that he would never forget: “[t]he falls were in plain view about a mile off.... The river tumbl[ed] green and white, far below me; the dark high banks, the plentiful umbrage, many bronze cedars, in shadow; and tempering and arching all the immense materiality, a clear sky overhead, with a few white clouds, limpid, spiritual, silent” (qtd. in McKinsey, and see Doyle 165-74). There can be no question at all that, whether seen from the shore or used as a vantage point,¹⁸ the Niagara Suspension Bridge and its wooden predecessors and metal successors in the vicinity of the Falls brought about a (Heideggerian) readjustment of perceptions and conceptions of their surroundings on all sides, not least, as Whitman’s description makes apparent, above and below.

     The Niagara Suspension Bridge also prompted thoughts in the minds of many Canadian observers about their country’s evolving relationship with the United States. As seen in the previous chapter, while on a visit to the Brock Monument sometime before 1859, Charles Sangster wrote “From Queenston Heights,” a poem that begins by describing the “classic hill” and its peaceful surroundings and then proceeds to meditate upon the decisive battle that took place there in startlingly querulous and grudging tones: “What have we gained, / But a mere breath of fame, for all the blood / That flowed profusely on this stirring field? ... ’Tis true, a Victory ... ’Twere better than Defeat, a thousand times” (The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay 218). Perhaps because the 1854-66 Reciprocity Agreement between Canada and the United States was either in effect or in the offing when he wrote the poem, Sangster was less bent on commemorating a British and Canadian “Victory” in “From Queenston Heights” than in asserting the kinship of Canadians and Americans.¹⁹ Proclaiming those killed on the battlefield “brothers all, Vanquished and Victors both,” he concludes the poem by focusing on the Niagara Suspension Bridge, which, as he might have known from W.H. Smith’s Canada: Past, Present, and Future (1851), was built by “a joint company of Canadians and Americans” (1:197):

Whereas the Brock Monument represents Canada’s military past, territorial integrity, and British connections, the Niagara Suspension Bridge is a site of diplomacy that elicits hope for a better future based on peace and co-operation between Canada and the United States. It was these and similar ideas that led to the naming of the Peace Bridge (see also: i) of 1925-27 between Buffalo and Fort Erie and the Ambassador Bridge of 1927-29 between Windsor and Detroit: the former came into being as a result in part of a movement in 1913 to commemorate the centenary of the end of the War of 1812, and the latter got its name from its principal advocate, Joseph A. Bower, who conceived of it as “‘an ambassador between the two countries’” (Stamp 81, 98).²⁰ Nowhere is Heidegger’s conception of the bridge as both “thing” and gathering place perhaps more evident than in the bridges that “unite ... Canada and America” (St. Maur 15) across the Niagara, Detroit, St. Clair, and St. Lawrence rivers.

     That even the bridges on the Canadian-American border were capable of “express[ing] much else besides” and thus becoming symbols in Heidegger’s sense is evident in W.H. Withrow’s response to the Niagara Suspension Bridge in our Our Own Country, Canada, Scenic and Descriptive (1889). Describing the bridge as “fairy-like,” Withrow simultaneously conveys a sense of its seemingly delicate form and prepares the way for the complex conceit that follows. More than merely “a life-artery along which throbs a ceaseless pulse of commerce between the Dominion of Canada and the United States of America,” the Niagara Suspension Bridge is to him a web woven by and between “the two fairest and noblest daughters of grand Old England, the great mother of nations” (338-39). As well as signifying peaceful relations between Canada and the United States, it betokens a movement towards the “Federation of the world” foretold by Tennyson in “Locksley Hall” (1842) and heralded by the amicable negotiations among Britain, the United States, and (albeit as a very junior partner) Canada that resulted in the Treaty of Washington (1873):

That bridges and poems can alike both reflect and promote the advance of civilization is implicit in this passage and becomes more apparent as Withrow extends his weaving metaphor, first into the process of writing a poem (“[w]hile I was musing on this theme ... fancies wove themselves into verse”) and then into the resulting poem, a Shakespearean sonnet that figures the Niagara Suspension Bridge as a “deftly woven ... iron band” analogous to the “bright golden strands” of love and friendship between nations and people(s) (340). As a work of art, Withrow’s sonnet is no more than competent, but its claims for the significance of the Niagara Suspension Bridge are among the highest made for any bridge either in Canada or on Canada’s border with the United States.

     If there is one late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century Canadian bridge that rivalled Roebling’s Niagara Suspension Bridge and Stephenson’s Victoria Bridge in fame, it is surely the cantilever bridge across the St. Lawrence River near Quebec City. Conceived in the eighteen eighties and heralded during the decade of its elephantine gestation as “the longest bridge in the world,” the Quebec Bridge (see also: i) was to have consisted of a central span supported by two huge cantilever arms and to have constituted the “magnum opus” of the eminent American bridge engineer Theodore Cooper (1839-1919) (Petroshi 101-03). Instead, it became one of the “major bridge failures” that Henry Petroshi sees as occurring on a thirty year cycle in the West (338). Begun in 1906 with the hope that it would be completed in time for the Quebec Tercentenary celebrations in 1908, it progressed well until August 29, 1907, when its southern cantilever arm collapsed, killing seventy-five people (Petroshi 104, and see Vance 9-17). After a Royal Commission enquiry and report, a “redesigned structure” was begun, but this too met with disaster: “while being hoisted into place” in 1916, its “closing span ... fell to the bottom of the river,” killing eleven people. When it was finally completed in 1917, the Quebec Bridge had become “a symbol of Canadian resolve” (Petroshi 118) and, as the “longest span in the world until the completion of the Ambassador Bridge” in 1929, a “source of enormous pride to Canadians” (Middleton 167). In 1987, it would be nominated as an “International Historic Civil Engineering Landmark” for being “the longest cantilever bridge ever built,” the “‘primary symbol of Canadian engineering’,” and a reflection of “‘human, professional and national values’” (qtd. in Middleton 174). For the better part of a century, it has also been erroneously believed to be the source of the metal in the iron rings that most Canadian professional engineers wear on the little finger of their working hand as a symbol of brotherhood and as a reminder of their obligations and fallibility.²¹

     In very different ways, the Niagara Suspension Bridge and the Quebec Bridge collapses provide a fitting preamble to the final and most recent work to be examined in this chapter. Set on both sides of a dilapidated bridge over unnamed river on the western border between Canada and the United States, Thomas King’s Truth & Bright Water (1999) is based geographically on Sweetgrass, Montana (Truth) and Coutts, Alberta (Bright Water), with nearby Mountainview, Alberta figuring in the novel as Fairview.²² As a reference to “wolf willow” (2) in the novel’s Prologue is perhaps intended to indicate, its conception of the Canada-U.S. border as an arbitrary imposition on the prairie landscape and the Native peoples is indebted to Wallace Stegner’s Wolf Willow (1955), where much is made of the 49th parallel as an expression of “expedien[cy] and compromise” whose ramifications were immense for those living adjacent to it, not least the Indians (45, and see 97-98). “The 49th parallel ran directly through my childhood, dividing me in two,” recalls Stegner; “[i]n winter, in the town of Whitemud [Saskatchewan], we were almost totally Canadian ... [b]ut ... [the] summer and the homestead restored us to something nearly, if not quite American.... We could not be remarkably impressed with the physical differences between Canada and the United States, for our lives slopped over the international boundary every summer day.... For all my eyes could tell me, no Line existed” (81, 82, 83). Nevertheless, Stegner further recalls, the 49th parallel “exerted uncomprehended pressures upon affiliation and belief, custom and costume” and created its own “varieties of lawbreakers, smugglers particularly,” to take advantage of the fact that a frontier is a “line where one body of law stops and another body of law begins” (84, 96). In Truth & Bright Water, King has one of his near-ubiquitous Trickster figures, Monroe Swimmer, an artist bent on restoring the Prairie to at least the appearance of its pre-settlement condition, “look ... out across the river” and observe: “‘There’s Canada.... And this is the United States.... Ridiculous, isn’t it’” (140). Moreover, smuggling hospital waste (rather than cigarettes, which is no longer profitable since “‘Those asshole politicians in Canada dropped the taxes and ruined the business’” [86]) provides a lucrative side-line for the father of the novel’s narrator, a naive young resident of the Bright Water reservation whose name, Tecumseh, links him to one of the Native peoples’ most famous border-crossers. Not surprisingly, the bridge in Truth & Bright Water means in ways that are very different from those of the bridges hitherto discussed.

     When it is introduced in the Prologue, it initially recalls nineteenth-century descriptions of the Niagara Suspension Bridge, but as enchantment is dissolved by proximity in the description it emerges as the dilapidated residue of a violent and incomplete attempt to reconnect the two banks of the river and thus (in what is here a necessary reconfiguration of Heidegger’s generalizations) to re-connect adjacent parts of the landscape that were “set off against each other” by the border (152):

Like the border itself, like the abandoned Methodist church that is then introduced, and like the railroad to which all three are spatially and metaphorically related, the bridge is an alien encrustation built in the name of economic and, in the church’s case, spiritual development. “Three years ago,” Tecumseh later explains, “the new highway from Pipestone was going to pass through Truth and cross into Canada at Bright Water. The foundations for the bridge ... were poured, and everyone started talking about the steady stream of tourists who would stop at the border to catch their breath” and, of course, spend their money (39).²³ “The bridge was half completed when construction came to a halt,” he adds, and “[t]he next day, [the crews] stretched chain-link fencing across both ends, packed up all their equipment, and disappeared. The Sacred Word Gospel people were not far behind.” Abandoned before its connective work was complete, the bridge in Truth & Bright Water permits the river’s banks and, indeed, the river itself to re-appear as things that were “already there.”

     That this is so emerges very clearly in a conversation between Tecumseh and his mother as they cross the river by means of a “basket-and-cable” device similar to the one designed by Charles Ellet for crossing the Niagara River in the years preceding the construction of the Niagara Suspension Bridge (see Stamp 13-20).

A distinct advantage of coming to this dialogue by way of Straton’s The Building of the Bridge is an enhanced recognition of the subtlety with which King aligns Tecumseh’s erroneous and thoroughly Westernized sense of history and time with a similarly Westernized and erroneous sense of place and space, and then comically shatters both with his mother’s laconic identification of the river as the true permanence in the landscape.

     In view of the seriousness of the theme of restoration that underlies many elements of Truth & Bright Water, most conspicuously Monroe Swimmer’s painting out of the church and his population of the prairie with sculptures of bison, it is only to be expected that through allusion and emphasis King continually privileges the natural over the built environment. Near the end of the Prologue, for example, attention turns away from the bridge and the church to the prairie, the appeal of which is nicely summed up in a statement – “and everywhere the air is warm and sweet” (2) – whose diction, syntax, and cadences echo and displace Stephen Leacock’s celebration of the “little town” in the Preface to Sunshine Sketches (“and everywhere the sunshine of the land of hope” [xviii]) which, in turn, endorses Charles Dickens’ celebration of Canada as a country “full of hope and promise” (207) in his American Notes (1842). The Prologue concludes with a summary shift from architecture to nature:

Earlier in the Prologue, the violent and destructive aspects of the bridge were only hinted at in passing in the figure of the “knife,” but here the structure emerges as a “dead,” entrapping, and potentially deadly entity that exerts a chilling and darkening effect on its surroundings. (The force that King gives to the words “the air is sharp” by setting them off from their surroundings both rhythmically and with commas is another indication of the stylistic mastery that is continually evident in Truth & Bright Water.)

     Although the bridge’s sinister qualities are evoked at various points in the course of the novel, they do not emerge fully until its final pages. There Tecumseh’s friend Lum, a young Native from the Canadian side of the border who has dreamed of winning a “running scholarship ... at a big university” (6), commits suicide by running up the “curve of the bridge” towards Bright Water and “disappear[ing] over the edge,” taking Tecumseh’s dog Soldier with him (272). Given the novel’s earlier use of the magic-realist topos of (miraculous) re-appearance in the restorations of Monroe Swimmer, the reader might expect Lum to re-appear in a subsequent chapter, but this is not the case: Lum’s body is found “a couple of days” later by the police and his funeral is held shortly after that (274). (The fact that Soldier’s body is not found may be because, as Tecumseh suspects, the police were not “really looking for him,” but it leaves open the possibility that he either survived the fall or will fulfil the re-appearance topos.)²⁴ In the final analysis, then, the bridge in Truth & Bright Water stands in stark contrast to the other bridges examined in this chapter: a material testament to abandoned schemes and lost hopes, it does not (in Heidegger’s words again) allow “mortals ... [to] come and go from shore to shore” but serves instead as the means by which a young Native from a community that has been divided, broken, disempowered, and constructed by alien societies and cultures achieves release in self-destruction.²⁵ Lum’s last act before he makes his run up the curve of the actual and the “last” bridge is to drop a skull into the river with the comment “‘Nothing to it. All you have to do is let go’” (272). Tecumseh’s final description of the bridge as he and Lum prepare to drop the skull allows it to be read as a macabre figure for the danger and destruction that face all members of a community that was once vibrant and alive but is now dead and decaying:

Annex 1
Di Brandt, “Zone:<le Détroit>”

In 1999, the Art Gallery of Windsor, Ontario commissioned Di Brandt (1952- ) to compose a poem to accompany a photographic portrait of Detroit by Stan Douglas entitled Le Détroit. Premiered at the opening of the exhibition in November of that year and given pride of place in Brandt’s Now You Care collection of 2003, “Zone: <le Détroit>” consists of five sections, three of which were “set to music … and performed … at the international conference/festival Wider Boundaries of Daring: the Modernist Impulse in Canadian Women’s Poetry in October 2001” (Brandt 115). These contexts are significant because they attest to the importance that Brandt attaches to “Zone: <le Détroit>,” indicate that portions of her poetic sequence were mediated by such bleakly unpopulated images of urban deterioration as Douglas’s Collapsed House (1997) and Gem Theatre (1997-98) , and suggest that its forensic presentation of a blighted urban landscape may be a feminist response to Anglo-American Modernism’s great and profoundly masculinist poem in that genre, The Waste Land of T.S. Eliot.     

     In addition to repeating the title of Douglas’s photographic portrait, the title of Brandt’s poem contains two elements, the “<” and “>” surrounding “le Détroit,” that evoke the electronic age and serve as “a graphic analog to the fast car culture … [that] erases landscape and place much the way the internet does.”²⁶ Douglas “doesn’t have any people or animals in his photographs, just streets and houses and alleyways and grass, which I find rather spooky, as if the city is abandoned,” explains Brandt, “so I focussed more on the through stuff, the cars, the river, the train tracks, the tunnel [beneath the Detroit River], the people and dogs…. [P]utting Detroit into electronic quotation marks is meant … to put the tension in the poem, between … rivers and fish and trees and land, and the virtuality created by cars/tunnels/bridges/electricity.” In the same year as the publication of The Waste Land (1922), Le Corbusier presented in Ville contemporaine the plan for the reconstruction of the Right Bank in Paris that would provide the basis for Modern urban planning: a gridiron system of streets serving twenty-four skyscrapers, each surrounded by a large open space (the so-called “skyscraper in the park” concept). Central to his thinking were “fast car[s],” which he envisaged entering cities on “elevated track[s]” at “sixty miles an hour” and then descending at slower speeds to pass “gently through the residential quarters” (The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning 177). “A city made for speed,” he emphasized, is a city “made for success” (179). It is against this way of thinking and its consequences that “Zone: <le Détroit>” enveighs, not from the platform of Jane Jacobs and other opponents of Le Corbusier’s planning principles, but from an ecofeminist perspective rooted in the work of Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and other writers.²⁷

     The inference of an intertextual relationship between “Zone: <le Détroit>” and The Waste Land is supported by the five-part structure of both pieces and confirmed by the reference in the opening poem of Brandt’s sequence to the mythical figure who presides over Eliot’s poem, impotently awaiting the rescue of his kingdom from its blight by the arrival of a questing knight who is able to confront and transcend the materialism that has rendered it spiritually and physically sterile:

On each side of a border that poses no barrier to pollution, stand cities whose economies are to a great extent built on a major source of the environmental contamination that has “poisoned” the area and threatens to destroy the earth. Between the two cities runs a river – the Detroit – that is itself polluted, and a bridge that Brandt envisages as a stage for a Native leader whose commitment to his homeland and belief in the Native peoples’ common ownership of land made him an implacable enemy of American expansionism, led to his death in defense of Canada during the War of 1812, and now, nearly two centuries later, give him the coloration of an ecological hero:

Inspirational though he may be, Tecumseh cannot be willed back to life as the questing knight who will heal the blighted land. Nor indeed can the task involve any Fisher King or questing knight, for both figures are representatives of the very group – “M*E*N” – that, by Brandt’s analysis, must be accounted responsible for the present state of an area that once lay “at the heart of the dream / of the new world” (18, 13).

     Damage to that “heart” goes far beyond the “arteries / of the potholed city” in which “the future is perhaps fatally “clogged” (13). A “land” imagined centuries ago by European colonisers as “lush,” “virgin,” and “dripping with fruit / and the promise of wheat” – that is, as fecund, female, and occupiable in the sexual as well as the imperialistic senses of the word – has been “overlaid” (another sexually resonant word) with “glass and steel / and the dream of speed.” A sky once graced by migrating “passenger pigeons” in their millions is now haunted by their “ghosts,” obscured by “silver tower[s],” and toxified by “yellow air” akin to the “brown fog” of The Waste Land (Collected Poems 65). With a none-too-subtle allusion to the Lord’s Prayer (or, to give it its even more patriarchal name, the “Our Father”), Brandt takes aim at her largest targets, the physical and political entities for which the land was most recently “crushed” in order to provide conduits for more and more “cars and trucks and electricity”:

In a landscape blighted by modernity, pollution, free trade, and North America’s busiest highway, the perpetrators, perpetuators, and victims of the blight appear miniscule and inhuman (“scattered / like dust or rain in ditches”). Like the Fisher King, they can do little more than observe their “poisoned country,” await its and their redemption through death and rebirth, and wonder “who will … cover … [their] splintered / bones with earth and blood, / who will sing us back into – ” That the first poem in the sequence thus ends with a fragment and a hyphen reflects not only its theme of a world and its inhabitants being “blown … to bits,” but also the desire for wholeness and health that impels its environmental diagnosis and underlies the two poems that follow.

     Both of these are macabre glimpses into the horrific effects and costs, especially for women, of living in the Detroit-Windsor “zone” and the physical and cultural environment of which it is an especially toxic part. In the first, a journey towards Windsor on the 401 becomes a foray into paranoiac fear and urban legend when one of the travellers judges from the traffic that “there’s no one [else] going to Windsor, / only everyone coming from [it]” (15). “[M]aybe there’s nuclear war,” speculates the traveller,

And so on. The second poem is more painfully macabre in its subject and more obviously didactic in purpose. Introducing herself into the sequence for the first time, Brandt conjures up a surrealistic and Dionysiac “ghost dance” of severed and “dandelion”-like “female breasts” to inveigh against the use of cancer-causing herbicides to keep urban lawns free of weeds:

The manifest absurdity of the notion that herbicides are intensifying the greenness of grass and will continue to do so ad infinitum as the poem’s final lines and lack of terminal punctuation suggest only increases the horror of the equation of “missing breasts” and poisoned weeds, green lawns and radical mastectomy, that the poem so vividly presents through the figure of the dandelions.

     Implicit in the conflation of dandelions and breasts is the ecofeminist assertion of a special affinity between women and Nature. Earlier in the poem, Brandt presents herself as a questor who is motivated by such an affinity and, by implication, in alignment if not necessarily in possession of the characteristic needed to redeem the waste land:

Although the speaker of the ensuing poem is not personalized as here, the affinity for colourful instances of Nature’s “defian[ce] against creosote” persists in the poem’s opening celebration of the “gold and red” of a “glorious tree … / splayed out for sheer pleasure / over asphalt and concrete, / ribbons of dark desire / driving us madly toward death …” (17). In an environment where “creosote,” “asphalt and concrete” are the norm, a resplendent tree appears “perverse,” like other urban sights that are arrayed for “sheer pleasure”:

Here perhaps is the equivalent of the question that in the myth of the Fisher King must be asked if the waste land is to be rescued from blight, a parallel to the “Shall I at least set my lands in order?” near the conclusion of The Waste Land (Collected Poems 79): to question “the dream of speed” is at least to question one of the claims of the “gods / of the Super highway.”

     But if speed were the only problem, a solution would be ready to hand in the Slow or Lento Movement that began in 1989. It is not, and nor is one provided by Brandt’s poem, for the “gold and red” of its “glorious tree” are also attributes of the unseasonal “heat” of global warming a phenomenon that does not negate the “splendour” of the tree but does make a response to it more complex and dark:

As a period, a series of periods, or an absence of terminal punctuation would not, the comma with which the poem ends invites a continuation of the list that precedes it, while the trajectory of this list itself – “a dead man, / or a kid, or a dog” – almost ensures that further possibilities – a leaf, for example, or a branch – will be drawn from the natural world with which the reader is thus drawn into closer affinity. (Of course, if the reader’s contribution is, say, an old tyre or a stray shopping cart, he or she represents the problem rather than its solution.)

     In the final poem in the sequence, blame for the poisoning of the environment is laid squarely in the lap of the male sex in a burst of ecofeminist sarcasm whose specific targets may at first glance seem anatomically incorrect:

As a category, “phalli / dangling from … thighs” includes swords, pistols, and several other extensions and instruments of male aggression, but when the construction of the tunnel beneath the Detroit River in 1928-30 becomes the focal point of the poem it also includes the tools and tool-belts of construction workers. As the poem continues, the tunnel’s builders are given stereotypically male traits and attributes and ridiculed as servants of a false and destructive god whose brave efforts have done nothing more than facilitate consumerism by giving another form to “the dream of speed”:

This is not a question, for there is only one answer and it has already been provided.

     M*E*N are the first and most obvious targets in the final poem of Brandt’s sequence but they are not the only or last group to feel the homeopathic sting of her sarcasm. The echo of Eliot’s famously disdainful “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michaelangelo” (Collected Poems 13) that sounds in the “coming and going, [and] chatting about / this and that” of the “mothers and maids” as they travel to and fro in the tunnel marks the passage as a writing back that at once refutes Eliot’s lines as a generalization about women and grants their accuracy in some circumstances about certain women, specifically those who acquiesce in the “dream of speed,” the consumerism that it facilitates, the detachment from Nature that it encourages, and the destruction of human life that it causes. “[O]ur feet never / leav[e] the car,” writes Brandt as she implicates herself in all that a cross-border shopping expedition entails and implies,

In the aftermath of 911, suspicion and inconvenience await on the other side of the tunnels and bridges that lead from “here” to “there,” but pollution continues to flow freely across and down the river, shopping maintains its appeal as a recreational activity, and speed remains a dream that is chased, perhaps more frantically than ever as delays become more frequent, streets more clogged, highways more congested. No questing knight rides to the rescue of the “fisher king” and “poisoned land” in “Zone: <le Détroit>,” but the poem as a whole is a manifestation of a questing ecological consciousness, whose critical attitude, connective spirit, and refusal to acquiesce offer hope that the time is soon coming when “the lit bridge over the dark river” will prompt thoughts of environmental recovery and restoration as well as degradation and loss. “[T]eetering on the brink of political and environmental apocalypse, [we] have the challenge and possibility of imagining the future of our planet in radically revisionary ways,” writes Brandt at the close of her Afterword to Speaking of Power: the Poetry of Di Brandt: “rediscovering the interconnectedness of everything, the green world recovering its strength, language remembering its life giving power, our spirits singing in chorus with the breathing world, uncaged, not above it, not against it, our blood pulsing in harmony with its rhythms, deep rooted, poetically” (53).

Annex 2
John Richardson, Wacousta

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. I immediately started backing up and apologising. “I mean, it’s really none of my business, I don’t know all that much about politics. Maybe you could blow up the Peace Bridge or something.”
    I was horrified to see that they were taking me seriously.

                                   – Margaret Atwood, Bodily Harm (1976) 261

Between the publication of Truth & Bright Water and the writing of this essay much has happened to change North Americans’ perception and conception of bridges. Whether across borders or, especially in the United States, within borders bridges have become places of fear and tension where the question of what or who “stops” or “begins ... presencing” has been lent new political, economic, and racial dimensions. Are North America’s bridges to be sites where “mortals come and go from shore to shore” without fear or hindrance, or are they to be fearful and restricted reminders of the “last bridge,” “the other side” (Heidegger 153), the deathly and deadly Other? If the latter, then perhaps they do have a distant ancestor in the bridges of John Richardson’s Wacousta; or, the Prophecy, – in the “drawbridge” that “communicate[s] with the fort” but “help[s] to protect” it from the inhabitants of the forest and in the “strong wooden bridge” at the mouth off the St. Clair River that Richardson modelled on the bridge “by which the Bloody Run was ... crossed” at the time of the siege of Detroit in 1763 (63, 149, 538).²⁸ As the novel opens, the “drawbridge” has already failed as the only means of gaining entry to the fort and the garrison is in a state of bewilderment and dread:

By the end of the novel, the wooden bridge has been the site of a vengeful collision of othernesses so destructive as to be almost nihilistic:

“[P]eople think of the bridge as primarily and really merely a bridge,” wrote Heidegger, but “after that, and occasionally, it might possibly express much else besides” (Poetry, Language, Thought 153). Indeed.

Notes

1. In Engineers of Dreams: Great American Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America, Henry Petroshi observes that the wooden truss “came in for attention as a true bridge with its discussion by Palladio in the sixteenth century” and quotes Palladio on the wooden truss as a “‘most beautiful contrivance’” (10-11, 35). He also observes that “[i]n eighteenth-century England, wooden bridges resembling Palladian designs came to be called ‘mathematical bridges,’ presumably because of the forethought and calculation that had to precede the cutting, assembling, and bolting together into an effective structure of the many different wooden pieces” (36). It is possible that the Union Bridge was partly inspired by the Craigellachie Bridge (1814) over the River Spey in Scotland, a single-span iron structure designed by Thomas Telford who is most remembered for his later suspension bridges over the straits of Conway (1822-26) and Menai (1819-26). Detailed accounts of the trials and tribulations that attended the construction of the chain of bridges of which the Union Bridge was the centerpiece are provided by A.H.D. Ross in Ottawa Past and Present 71-85, Nick and Helma Mika in Bytown: the Early Days of Ottawa, 58-61, Lucien Brault in Links between Two Cities: Historic Bridges between Ottawa and Hull, 10-15, and Jonathan F. Vance in Building Canada, 3-5.[back]
2. For a rich discussion of the complexities of boundaries or borders as barriers and loci of communication see Anthony Wilden’s System and Structure, especially xxxix-xliv, 183-87, 219-23, and 324-29. [back]
3. For details and illustrations of some wood and iron bridges in mid-nineteenth-century Canada, see Henry Grattan Tyrrell’s History of Bridge Engineering 199-200, 222-26, and elsewhere, and, for further discussion of the Fredericton Bridge, Harry Hagerman’s “Fredericton Bridges Hold Many Stories” and my Introduction to the electronic edition of The Building of the Bridge. Hagerman provides a quite detailed description of the Fredericton Bridge: “[t]he piers and abutments of th[e] structure, consisted of cedar-log crib-work, which were filled with stone. Otherwise the entire structure, consisting of nine double-arch truss spans, was built almost entirely of wood. In addition, on the Fredericton side, there was a swing draw span of about 150 feet. To alleviate the hazards of the annual ice runs – and to dispel the belief that the bridge would go out with the first jam – ice guards were installed on the up-river side. The fabrication consisted of hardwood planks, positioned at an angle of 45 degrees.” He also observes that on August 1, 1905 “two spans near the centre of the wooden structure burned.” [back]
4. See, for example, the final sentence of the prayer “for the whole state of Christ’s Church militant here on earth” in the Communion service, which reads, in part: “give us grace so to follow their good examples, that with them we may be partakers of thy heavenly kingdom.” [back]
5. For example, its description of the mediaeval “Brothers of the Bridge” (see 77-102 and Tyrrell 39-40). [back]
6. Compare Straton’s “Here, where the sunken weed-mesh parts, / Wax-white lilies with golden hearts. / Sleep on the stream, – fair spirits, they, / Of wooing beams ...” (511-14) with Crawford’s description of the water lily in Malcolm’s Katie as the “‘Mild soul of the unsalted wave! / White bosom holding golden fire!’” whose “‘desire’” is to be “‘fill’d’” with love (3:183-97) and Straton’s description as a whole with Roberts’s “Ode to Drowsihood” in Orion, and Other Poems. [back]
7. The power of bridges to alter and create such relationships is taken as a given in numerous more recent Canadian poems. In “Faust on Two Wheels, Going Like Hell” (1995) by Gary Geddes (1940- ), for example, the speaker ascends the “grade” of Lion’s Gate Bridge in Vancouver “until [he] can watch foreign ships / ease their way into the Inner Harbour” (26) and in “Don’t mention the Word Love to Me” (1986) by Jan Conn (1952- ) the speaker “walk[s] / The length of the Granville Street Bridge” in the same city and observes a scene of “Boats in the harbour …, lit up / in a celebration that is “alien” and “mountains behind like backdrops” that are “nowhere [she] can imagine being” (56). In Rites of Alienation (1989) by Douglas Fetherling (1949- ) the Bathurst Street Bridge in Toronto provides the vantage point for a bleak urban vignette: “Through broken plant windows / rusty railyard, cold lake empty / view from the Bathurst Street bridge” (20). In Ted Plantos’s “The Lone Ranger Social Club” (1993), climbing down the “battered cross beam ties” of a “railroad bridge” over the Don River to the east of the Bathurst Street Bridge provides children, first with a new perspective on the “tramping river” and then with a sense of “adventure” and danger that leaves them “stripped … of courage, / and … with nerves sweating / the last few parallel beams before ground” (19). In Robert Currie’s “Trestle Game” (1977), children are shaken and “forever / changed” by an experience on a “CP trestle” across the South Saskatchewan River (19) (and see Currie’s “First Elegy,” “Taken,” “The Door in the Governor’s Bridge Is Open,” “Fall,” “And Again,” and “Sky Diver at the Lion’s Gate Bridge” in the same collection). See also Leslie Choyce’s “Thoughts while Watching an Oil Rig Adrift in Halifax Harbour” in his The End of Ice (1985) 51, Cyril Dabydeen’s “Capilano Suspension Bridge” in his Discussing Columbus (1997) 52-53, Mary di Michele’s “Gravity” in her Immune to Gravity (1986) 58-59, and Patrick Friesen’s “midtown bridge” in his St. Mary at Main (1998) 14. Among the numerous poems in which Canadian bridges frame a portion of the surrounding landscape or otherwise alter the way things are perceived and understood, see Geddes, “False Creek,” The Perfect Cold Warrior 16-17, George Bowering, “White, Unseen,” The Concrete Island: Montreal Poems, 1967-71 (1977) np, Frank Davey, “To the Lion’s Gate Bridge,” Bridge Force (1965) 13, John Donlon, “Arm’s Reach,” Green Man (1999) 71-73, Mick Burrs, “The Day My Mother Called to Say My Father Died,” Dark Halo (1993) 41-42, and Marianne Bluger, “The Very Spot” and “What Happened to the Body Then,” Scissor, Paper, Woman (2000) 11 and 32. Nor are bridges as platforms for perception absent from Canadian prose. See, for example, Thomas A. Clark’s exquisite On Greta Bridge (1984), when the bridge in northern England of the title is the site of a meditation in which “all contingencies are washed away, while the hours pass, in stately procession, under [it]” (np). “It was surely not as a crossing-place this bridge was erected,” Clark imagines, “but as an inducement to idleness, a monument to the lucid architecture of stillness. These simple curves and angles lend to a pause in the middle air the dignity of settled stone.” See also Robert Standquist’s The Dreamlife of Bridges (2003), where Vancouver’s bridges, especially the Burrard Street Bridge, are personified as women, serve as shelters for the homeless, and provide the platform for one of the novel’s climactic events (see, for instance,15, 43-44, and 147-53). [back]
8. Tyrrell defines a viaduct as a bridge “in which a series of longer spans are borne on individual towers composed of two or more bents braced together” (365). [back]
9. “The following day I [Commissioner Harris] was lunching with the architect John Lyle. I told him of the ... landscapes [of which I had dreamed] and he began to laugh. ‘These are real,’ he said. ‘Where?’ I asked. ‘In Toronto.’ It turned out I was dreaming about projects for the city that had been rejected over the years. Wonderful things that were said to be too vulgar or expensive, too this, too that” (237). [back]
10. Ondaatje erroneously describes Burke as “the bridge’s architect” (49). [back]
11. Since the addition in 2002-03 of barriers that are intended to deter potential suicides, the appearance of the Bloor Street Viaduct has been drastically altered as has the view from it. According to the architect who designed the “Luminous Veil” (as the barriers are called), Dereck Revington, “‘it draws the skin of the lake [Ontario] to the walls of the viaduct, and takes the entire structure of the viaduct, and folds it into the Don Valley’” (qtd. in Jacob Richler). [back]
12. In “Burr: the Historical Novel,” Gore Vidal observes that “[w]here the novel set in history often goes wrong is when the author can’t visualize any time but his own and so imposes his own present on a different place” and relates this failure to an “inability to begin to empathize with those of a different political persuasion, not to mention country, the past into which one must feel one’s way” (40, 41). Along the same lines, John Demos observes in “Real Lives and Other Fictions: Reconsidering Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose” that an important aspect of the “verisimilitude” and “authenticity” of a “novel set in history” is “its representation of period values and attitudes” (139, 137). “Good novelists ... not only endorse historical accuracy in principle,” writes Mark C. Carnes in the Introduction to the collection of essays in which these observations occur, “but [they] also pour much of the actual historical record into their work” (20). In “A Wrench in Time: a Sub-Sub-Librarian Looks beneath the Skin of a Lion,” Dennis Duffy observes apropos Ondaatje’s “declared aim … of returning to history the actualities of the workers’ experience” that he “does not restore Temelcoff’s history; the man was already there, in print and photograph. What happens, instead, is that In the Skin of a Lion drags Temelcoff and all that he intimates about the realm of society into the realm of myth,” a procedure that Duffy counts as one of the novel’s strengths (125, 128). A notorious example of the violation of the principle of historical accuracy – the accuracy contract between the author and reader of an historical novel – is The Da Vinci Code (2003), with its treacherously slippery disclaimer.[back]
13. See, for example, the reviews of Tom Marshall and Neil Schmitz. [back]
14. And, some might add, overwritten: when Temelcoff catches the falling nun “his timing had been immaculate, the grace of the habit, but he found himself a moment later holding the figure against him dearly” (32). In his Twayne book on Ondaatje, Douglas Barbour comments on the “outrageous logic” (185) of the flying nun episode. [back]
15. The first metal bridge was, of course, Abraham Darby’s Coalbrookdale Bridge (1779) over the River Severn in England. [back]
16. “Other interesting suspension bridges in Canada are those at St. John, New Brunswick, ... designed by ... [Edward W. Serrell], and one at Montmorency Falls, Quebec. The St. John Bridge dates from 1852.... It has ten cables, and stone towers and was rebuilt in 1857. The Montmorency bridge ... collapsed some years ago ..., and only the stone towers now remain. The old Chaudière highway suspension bridge over the Ottawa bridge at Ottawa ... was removed in 1888” (Tyrrell 224-25). Amelia M. Murray describes the last as “handsome” (93). As Elizabeth McKinsey observes, the Niagara Suspension Bridge was Roebling’s “proving ground” for his later “masterpiece,” Brooklyn Bridge (see also: i) (1869-83) (253, and see also David McCullough, The Great Bridge and Alan Trachtenberg, Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol). [back]
17. Robert M. Stamp records that the Victoria Bridge was known for a long time as the “eighth wonder of the world” (53). To “A Lady” (Jane Porter), it was “the Marvel of Bridges”(39) and to W.H.Withrow it was “one of the grandest achievements of engineering skill in the world” (233). Detailed contemporary accounts of its design and construction can be found in James Hodges’ Construction of the Great Victorian Bridge in Canada and in Charles Legge’s A Glance at Victoria Bridge and the Men who Built It, which are usefully supplemented by the section on “Travel and Transportation” in The Dominion of Canada 257-65 by H.Y. Hind and others and by the section on “The Victoria Bridges” in William Henry Atherton’s Montreal 2: 612-15. The last includes two quotations that will appeal to anyone with an interest in perceptions of Canada and manifestations of Canadian identity: Robert Stephenson’s remark in 1853 that when he visited Canada “‘twenty-five years before ... the St. Lawrence seemed to be like the sea, and [he] certainly never thought of bridging it’” and George Étienne Cartier’s response to a question from Queen Victoria about the length of the bridge in feet: “‘When we Canadians build a bridge and dedicate it to Your Majesty we measure it, not in feet, but in miles’” (2: 613, 614). In “The Spirit of Place,” Douglas Richardson describes the Victoria Bridge as “a work of sublime proportions” but considers it “the most eloquent expression of the malevolent turn that the genius loci sometimes takes in this country,” observing that its “tube of 25 spans extending 6,592 feet with approaches of almost two miles” was “a traveller’s nightmare in the age of steam and smoke” because it had “scarcely any ventilation or lighting” (27). Although opened to traffic late in 1859, the Victoria Bridge was not dedicated by the Prince of Wales until August 25, 1860, at which time Harper’s Weekly published engravings showing it in all its massive glory and festooned with lights for the Prince’s visit. See also Raymond Filip, “Common Grave: Point St. Charles” 14 for the Victoria Bridge as “Montreal’s first footpath to bestride the tide, / straight as an Iroquois arrow, / … solid as the Royal Bank,” and “built upon the backs of foreigners / who burned their bridges behind them….” [back]
18. In the Tour of H.R.H. the Prince of Wales through British America and the United States, “A British Canadian” records that during the Prince’s visit to the Niagara Suspension Bridge “the royal car ... crossed to [its] centre, whence the visitor had a capital view of the Falls” (188). [back]
19. Sangster’s reconciliatory tone may also be a function of the desire to sell The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, and Other Poems to American tourists as well as to Canadians (see Bentley, “Introduction,” The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay xl-l). [back]
20. See Stamp 26 and 93 for reproductions of the postage stamps that were issued for the centenary of the Niagara Suspension Bridge in 1948 and the fiftieth anniversary of the Peace Bridge in 1977. The caption on the former, an American stamp, reads “A Century of Friendship/United States-Canada.” In two poems in Public Fantasy (1983), “Photo Session” and “Maggie T. Zaps the Heretics,” by C.H. Gervais (1946- ), the Ambassador Bridge makes fanciful appearances, in the former as parallel to “Maggie T”’s “partying to ragtime / & stepping high above the twin cities” of Windsor and Detroit and in the latter as part of a fantasy in which she declares herself to be a “TOURIST ATTRACTION,” proclaiming “Let me tell you how / The river cuts thru / me until / I am exposed / & one with the / stars / & around me I bend / & clasp the Ambassador Bridge so it sparkles / around my waist … ” (49-50, 33). [back]
21. I am grateful to Mike Bartlett of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Western Ontario for discussing the significance of the iron ring with me and for allowing me to raid his library for books on bridges and bridge engineers. See David McFadden, “Crossing Second Narrows Bridge in an Old Blue Morris Minor” in The Art of Darkness (1984) 99-100 for a meditation on the collapse on June 17, 1958, during its construction, of the Vancouver bridge of the poem’s title, a disaster that plunged “twenty-three [in fact eighteen] workers to their cursed deaths / in the twisted metal of Burrard Inlet.” “Memories are made of this,” observes McFadden, “And the bogus bridge-builders are all around us. / It’s no longer worthwhile to build a good bridge / unless you do it so furtively / no one will know what you are doing.” On June 17 every year, a ceremony convened by Ironworkers Local 97 commemorates the men who died during the construction of the bridge that was renamed Ironworkers Memorial Second Narrow Bridge in 1994. [back]
22. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that King’s Bright Water is also based on Stegner’s Whitemud or that such passages as the following lie behind his conception of Truth and Bright Water: “[w]e bought supplies in Harlem or Chinook, and got our mail at Hydro, all in Montana. In the fall we hauled our wheat ... freely and I suppose illegally across the Milk River towns and sold it where it was handiest to sell. Even yet, between Willow Creek and Treelon, a degree and a half of longitude, there is not a single settlement or a custom station” (83). In an interview with Jennifer Andrews in December 1999, King stated that what he finds “compelling about borders” is the fact that “there is one. The fact that right in the middle of this perfectly contiguous landscape someone has drawn a line and on one side it’s Canadian and therefore very different from the side that is American. Borders are ... very artificial and subjective barriers that we throw up around our lives in all sorts of different ways. National borders are just indicative of the kinds of borders we build around ourselves” (172). In the same interview, King observes that the bridge in Truth & Bright Water “indicates this border” as does the river “[b]ut the characters ignore it. They ignore it the same way they ignore the bridge ... [which] itself is a Picture of Dorian Gray kind of structure” that symbolizes the “deteriorat[ion]” of “relationships between people ... races and ... countries. It won’t hold the weight of people trying to cross back and forth” (172-73). [back]
23. See Stamp 86-93 and elsewhere for cross-border bridges as conduits for tourists and boosts to the local Canadian economy. [back]
24. “I walk the river bank from the bridge to the flat, just like the night Lum and Soldier and I went searching for the woman” who turned out to be Monroe Swimmer in disguise, Tecumseh later states. “I don’t expect to find Soldier alive, but I am happy that no one has found his body either. There’s always the chance that he survived the fall but was injured and lost his memory, and that one day he’ll remember and come home” (277). [back]
25. A fruitful comparison could be made between the abandoned bridge of King’s novel and the bridge in Ravensong (1993) by the Métis and Salish writer Lee Maracle (1950- ), a structure that conspicuously fails to allow the protagonist to span to the gap between white and Native cultures but whose “arc” (centre) is the site for her of an epiphanic moment of insight (see 74-75, and 40, 43-44, 60-61, 90, 186-88, 194-95 and elsewhere). In Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature, George Elliott Clarke identifies and inveighs against “[t]he trope of ‘building bridges’... [as] the sine qua non of political righteous, liberal identified criticism” in the postcolonial mode, citing instances of it in the work of Lynette Hunter, Coomi S. Vevaina, and other writers that “inspire pugnacious questions” about “who’s crossing (and presumably building) these supposed bridges and why?”(270 n15). See also Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here (1996) for the suggestion that a (black) “woman can be a bridge, limber, and living, breathless, because she don’t know where the bridge might lead” and “she don’t need no assurance except that it would lead out with certainity, no assurance except the arch and disappearance ... a way to cross over from slavery to freedom” (16; and see “the bridges leading nowhere” and “the viaduct at Bathurst” in Toronto later in the novel [65, 95]). [back]
26. These and the subsequent comments by Brandt are drawn from two emails of early September 2005 in which she generously responded to queries about the poem. [back]
27. Among the texts that Brandt identifies as influences in her emails are Irigaray’s “The Female Gender” in Sexes and Genealogies (105-24) and Cixous’ “The School of Roots” in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (111-61). Brandt also mentions Erin Mouré as a probable influence on her ecofeminism. See also her “Looking forward, looking back,” which prefaces the collection that emanated from Wider Boundaries of Daring, and her Afterword to Speaking of Power: the Poetry of Di Brandt. [back]
28. The reference to “Bloody Run” is in Richardson’s Introduction to the 1832 edition of the novel. In the Introduction to the 1832 edition he refers to the bridge as “‘Bloody Bridge’” (22). [back]

Works Cited