When I was in ninth grade the orchestra had the opportunity to travel to the a Heritage Performance Festival competition held in New York City. I’d never been to NYC before and was extremely excited. I couldn’t get any consistent sleep on the tour bus we road overnight from Jefferson City, Missouri so I stayed up most of the night listening to the Cardigans album “First Band on the Moon” that I picked up at our dinner stop, a mall in Indiana. To this day it remains one of my favorite albums of all time.
I drifted in and out of a shallow sleep. At one point my gaze solidified enough from the haze of half sleep to recognize a beautiful suspension bridge adjacent to I-70. It looked like something from a dream, ancient and dotted with fairy lights, rising uphill into a city that we swept past on the interstate. I drifted off again after this only to awaken a few times in panics as we fell over ridges in Appalachia, ridges I have now passed on foot and can attest to their steepness. I was never able to find the bridge again. I had no clue where we were along our route, gps was barely a consumer product at this time and not in phones… not that I had a phone. When google introduced street view I scoured river crossings in New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania and never found the bridge I saw that night. I gave up looking for it. It was too fantastic and must have been half dream, half reality.
I passed through a tunnel along a pedestrian trail into downtown Wheeling this afternoon to meet back up with the road, The National Road, Highway 40 and there it was. The beautiful old suspension bridge from that night years ago! The Wheeling Suspension Bridge. Go read about her and come back! She connects Wheeling to Wheeling Island in the middle of the Ohio River.
Thank you bridge for answering a burning question from a lifetime ago and for helping me across the Ohio River and into Ohio herself! I left Pennsylvania this morning, crossed the WHOLE state of West Virginia (an epic feat) in just a few hours and now I will sleep in St. Clairsville Ohio.
34 miles… and oh wow 666% of the default fitbit goal of 10k steps. Wish me luck guys. The devil might come challenge me to a… walkathon tonight. That’s not going to make a very compelling Charlie Daniels Band song :/
2 Comments
THAT is an awesome bridge…
How cool is that—finding that bridge! The only thing cooler is you in Ohio already! Good job! We love reading your blogs every night—thanks for writing them!