35W Bridge Collapse

She Do Run Run published a nice post about the 35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis. Particularly poignant is the story of her friend Dean, whose workplace overlooks where the bridge was. He didn't see it go down but he looked out the window a moment later and the view was wrong. The wrong bridge, the arched one, was now in the forefront. The other one was just . . . gone.

Dori writes nicely, travels widely to interesting locations like Fargo, ND and is well worth reading. She, like Bex, is moving out of this country soon to go live in California. Why are all the good ones emigrating?

My sister owns a yarnshop in St. Paul. You can see her in this video taken inside her store (she's the one with the blue hair).

Folks in Minnesota are the salt of the earth. They're normally hard to spot because it's not as if they identify themselves by wearing cowboy boots like Texans or having radiant tans like Californians. I can discern them when they say "a-boot" for "about," "you betcha!" for "oh, sure" or "Geez" for "Aww, Jesus!" It's a hoot to hear.

My sister called family members on the night of the tragedy to leave messages saying she was okay, which we were all grateful to receive. (I have five siblings spread out across the country from Santa Fe to Queens.)

I called her back the next day and she was with her husband underneath a highway bridge in some town south of Winona on the River Road. Winona is the town on the Mississippi River where my father was born in 1925 and in which he grew up.

My sister's husband works for a paper in Minnesota and after the bridge's collapse, he had been detailed to visit the structurally deficient bridges in the state and record his impressions. My sister said the bridge they were currently under was noisily shaking and shimmering due to the traffic load. I felt strangely uneasy and wished she would get out from under that bridge.

It was probably like a lot of bridges all across the US.