At last...

We’re getting our bridge back. That is, our bridge as we more or less know it – absent one-lane traffic, work crews, jack hammers, sand blasters, barged cranes, safety netting, giant vacuum hoses and billowing white tarpaulins. According to the local paper, the three year project involving re-decking, re-painting and the sub-structural rehab of steel-reinforced concrete piers is proceeding without incident and may well finish ahead of the December 31 completion deadline.

Good news for those of us who, putting aside any inconvenience, merely miss our beaut of a suspension bridge. But at 2,308 feet long and rising 98 feet above water, with steep approach grades and towers as much as 213 feet tall all of which rely on bundled, twisted-strand steel cables and diagonal cross bracing stays and now 71 years old, the bridge needed more than a little TLC.

As with most bridges, ours means many things. In at least one guidebook, the Deer Isle-Sedgwick bridge is characterized as the only “vehicular connection” to the island. Boaters charting their courses may merely note its clearance spanning the Reach. For some of us, the bridge is the welcome substitute for a ferry dock. To others, it makes us less an island. Philip Conkling, president of Island Institute, once referred to the time Deer Isle was a “real island” – back before the bridge was erected. Of course, just the idea of a bridge invites not just metaphorical musings.

A bridge connects. It also divides. By way of it, you arrive. Or depart. A bridge is necessary or it’s not -- really, didn’t we all hear enough about the Bridge to Nowhere in the last presidential election? And someone please tell me, how many years now have we been hearing about “bridging the gap?” And what, really, does that mean?

About our bridge, the late island historian Clayton Gross wrote, “No other event has wrought so many changes in our lives, brought us so many benefits, and created so many new problems.” Most of which islanders in 1939, the year the bridge was erected, likely couldn’t have imagined.

Today, fewer are those who can remember a time without the bridge. Perhaps some who do might occasionally wish it had never been built, tempting as it is to lay at the bridge’s concrete foundation the woes that often beset us. But of course wishing alone won’t create more jobs, return cod to the Bay, boost the boat price of lobster or better our schools.

So then, folks, let’s consider nostalgia. In something I recently read, nostalgia was depicted as a malady, a widespread in situ homesickness. Deriving from Greek nostos for homeward journey and algos for grief or pain, nostalgia is what a 17th century Swiss doctor identified as the body-sickening longing for home. European medical books described nostalgia as fatal until the 19th century, after which it shifted from a physical disease to a psychological one, an issue of time not place. Most commonly today, nostalgia is recognized as a longing in the present for what belongs to a different time, for things, persons or situations of the past. Often, for what is no longer possible.

The advertising folks who try to sell us stuff are especially adept at pulling nostalgia from their trick bag. As do consultants crafting political ads in presidential election years. And so, too, the state tourist boards. Long touted as “Vacationland” (really? for those folks, too, who have to hold down three jobs?), Maine now sports a state-sponsored tag line of “Life As It Should Be,” which, when translated in certain quarters here, might read: “Life As It Was.”

Americans, I’ve read, are “habitually nostalgic.” Even as we’re taking videos of our children, we’re already looking forward to watching them in future years. The present moment becomes anticipated memory. This is not unusual. Take my native Chicago’s late mayor Richard Daley. Never the wordsmith, he once declared, “I am looking to the future with nostalgia.”

What in our nostalgia we might be missing or wishing for is not a simple life, but a simpler one. In which, for example, technology doesn’t, and almost singlehandedly, account for most of our connection and connectedness. When using such a measure, we islanders are, I’d like to think, luckier than most. Miss those service stations where friendly attendants pumped your gas and actually knew how to fix your car? A postmistress who calls your house to remind you of an express delivery package you’ve yet to pick up? We still have them. Would you like to know whose chickens laid your eggs, whose hands made your bread and shaped the plate that holds it, whose maple trees are the source of your pancake syrup? I can sit down to breakfast and give you answers.    

But lest I veer too close to boosterism or indulge in nostalgia’s sidekick, sentimentality, I need to be clear: we, too, on this island have our complexities, our messy problems. What goes on elsewhere goes on here and in one way or another always has. On this road alone this past year: a divorce of the nastiest sort, a DUI, an inheritance dispute, a threatened lawsuit over property easements, a 9-year-old left behind by his mother when she left his father. A bit further afield: the burglarized pharmacy, a stabbing in a Saturday night post-party brawl.

Naturally, nostalgia threatens with its many downsides. Nostalgic, we may reject change, resist moving on. But do all the islanders out on distant inlets and backroads and still without choice truly prefer dial-up Internet service? (Or as my teen-age nephew calls it, “living in the Stone Age?”) Would we truly feel better off if the Island Medical Center had never been built?

And yet I understand the urge to resist change. Even to imbibe at the well of myth. When, in my mind’s eye, I return to my childhood past, I often paint much of it with broad idyllic brushstrokes or peer back through a smeared lens blurring coarse edges with gauzy light. Filtering through are tidy yards, shady sun-dappled streets, endless games of Kick the Can, mothers at each screened doorway calling children home. Filtered out are the abuse, divorce, the joblessness and booze from which most neighborhoods are seldom exempt. Punching into my Blackberry now, I don’t really miss the rotary phones of my adolescence although some days I do lament the wait for each dialed number’s trip around the wheel, a circular route of pause and connection in which I once had time to think about what I planned to say, had time to hang up without fear Caller ID would betray a change of heart.

No doubt in future years, given the perennial threats to close the Deer Isle village post office, I’ll walk to a roadside mailbox (if postal mail hasn’t by then become extinct) and long for the time when the retrieval of mail in the village was a daily ritual, when communication came by way of not just a clutch of letters and magazines but in the exchanges with fellow islanders, the possibility of obtaining a recipe, passing along an invitation, seeing photos of a new grandchild, securing the recommendation of a tree trimming company, a chimney sweep or a local seamstress to slipcover a favorite chair.

I doubt few of us truly want a return to the island’s past. Personally, I don’t wish to have back the island of, say, 30 years ago, or moving further back still, to a time when, as the local paper once reported, some folks on Little Deer Isle  greeted visitors with pitchforks (really?), but, selfishly or unwisely, I do want many things about this place to stay the way they are now. Some days, as though sealing it into amber is a possibility, I find myself wanting to preserve the present.

And so I, too, wish. And maybe that makes me a partner in collusion. On one side those who are nostalgic for a place that maybe never was but nevertheless has been lost, and on the other, those who like me are nostalgic for a place that maybe never was but seems to have been found.

Regardless, just as no individual steel cable is enough to hold up the bridge, we are all, like bundled steel strands, in this together. Our connections are both fragile and strong. Change often takes a leap of faith, just as it might when approaching the bridge at the same time as a flatbed heavily loaded with newly quarried granite slabs, and when, 100 feet above water, we feel the bridge beneath us pitch and sway. When we need to remember how the original design engineers went back to their drawing boards to fix an unexpected problem – the bridge’s “unwanted motion.” Which, these many years later and in more than language alone, suggests some movement, if not wanted, is, at the very least, necessary.