The Screech of the Span

The wind is a 29-mile-per-hour bastard today, whipping through the truss work of the 109th Street Span with a screech that sounds like a choir of dying saws. I am suspended 189 feet above the water, dangling in a harness that feels significantly tighter than it did in 2019. Below me, the river is a churning slate gray, moving with a deceptive speed that would swallow a man in 9 seconds flat. My job, according to the city, is to find the rot. My job, according to my own weary joints, is to witness the slow-motion collapse of everything we pretend is permanent. I have a hammer, an ultrasonic tester, and 19 years of looking at the things people ignore while they are driving to work at 69 miles per hour.

I spent 39 minutes this morning trying to fold a fitted sheet. It sounds like a joke, but it wasn’t. I stood in the laundry room, the scent of lavender detergent mocking me, and wrestled with those elasticated corners like they were a puzzle box designed by a hateful god. No matter how I tucked or turned, the fabric refused to submit to a 90-degree logic. It was a chaotic, soft-sided rebellion. Eventually, I just bundled it into a 9-pound wad of cotton and shoved it into the closet, feeling a strange, simmering resentment. If I can’t even impose order on a piece of bedding, what the hell am I doing up here, trying to tell the city that a 79-year-old bridge is safe? We want things to be neat. We want them to be stable. But the truth is, the universe is a fitted sheet, and it’s always, always bunching up in the corners.

The Illusion of Control

But up here, where the pigeons nest in the gusset plates, I see the truth. The gusset plates are supposed to be solid, but they are currently being consumed by a 19-stage oxidation process that turns steel into orange lace. We live in a world of decay that we’ve painted over 49 times with lead-based hope. The frustration isn’t just that things break; it’s that we are required to pretend they won’t.

Stability is a performance. When a bridge is perfectly still, that’s when you should be terrified. A healthy bridge is a swaying bridge. It has to move 9 inches in the wind or it will snap like a frozen twig. We spend our lives seeking rigidity, thinking that if we can just lock everything down-our jobs, our relationships, our 401ks-we will be safe. But rigidity is the precursor to a catastrophic failure. If you don’t allow for the sway, you are inviting the break. I’ve seen 29-ton beams twist like licorice because they were held too tightly by a design that didn’t account for the heat of a 109-degree summer.

Inspecting the Foundation

I’m currently staring at a rivet that has lost 89 percent of its head to corrosion. To the casual observer, it’s a tiny flaw. To me, it’s a symptom of a systemic lie. We do this with our finances, too. We look at the surface and think the structure is sound because the commute is smooth. Most people never look under the deck. They don’t want to see the scuppers clogged with 19 years of road salt or the expansion joints that have frozen solid.

The Points of Failure in Crossing

When I’m not hanging from a cable, I try to apply the same inspection logic to my own survival. I look at the foundations. Sometimes that means acknowledging that the bridge I’m walking on-my mortgage, my debt, my credit-needs a professional eye. Most people find themselves comparing different versions of stability, looking for a way to refinance their fears. They go to sites like Credit Compare HQ to see which structure holds the most weight before it buckles under the stress of interest. It’s the same logic I use up here with my hammer. You’re looking for the points of failure before you commit your life to the crossing.

The Irreducible Mess

There is a deeper meaning to this inspection. We are all bridge inspectors of our own collapsing lives. We wake up and check the welds of our routines. We look at our partners and hope the rivets of affection are still holding. We look at the 1999 sedan in the driveway and pray the frame isn’t brittle. We are obsessed with maintenance because we are terrified of the drop. But the drop is always there. The river is always 189 feet down.

I remember an inspection back in 2009. It was a small span over a creek, maybe 89 feet long. It looked fine from the road. The asphalt was new. But when I got underneath, I found that the pile caps were essentially gone. The bridge was standing on habit and nothing else. It had been like that for maybe 29 years. It was a miracle of physics and sheer stubbornness. I had to shut it down immediately. The locals were furious. They hated me for 19 days because I added 9 minutes to their commute. They didn’t care about the illusion of their morning routine. They wanted to believe the bridge was solid because it had been solid yesterday. That’s the human condition in a nutshell: choosing the convenient lie over the inconvenient truth, right up until the moment the tires leave the pavement.

The Frustration of Seeing Too Much

I think about that bridge whenever I’m struggling with my own life. My back hurts 159 percent more than it did when I started this career. I have 9 missed calls from my ex-wife, most of them about the 499 dollars I still owe for the kids’ dental work. My own internal structure is fraying. I’m a 59-year-old man hanging from a wire, looking for cracks in someone else’s work while my own foundation is covered in weeds.

I once read a report that said we need 979 billion dollars to fix the national infrastructure. It’s a number so large it becomes a ghost. You can’t fix a ghost with a hammer. You just keep inspecting. You keep marking the cracks with yellow chalk. You keep telling the truth, even when the city council only has 19 percent of the budget needed to listen. I’ve marked 699 different areas of concern on this span alone. Each one is a tiny scream from the metal, a warning that the weight is too much. And yet, the cars keep coming. 49 cars every minute, passing over my head, oblivious to the fact that they are supported by a web of aging iron and my own shaky professional opinion.

But I can’t do that. I’m cursed with the need to see the fracture. It makes me a terrible dinner guest and a worse husband, but it makes me a damn good inspector. I can tell you exactly when a bolt is going to shear. I can feel the vibration of a failing bearing in my teeth. It’s a lonely kind of expertise. It’s the same feeling I had with the fitted sheet this morning-a quiet, isolated struggle against a reality that refuses to be neat.

The Sound of Still Being Alive

We build these massive things to prove we are here. We throw 299 million pounds of concrete across a canyon and call it progress. We create financial systems that are so complex they require 139 different algorithms just to track a single dollar. We do all of this to hide the fact that we are small and the water is deep. We are terrified of the sway.

So, I’ll keep my yellow chalk. I’ll keep my 19 tools. I’ll keep wrestling with my bedding and my bank account and the 9 ways I’ve failed the people I love. Because as long as I’m looking at the rust, I’m not being fooled. I’m seeing the world for what it actually is-a beautiful, swaying, decaying mess that somehow, against all odds, manages to hold us up for one more day.

The wind picks up again, pushing the gust to maybe 39 miles per hour. I grip the cable tighter. I find another crack. It’s 19 millimeters long. I mark it. I breathe. The river keeps moving, and so do I. We are all just trying to make it to the other side of the 1990s, or the 2020s, or whatever decade finally decides to give way. The trick is to keep moving, to keep swaying, and to never, ever trust a fitted sheet that looks too perfect.