Staring at Bridges

George Washington BridgeI sat in a chair by this window for hours last week, looking out at the George Washington Bridge.  I was staying with friends who live in New York, in Washington Heights, and I took this early morning picture through their living room window.

It was hard to tear my eyes away from the span. It was so big and so close. And so loud.  106 million cars and trucks go across this bridge every year, making it the busiest motor vehicle bridge in the world.  Even though the sound was muffled through good windows, I felt I could hear every vehicle.  And feel every one.   Especially the trucks - they shook and rumbled right through the walls. 

It wasn’t annoying or scary or depressing.  (Well, a little depressing, to think of the energy consumed and the hours wasted sitting stuck in traffic.) No, it was compelling, hypnotic, almost inspiring, this giant steel spanning support, so close.

Think of all the bridges you’ve stopped and stared at.  The day before I stared in equal fascination as we drove across the Brooklyn Bridge, a much older NYC bridge (George Washington Bridge completed 1931, Brooklyn Bridge 1883, almost 50 years earlier.)  Both bridges are historic and iconic, vital links between the island Manhattan and its neighbors, Brooklyn to the east, New Jersey to the west.

What is it about bridges that is so fascinating?  I can think of three reasons – there are probably more.  First, there is a compelling danger associated with bridges.  Second, even the most simple span is not just functional but also beautiful.  And last, bridges compel because they connect, they link two different places.  With a beautiful dangerous leap, two become one.

Brooklyn BridgeBridges are dangerous to build and dangerous to cross.  Their builders die digging the foundations, laying the cable, climbing the towers.  Construction of the Brooklyn Bridge was overseen by a heroic father and son team, the Roeblings, who both suffered mightily during construction; the father died from injuries, and the son knowingly risked his life diving deep into the East River mud to lay the foundation.  Paralyzed with the bends, he oversaw its completion seated in the window of a neighboring building, immobile but in charge (and greatly aided by his wife, who learned much of the engineering and business and might have been a bit wiser about the dangers.) 

But danger doesn’t end with completion of a bridge.   People jump off bridges, drive off them on purpose or in an accident, ships hit bridges, storms tear them apart, earthquakes crack them in two. All life is dangerous, but there is something about the high span, the rushing river, the soaring towers, the cargo, the fog and wind – all combine to amplify the danger. (Some of my hypnosis staring at that bridge was anticipation that someone might come crashing off it.)

I’ve written before of Vitruvius’ idea that every structure needs three things: strength, usefulness and beauty.   A bridge must be strong to stay standing, and it must be engineered to do its job – span the space.  But is it also required to beautiful?  I can’t think of an ugly bridge.  I believe that it is simply in the nature of spanning and connecting that beauty appears; beauty is inherent.  Maybe it is the arch that gives it beauty?  Flat bridges are a little less interesting.  But almost any bridge evokes poetry and emotion, in a way that say, a highway does not.  I think that’s because of a bridge’s beauty.

Architect Le Corbusier saw beauty in the George Washington Bridge (even though he disliked the city):

“The George Washington Bridge over the Hudson is the most beautiful bridge in the world. Made of cables and steel beams, it gleams in the sky like a reversed arch. It is blessed. It is the only seat of grace in the disordered city. It is painted an aluminum color and, between water and sky, you see nothing but the bent cord supported by two steel towers. When your car moves up the ramp the two towers rise so high that it brings you happiness; their structure is so pure, so resolute, so regular that here, finally, steel architecture seems to laugh. The car reaches an unexpectedly wide apron; the second tower is very far away; innumerable vertical cables, gleaming against the sky, are suspended from the magisterial curve which swings down and then up. The rose-colored towers of New York appear, a vision whose harshness is mitigated by distance.”

And finally, bridges are compelling because they are connectors, they link and span two often very different places, shores that had long been isolated or linked only by slow ferries.  The headlines screamed in 1883; you can now drive or walk directly and fast from Brooklyn right over to Manhattan!  What an amazing link.  The city has changed.  What was once apart is now connected.

Sadly we’ve all also heard some not so joyous stories about bridge links, about remote islands forever changed when it became so easy to get there on the new bridge, supposedly an improvement.  Bridges connect.  And connection means change.  Usually more connection is better than less, but not always.

Bixby BridgePerhaps some of the thrill of going over a bridge, or seeing one in the distance, is that we are reminded of our own longing for connection.  I see orange girders spanning the Golden Gate, or in my neighborhood, the rainbow Bixby Bridge leaping a canyon and I think,  “Look, what was separate is now connected.  That’s what I want too.”    No one is an island, or will last long acting like one. 

A bridge is about possibility, new connections.  It is a safe arch over troubled waters.  And it is, in Le Corbusier’s words, a pure, resolute structure of beauty, bringing us happiness, and making us want to laugh.

Copyright © 2915 Deborah Streeter

Cryptic Sound

In this column, I wander around buildings. This week I take us on two different trips down into the crypt, the mysterious church space below the nave and choir.

In the crypt of Winchester Cathedral stands an eerie sculpture that is a study in opposites. 

The arched stone undercroft is ancient, even predating the medieval Gothic sanctuary that soars above it.  But the sculpture is modern, 1986, installed by contemporary renowned British artist Antony Gormley. 

The crypt is cold and hard and impersonal; we associate crypts with death and graves and fear.  People mostly stay upstairs in the nave.  But the statue depicts a very alive human figure, indeed it is a made from a cast of Gormley’s own living body.

Crypts are built as solid hard foundations, dug deep in the dense dark earth.  But this crypt appears soft and fluid each winter when the persistent groundwater of the region floods it up to three feet deep.  Then the dark space becomes shiny and shimmering, reflecting the water in motion.  The sculpture was fashioned intentionally to withstand and even embrace its months partially submerged, wet and fluid.

Crypts are quiet, silent as a tomb.  But Gormley named the statue “Sound II.”  Sound?  One writer suggests Gormely wants us to look at the sculpture and “be still for a moment, to ‘sound’ the depths of our own spirit.”

The hands of the human form are cupped and the face is looking down at what it gently holds – water.  Not only does the sculpture stand up to its waist in the water, but an inner pipe brings water up into the hands. (So we are told – no crypt tours in the winter, too wet.  I was there in June and it had just reopened two weeks earlier.)

There are tombs in the crypt, but this sculpture is about life.  Like all life, born of water, seeping from ocean ancestors, the sculpture reminded me of Venus rising from the sea atop another wet cup.  And the dark fecundity of the space was womb-like, another wet source of life.

To find such a contemporary sculpture in a church is profound.  Sound II is not explicitly religious art, an icon of a saint or deity.  But it evokes birth and baptism. And life.

Church Dreams

A soaring Gothic cathedral draws the eye – and the heart – upward. “Glory to God” is usually spoken (or sung!) looking up, not down.

But I am most moved when I go down, down into a cathedral’s crypt, the deep space below nave and choir.  Often a remnant and reminder of an earlier church, and certainly essential in holding up the massive uplift above, the crypt (literally “hidden”) carries more meaning than just its function or its interesting early chapter in the building’s history. 

Some years ago when I started meditating regularly, a picture came to me that helped me turn off my monkey brain for that simple 20 minutes.  I don’t think I intentionally chose the image -  (“I will now focus on this!”) - it just seemed to arrive.  It was a door in the wall of an old church nave, and I knew that the door led down to the crypt.  I could vaguely place it, either Bourges or Winchester, it almost didn’t matter.  I would soon be going down into dark and mystery, the hidden and forgotten, the foundation, the dank wet smell of old stone, the residue of memories of masons and monks.  But for now, I stand at the door.

I’m rereading French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space.  Drawing on Jungian study of dreams and memories, he suggests we pay attention to our day and night dreams about houses we have lived in, which he calls “topoanalysis.” He writes, “The chief benefit of a house is that it shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” “The unconscious is housed…Our house is our first universe.”

He writes about how we should take seriously our dreams of walking through the rooms of our childhood, and suggests we are more at ease with our dreams and memories of attics, and more wary of going down into the cellar. Like Jung, he says that dreams of water and of cellars are deep dreams of the unconscious. 

Bachelard writes, “The cellar dreamer knows that the walls of the cellar are buried walls, walls that have the entire earth behind them.” 

That sounded like a crypt to me, that cellar imagery.  We can take his imagery of house dreams and applying it to churches.  For medieval worshippers, at places like Bourges or Winchester, the massive cathedral might have seemed like a universe, limitless sky above, mysterious darkness below.

It’s the same for me, there’s something about those old churches that seems like a universe.  As I dream or meditate, I stand at the door to the crypt.  And I’m headed down.

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter

Do Animals Use Tools?

I’m a weekly volunteer guide at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and we make a big deal with the guests about how sea otters use tools. They find a small rock and use it to break food like sea urchins off from a rocky ledge and then they turn the same rock into an anvil on their chest and whack the urchin against it to break the food open.  Look, we say, how smart otters are.  They can use tools, it’s not just people who use tools.

I think the idea is that people will care more about the ocean, and maybe do something to help protect and conserve it, when they can identify with and relate to a cute animal like the otter that does some pretty ingenious things to survive.  Behind the scenes the Aquarium educators refer to otters as one of our charismatic, or iconic animals, and as ambassadors on behalf of ocean conservation. 

Since I’ve been writing about building and tools for a couple months now, I thought I’d ponder how animals use tools, and when it was that people figured out we weren’t the only tool users.

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Do other animals besides humans use tools?  Are there other animals that can create and manipulate objects for their own benefit?  Is being a tool user one of the key distinctions between humans and other animals?

Yes, yes, no.

In 1960 Jane Goodall observed chimps doing something that was so unknown and unthinkable at the time that when she published her findings, it turned the scientific world was upside down.

Until then, social scientists and anthropologists and animal behavioralists all assumed and agreed that only humans used tools.  Indeed that was how humans were defined and distinguished from other animals – we were the only ones to use tools.  Only we could figure out how to make tools and how to adapt natural objects into tools.  Oh, smart humans.

But on that fateful day Goodall noticed a chimp pick up a twig and carefully remove all  its leaves. Then the chimp used the bare stem to dig around in a huge termite mound, lifting the twig to its mouth.  Over and over.

I think one reason Goodall is such a compelling person is that she is not only a really smart person, but she also communicates so well to the general public.  She transcends so-called scientific objectivity by being an activist and advocate for all creatures.  (Just this week she spoke out on the slaughter of Cecil the lion.)

So as Goodall tells the story, she wasn’t sure what the chimp was up to, so she tried it herself, doing exactly what the chimp did. (I probably have an unfair stereotype of scientists, but her humble admission of ignorance and her willingness to imitate a chimp seems more proof that she is unusual, and very creative.)  When her twig brought insects out of the mound and she, like the chimp, scrapped them off with her own teeth, she figure out what the chimp was doing.  Making a tool.  The twig had become a tool, a fishing hook, and the chimp was using it to fish for termites, to procure food.  Chimps were tool makers and users.

This may seem obvious now, but in 1960 it was revolutionary.  “Man” was not so special, so uniquely smart after all.

Since then we have noticed (and a lot of it is noticing, they’ve been doing it all along) lots of animals using tools.  Mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, insects – clever and amazing and effective.   It’s a little humbling, but inspiring, to see a brownheaded nuthatch take a small piece of bark in its peak and use it as a lever and a wedge to pry up a round of bark and expose insects.  They use the same bark tool over and over and carry it 

Well bark, that’s not really a tool, is it?  We humans use real tools, like screwdrivers and jackhammers and electron microscopes, right?  After Godall’s discovery, scientists started debating how to define “tool.”  One widely used definition is

"The external employment of an unattached or manipulable attached envirnomental object to alter more efficiently the form, position, or condition of another object, another organism, or the user itself, when the user holds and directly manipulated the tool during or prior to use and is responsible for the proper and effective orientation of the tool.^[5]

There are other simpler definitions:

-an external object used for a specific purpose.

-an object carried or maintained for future use.

-an object that has been modified to fit a purpose.

The nuthatch’s bark wedge/lever sounds like a tool to me, using any of those definitions.

It’s hard for me to imagine how different the world view was before 1960 and Goodall’s discovery (actually just careful observation), but it seems that science and the public were still stuck in the idea that humans were constitutionally different from other animals.  Theologians had long insisted that humans were the crowning glory of God’s creation, better and above the “lower” animals. I assumed we’d gotten over this a century earlier, with Darwin, accepting that humans are not different, or better, singled out (by God?) for special treatment and privilege.  But maybe those who had grudgingly accepted Darwin just believed evolution proved that humans had evolved beyond other animals, into smarter tool users.

However this revelation happened (and you can tell I like it that it was a woman who simply noticed something that had been going on all along) there was no going back.  As Darwin said we are related to all animals, so Goodall said we are not so much smarter as we thought.

Thank God for folks like Goodall and Darwin.  These two observant and unorthodox scientist, from England, were willing to travel to risky new lands (and seas), make careful observations, and to shatter human hubris. 

For me, tool use by animals is good news, not a step down in my special favor in God’s sight.  I’m always looking for more connections between me and other animals, not fewer.  They’ve got a lot to teach me.

I like how Job puts it, in the Bible: “Just ask the animals, and they will teach you.  Asks the birds of the sky, and they will tell you.  Or speak to the earth, and it will teach you.  Let the fish in the sea speak to you.” 

I’m trying to listen.

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter 

Need A House? Call Ms. Mouse!

Do you have a shelf of books about carpentry and architecture and building codes?  We do!  Here’s a taste of a treasure in that collection I recently re-found.

I was reorganizing our many books recently and I found an old favorite book I’d read to my kids a million times.

It’s a picture book, but quite entertaining for all ages, called Need a House?  Call Ms. Mouse! by George Mendoza, illustrated by Doris Susan Smith.

I remember buying it, at a bookstore that was devoted to architecture and building, sort of the Restoration Hardware of bookstores, on the trendy 4th Street section of Berkeley.  (Restoration Hardware is still there, but I doubt the bookstore is – our nation still buys cute reproductions of old faucets, made in China, but doesn’t read much anymore.)

It must have been in the early 80’s, not long after the book was published, because we lived in that neighborhood til 1985, and had a little kid, so buying pictures books was fun and made us feel slightly virtuous, educating our son. 

I remember our delight and surprise to find a kids book among the heavy tomes on Frank Lloyd Wright and the Uniform Building Code.   Our two favorite things – building and kids!  Not to mention the slightly feminist twist – a female architect!  (And a mouse, at that.)

I looked it up on Google Images and you can see most of the book there.  That’s lucky for you, because it’s out of print and goes for $165 on Amazon! I’m glad I kept it through so many moves since then.

The basic theme is that Henrietta Mouse designs houses for her animal friends and they are all appropriate to the particular needs and character of each animal.  Here are some images from it:

Ms. Mouse at her drawing table:

 

Her own house:

 

Construction of the house for Lizard.  (Look, it’s a French version, now she is Heloise!)

 

A pear interior for Worm:

 

A cool modern house for Spider, with a separate music room!

 

Owl’s nighttime observatory, another cool cross-section.

 

Desperate grandmothers are begging on line for this out of print book.  I could sell my copy for $200!  Nope, I’m keeping it for me, and maybe future grandchildren. 

And looking at it again for the first time in a decade, I think Ms. Mouse might haveinfluenced us too, as we expanded our own hillside home, because we read it so many times to our kids. 

Thanks, Ms. Mouse.

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter

Remodeling

We remodeled the downstairs back corner of our house recently.  We ripped out a small funky 4x4 foot room that first was a woodshed 40 years ago, and which we had later closed in for a sort of study/junk room.  We tore down the room’s roof and walls, leaving just its foundation, which we used as the corner anchor of a nice new 12x16 guest room.

Remodeling, by definition, requires tearing things down before building the new.  Unlike new construction, in a remodel something has to go.  Seems the most common remodels are kitchens, involving lots of tearing out of cupboards and countertops.  Mercifully, our corner remodel didn’t get in the way of making dinner.

I have already used this column to sing the praises of the crowbar, my favorite tool in the destruction phase of this remodel.  Out of the room’s old roof and walls I pried many ancient bent nails.  Some went into the trash and others  we used as cheap rebar in the new foundation, stirring it in with the concrete.  Then with my fancy titanium hammer, I pounded many new nails into the fresh beautiful pine rafters and cedar wall boards. 

I once took a college course in human anatomy. (I talked about that in the crowbar column also. Yes, I used a crowbar there, too.)  We learned about bones and muscles and tissue and organs.  We dissected a human cadaver.  And we crammed for the tests by memorizing the names of lots of medical terms. I have forgotten a lot of it, but I’ve always remembered the cool names of two crucial cells we have in our bones; osteoblasts and osteoclasts.  Together these cells perform an essential function in our bodies, from birth to death.  I had to get out my old anatomy textbook to remember that phrase: “bone remodeling.”

Osteoblast cells (“blast” means to germinate) form new bone by synthesizing dense collagen and calcium to make our bones’ “mineralized matrix,” which is stronger than steel.  Our skeleton is our body’s structural support, obviously, but it’s also a storage place for minerals like calcium and phosphates, germinated there by the osteblasts.

This process begins in the womb and continues throughout our lives.  In the first year of our life our whole skeleton is rebuilt anew 100%, and even into adulthood 10% of our skeleton is reformed every year.

But the rebuilding can’t happen with only the octeoblasts laying down the new matrix.  No, first there must be destruction of old bone to make way for the new. Osteoclasts “dissemble” the bones in a process called “resorption.” (I think they don’t want to call it destruction.) 

(Get the analogy with our house?)

My anatomy textbook says, “Bones appear to be the most lifeless of body organs, and once they are formed, they seem set for life.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  Bone is a very dynamic and active tissue.  Large amounts of bone matrix and thousands of osteocytes are continuously being removed and replaced within the skeleton.  The small-scale architecture of our bones constantly changes. 

“As much as half a gram of calcium may enter or leave the adult skeleton each day.  The distal region of the femur is fully replaced every 5-6 months in adults.  Osteoclast cells maintain, repair and remodel bones by releasing enzymes and acids that digest parts of the bone matrix.  Old calcium ions are released from the bones and they enter the tissue fluid and the bloodstream.  Then the osteoblasts go to work forming a new mineral matrix.  The process continues for life.”

It’s funny what we remember from old classes; my recollection was that these two kinds of cells were like armed combatants in my skeleton.  The good osteoblast cells go to work every day building up our bones, but they must struggle against the forces of the evil osteoclast cells whose job it is tear them down. 

It is true that the clasts get the upper hand as we age.  That’s why I have calcium pills on my shelf, along with Vitamin D, which helps the body absorb calcium.  I’m just giving the blasts a fighting chance.  I don’t want to become one of those old ladies with osteoporosis, which means the osteoclasts have totally outstripped the osteoblasts.  (I learned recently that most old folks who fall down and break their hips actually break their hips first, it just crumbles inside, and then they fall down.)

But our bones are living, dynamic tissue, not inanimate roof rafters and nails.  They are always changing. We can improve the odds that there will be more construction than destruction, but with no destruction there would be nothing new. 

And sometimes the clasts go to work because they have sensed a need for calcium in some other part of the body and they come to get it in the calcium storeroom known as our skeleton.  They are not so much destructive soldiers as resource managers. 

I have no enemy within, those mean old osteoclasts.  It’s called life.  The cells give, the cells take away, a time for blasting and a time for clasting.  And sometimes the clasting makes room for something new and stronger, or uses those old nails to make the new foundation stronger.

I was talking with a friend about acceptance and he said, “Yes, I’ve been trying to take some bricks down from my usual walls, not just build them higher and higher.” Good remodeling advice.

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter