The Construction

Salt and Crossing

Chapter 13: The Construction

The first piling went in on October fourteenth at 9:42 in the morning, and Harlan saw it from the wheelhouse on the 10:00 crossing, the crane on the barge lifting the steel cylinder — sixty feet long, four feet in diameter, the cylinder's surface the dull orange of primer applied at the fabrication yard in Bath — and lowering it through the water into the channel bottom, the pile driver mounted on the barge's deck hammering the cylinder downward with blows that Harlan could feel through the Constance's hull from eight hundred yards away, the vibration traveling through the water the way sound travels through air, diminished by distance but not eliminated, the blows arriving at the Constance as a rhythmic tremor in the deck plates, a percussion that was not the engine's hum and not the water's motion but was something new, something that had not been in the channel before, the sound of the bridge entering the water for the first time.

He watched the crane. The crane was yellow — Liebherr, he would learn later, a German-made crawler crane rated at 300 tons, brought to the site on a flatbed truck that had crossed on the Constance the previous week, the crane's boom disassembled for transport and reassembled on the barge, the reassembly taking two days, two days during which the barge sat in the channel and the construction crew worked in the weather and the weather was October weather, which is to say changeable, the wind shifting from southwest to northwest and back, the temperature rising and falling, and the changeability was the coast's way of saying that October is not a settled month but a transitional one, a month that is leaving one season and approaching another and that expresses the transition through instability.

The piling entered the water. The water accepted it — the water had no choice but to accept it, the water could not refuse a four-foot cylinder driven by a hydraulic hammer delivering 300,000 foot-pounds of energy per blow — and the acceptance was visible as a disturbance on the surface, a ring of foam that spread from the piling's entry point and dissipated and was renewed with each hammer blow, the rings pulsing outward like the rings on a target, and the target was the channel, and the channel had been hit.

Harlan adjusted the Constance's course. The adjustment was small — three degrees to port, routing the ferry fifty yards south of its normal track to avoid the construction zone that the Coast Guard had established around the barge, the zone marked by yellow buoys that had not been in the channel two weeks ago and that were now part of the channel's furniture, the new furniture of the new arrangement, and the arrangement was temporary in the sense that the construction would end but permanent in the sense that the bridge would remain, and the permanence was the point, was the whole point, was the thing that the piling entering the water announced — not I am here but I am staying, not this is construction but this is change.

Three degrees to port. It was the first time in thirty-four years that Harlan had deviated from the channel's established track for a reason other than weather or current or traffic. The track was the track — the line between the departure marker and the arrival marker, corrected for tide and wind, the same line that his father had followed and that the pilots before his father had followed, the line that was not drawn on the water but was drawn in the knowledge of the men who crossed, and the line was being redrawn now, not by a captain's judgment but by a construction barge's position, and the redrawing was the bridge's first alteration of the crossing, the first of many, and the first was significant not because three degrees mattered — three degrees was nothing, was less than the correction for a building flood — but because the reason for the three degrees was not the water but the bridge, not the channel's conditions but the bridge's presence, and the presence was new, was unprecedented, was the first obstruction in the channel in Harlan's lifetime.

The channel had never been obstructed. This was remarkable, was a fact worth pausing on, because most waterways of any significance had been altered by human intervention — dredged, marked, bridged, dammed, narrowed, widened, redirected — but this channel, this 1.4-mile passage between Port Clement and Dunmore Island, had been left alone, had been allowed to exist as the glacier had left it, as the tides had shaped it, as the currents had carved it, and the leaving-alone was not neglect but respect, the respect of a community that understood the channel as a thing to be navigated rather than modified, crossed rather than conquered.

Now the conquering had begun.

Owen Delaney rode the 10:00. He boarded at Port Clement with his notebook and his hardhat and the work jacket that had replaced the sport coat, the jacket Carhartt, brown, the color already darkened by salt and weather, the jacket becoming the jacket of a man who worked outside, who stood on barges in October wind, who oversaw the driving of pilings into a channel he had studied and measured and modeled but had not, Harlan knew, felt, had not stood over for thirty-four years and learned by the body's accumulation.

Owen climbed to the wheelhouse. This had become routine — Owen climbed to the wheelhouse on every crossing, stood beside Harlan, watched the channel, sometimes spoke, sometimes did not, and the standing-beside was not intrusive but was companionable, was the shared occupancy of a space by two men who respected each other's competence and who were, in different ways, professionals of the same water.

"First piling," Owen said.

"I felt it," Harlan said.

Owen looked at him. "From here?"

"Through the hull. The hammer. Each blow."

Owen nodded slowly. He looked at the channel, at the barge, at the crane, at the piling that was now half-driven, thirty feet in the water and thirty feet above it, the exposed portion standing in the channel like a signpost, a marker, an announcement, and the announcement was legible from the wheelhouse the way a headline is legible from across a room — not the details but the meaning, not the text but the import.

"The bridge," Owen said, "will be 2,100 feet long. Cable-stayed. Two towers, each one 185 feet above mean high water. The deck will be 65 feet above mean high water at the center — enough clearance for any vessel that currently transits the channel."

"The Constance's mast is 48 feet," Harlan said.

"Seventeen feet of clearance," Owen said. "More than enough."

"The Constance won't need the clearance," Harlan said. "The Constance will be decommissioned."

Owen was quiet. He had walked into the statement the way a person walks into a room they did not know was dark — the entrance easy, the orientation difficult — and the statement was not hostile but was factual, was Harlan's way of placing the bridge's consequence beside its dimensions, of noting that the clearance was designed for a vessel that the bridge would render unnecessary, and the rendering-unnecessary was the fact that the dimensions concealed, the human cost that the engineering did not include in its calculations.

"The design life is a hundred years," Owen said. "The towers are reinforced concrete. The cables are galvanized steel with polyethylene sheathing. The deck is post-tensioned concrete on steel girders. The abutments are founded on bedrock — we cored to bedrock on both sides, forty-two feet on the mainland side, sixty-one feet on the island side."

Harlan listened. He listened the way he listened to the weather forecast — attentively, professionally, with the understanding that the information was relevant to his work even if his work was the thing the information would end. The bridge's engineering was impressive. He could hear the engineering in Owen's voice, the pride that was not personal but professional, the pride of a man who understood the bridge as a structure, as a problem solved, as a set of forces balanced and materials specified and connections designed to withstand the specific loads that this specific site would impose — wind, ice, thermal expansion, seismic activity, the live load of traffic, the dead load of the structure's own weight — and the understanding was deep and it was earned and it was, Harlan recognized, the same kind of understanding that he had of the channel, the same earned, deep, professional comprehension of a complex system, and the sameness was the bridge between the bridge-builder and the ferry captain, the shared language of competence, of knowing the thing you work with, of having studied it and tested it and committed to it.

"It's beautiful," Harlan said.

Owen looked at him.

"The engineering," Harlan said. "The structure. The cables and the towers. The way the forces work. I can see it. I can see how it holds itself up. The cables carry the deck's weight to the towers and the towers carry the weight to the foundations and the foundations carry the weight to the bedrock, and the carrying is the bridge's function, the carrying is what it does, and the doing is beautiful. The way the Constance's doing is beautiful. The way crossing the channel is beautiful. Not the look of it. The function of it. The act."

Owen nodded. He did not speak. The nod was the acknowledgment that he had understood not just the words but the thing beneath the words, which was Harlan's recognition that the bridge and the ferry were doing the same thing — carrying, connecting, making the island accessible — and that the sameness was the tragedy, because the ferry's carrying and the bridge's carrying were not complementary but competitive, not partners but replacements, and the replacement was not the bridge's fault or the ferry's fault but was the nature of progress, the way progress works, which is by substitution, by the new replacing the old not because the old has failed but because the new is more efficient, more permanent, more in keeping with the age's expectations, and the expectations are the force, the tide that drives the substitution, and the tide cannot be resisted, can only be ridden.

"I can appreciate the bridge and mourn the ferry," Harlan said. "They are not opposites."

"No," Owen said. "They are not."

The Constance crossed the channel. The piling stood in the water, the crane working, the hammer driving, the vibration continuing, the channel receiving the bridge's first incursion with the patience that water has for all incursions, the patience that is not acceptance but indifference, the water flowing around the piling the way it would flow around any obstacle, accommodating it, incorporating it, making it part of the channel's current pattern without comment, without resistance, without the objection that the people on the island felt and expressed and debated, the water unbothered by the piling because the water was not an island, was not a community, was not a thing that had an identity to protect.

Over the following weeks, Harlan watched the construction progress. The pilings multiplied — first one, then four, then eight, then twelve, the pilings arranged in rows across the channel at the narrowest point, each one driven to bedrock, each one plumbed and braced and capped with a steel plate that would support the pier form, and the piers were poured next, concrete pumped from the mixing trucks on the barge into forms that rose from the pilings like columns, and the columns rose from the water like the beginnings of a sentence, the subject and the verb stated but the object not yet declared, the bridge's grammar incomplete but its meaning clear.

The channel narrowed. Not literally — the water was the same width, the same depth between the construction zones — but practically, operationally, the navigable channel constricted by the barges and the buoys and the exclusion zones, the space available to the Constance reduced from four hundred yards to three hundred and then to two hundred and fifty, and the reduction was manageable but it was felt, was present in every crossing as a tightness, a constraint, the channel's freedom diminished, and the diminishment was the construction's daily reality, the daily reminder that the channel was being altered, was being converted from open water to obstructed water, from a natural passage to a construction site.

Harlan navigated the narrowed channel with the precision the narrowing required. He added corrections. He adjusted his speed — slower through the construction zone, the Constance's wake reduced to minimize the disturbance to the barges, the reduced wake a courtesy and a regulation, the Coast Guard's notice to mariners specifying a five-knot speed limit within 200 yards of the construction, and the five knots was slower than the Constance's normal transit speed of nine knots, and the slower speed added three minutes to the crossing, so that the crossing was now twenty-five minutes rather than twenty-two, and the twenty-five was wrong, was incorrect, was a duration that Harlan's body rejected the way a musician's body rejects a wrong tempo, the internal clock protesting, insisting that the crossing should be twenty-two minutes because twenty-two minutes was the crossing's proper duration, its natural length, the time that the channel and the vessel and the speed had agreed upon decades ago.

Three minutes. The bridge had stolen three minutes from the crossing. The stealing was temporary — when the construction was complete the speed restriction would be lifted and the Constance could, theoretically, return to nine knots — but the theoretically was the problem, because theoretically the Constance would not be crossing when the construction was complete, theoretically the Constance would be decommissioned, and the three stolen minutes would never be returned because the crossings from which they were stolen would be the last crossings, and the theft would stand, would be part of the record, part of the history of the crossing's final season.

November approached. The construction continued. The towers began to rise — the two main towers, one on each side of the channel, their forms climbing upward in pours that added ten feet at a time, the concrete curing between pours, the rebar visible at the top of each pour like bones visible through skin, the structural skeleton of the bridge exposed and then covered by the next pour, and the towers grew the way anything grows on the coast — slowly, exposed to weather, subject to delay, the construction proceeding in the intervals between storms, between fog, between the conditions that halted the work and reminded everyone that the channel was not a construction site but a body of water, a tidal passage, a place where the weather had authority and the construction did not.

Harlan watched the towers rise. He watched them from the wheelhouse on every crossing, the towers growing taller, growing more visible, growing from stubs to columns to towers, the towers' height increasing until they were visible from Port Clement, visible from Dunmore, visible from the channel at every point, the towers becoming landmarks, becoming the channel's new features, its new markers, and the becoming was irreversible, was the construction's progress made visible, made permanent, made concrete in the literal sense, poured and cured and standing.

He watched and he crossed. He crossed and he watched. The watching and the crossing were simultaneous, were inseparable, the bridge growing in the periphery of every crossing the way a tumor grows in the periphery of a body — not the body's center, not the body's main function, but present, visible, changing the body's shape, changing the body's prospects, and the changing was steady and it was irreversible and it was, in its way, beautiful, the towers rising against the sky with the austere geometry of things that are designed to carry great weight and that express their strength in their form, the form following the function the way the Constance's form followed her function, the hull shaped for the water, the towers shaped for the load, each one honest in its design, each one saying what it was by being what it was.

He could appreciate the bridge and mourn the ferry simultaneously, because appreciation and mourning are not opposites.

They are neighbors. They live on the same street, in the same body, in the same wheelhouse. They share the same view. They drink the same coffee. They feel the same vibration in the deck plates. They look at the same towers rising from the same channel and they see different things — the appreciation sees the engineering, the beauty of the forces balanced, the elegance of the cables that will hold the deck; the mourning sees the ending, the replacement, the last season of the crossing that the towers will render unnecessary — and the different things they see are not contradictory but complementary, not opposing views but adjacent views, the same landscape seen from two windows of the same room.

Harlan stood in his wheelhouse and held both views. He held them the way he held the wheel — firmly, steadily, with both hands, the left hand holding the appreciation and the right hand holding the mourning, and the wheel turned and the Constance crossed and the channel was the same channel and the towers grew and the crossing continued, twenty-five minutes now instead of twenty-two, the three stolen minutes the bridge's first tax, the first levy on the crossing's diminishing account.

The account was diminishing. The crossings were being spent. Each one was a subtraction, a deduction from the total that Harlan had not calculated but that he felt, the way a person feels a balance declining, not by counting but by weight, the wallet lighter, the account thinner, the reserve smaller, and the smaller reserve was the season's truth, the autumn's arithmetic, the math that October conducted in pilings and towers and stolen minutes.

The construction continued. The Constance continued. The channel continued, altered now, obstructed now, three minutes longer now, but continuing, still crossing, still carrying, still performing the act that the bridge would end, the act that was beautiful in its function, the act that was mourned in its ending, the act that was both things at once because the act was real and real things are always both things at once, always beautiful and ending, always appreciated and mourned, always here and leaving, the way the tide is always here and leaving, the way October is always here and leaving, the way everything that moves moves toward its own conclusion, and the conclusion is not the end of the beauty but its completion.