The Observatory at Penobscot Narrows by Susanna Baird (LANDMARKS Series)

The Observatory at Penobscot Narrows
by Susanna Baird

The only tower of its kind in the country. The tallest tower of its kind in the world.

I step into the elevator alone, am the most and least of everything as I rise until I stop, until I step towards thick glass to look over miles at sights the signs say I see that I can’t see through the drizzle.

With sunlight, the views might be cinematic: the river town, the granite foothills explosively disrupted to introduce the holiday road, the trees and the trees and the trees, the mountains I can’t find for the fog. The most favorite thing I can’t see is the restaurant the guard shows me used to be right down there, in that pressed dirt half circle that looks like a driveway. Can you see where it was?

There the camera people paused, ate lobster rolls for dinner, drank an extra bottle of beer, signed postcards with the waitress’s pen. But for time they are me, distinguished in this place for not being home, for driving through blasted rock, for stopping short of a bridge just shy of a town, hoping for ground clouds to scatter.

PHOTO: The Penobscot Narrows Bridge (Maine) by Demerzel21, used by permission.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Penobscot Narrows Bridge is a 2,120-foot cable-stayed bridge that carries US 1/SR 3 over the Penobscot River and connects Verona Island, Maine, to the town of Prospect. The bridge is home to the Penobscot Narrows Observatory, the first bridge observation tower in the United States and the tallest public bridge observatory in the world, with a tower 420 feet high.  Located on the Maine coast, 20 miles south of Bangor, Penobscot Narrows Observatory opened to the general public in May 2007. 

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I’m afraid of heights, and often need to tackle height-related activities alone. When my family visited this impressive tower, on a bridge spanning Maine’s Penobscot River, I waited until my husband and daughter went up and came down, then fought fear as I rode alone in the elevator. The view up top was reduced due to a fog, but I still felt grateful for having made the trip, and for that particular headspace you enter when you are apart from “real” life, when you feel deeply impressed by “only” and “tallest” in a way you don’t when enmeshed in your everyday. The best part came when the guard told me about the restaurant that wasn’t there anymore. It was a small, lovely gift, the moment that most remains with me from that experience. This summer, I am missing being a tourist farther from home, but enjoying local day trips I never before took the time to make.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Susanna Baird lives in the tourist town of Salem, Massachusetts, and is fascinated by tourist headspace. She serves as administrative editor of Talking Writing and as co-chair of the Authors Committee of the Salem Literary Festival, and leads a fiction and memoir writing group. She also helps run The Clothing Connection, a small nonprofit getting clothes to Salem kids who need them. When not writing or reading, she likes hiking with her dog, napping with her cat, and goofing off with her family. Find Susanna online at susannabaird.com (check out her occasional microblog, x100!) and on Twitter @susannabaird.

Separated by the Bay Bridge by Gerard Sarnat (LANDMARKS Series)

Separated by the Bay Bridge
by Gerard Sarnat

and often relative
competitors (e.g., chess)
since fifth grade

we sometimes kissing
cousins lived across
Maple Drive from

each other when
our kin (my mother,
his dad) were close

then enhanced
that family intimacy
over next fleeting

six-plus decades
as well as generations
of grand/kids

spending random free
time, vacations, every
Thanksgiving together

even if meeting required
driving long distances
or flying above oceans.

Myriad MDs in our clan
could be counted on to
weigh in to assure during

difficult illnesses,
cancer hadn’t spread to
chest/ lungs etcetera.

But nowadays, although
basically only separated
by the Bay Bridge

more frequently than not
proves beyond our ken
how you or I can manage

various mid-septuagenarian
stuff enough to find ways
or means one or another

of us will finagle what it takes
to travel a bit for those such
very sustaining group hugs.

PHOTO: Oakland Bay Bridge (California) by Rich Hay on Unsplash

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Gerard Sarnat won San Francisco Poetry’s 2020 Contest, the Poetry in the Arts First Place Award plus the Dorfman Prize, and has been nominated for a handful of recent Pushcarts plus Best of the Net Awards. He is widely published in academic-related journals (e.g., Universities of Chicago/ Maine/ San Francisco/Toronto, Stanford, Oberlin, Brown, Columbia, Harvard, Pomona, Johns Hopkins, Wesleyan, Penn, Dartmouth, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Baltimore) plus national (e.g., Gargoyle, Main Street Rag, New Delta Review, Northampton Poetry Review, Peauxdunque Review, MiPOesias, American Journal Of Poetry, Kurt Vonnegut Museum Library Literary Journal, South Broadway Press, Parhelion, Clementine, pamplemousse, Red Wheelbarrow, Deluge, Poetry Quarterly, poetica, Tipton Journal, Hypnopomp, Free State Review, Poetry Circle, Buddhist Poetry Review, Poets And War, Thank You For Your Service Anthology, Wordpeace, Lowestoft Chronicle, 2020 International Human Rights Art Festival, Indolent Books, Snapdragon, Pandemonium Press, Boston Literary Magazine, Montana Mouthful, Arkansas Review, Texas Review, San Antonio Review, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, Brooklyn Review, pacific REVIEW, San Francisco Magazine, The Los Angeles Review, Fiction Southeast, The New York Times, Review Berlin, London Reader, Voices Israel, Foreign Lit, New Ulster, Oslo Griffel, Transnational, Southbank, Wellington Street Review, and Rome Lotus-Eaters. He’s authored the collections Homeless Chronicles: From Abraham to Burning Man (2010), Disputes (2012), 17s (2014), Melting the Ice King (2016). A physician who’s built and staffed clinics for the marginalized as well as a Stanford professor and healthcare CEO, he is currently devoting energy/ resources to deal with climate change justice. Married since 1969 with three kids plus six grandsons, he is looking forward to future granddaughters. Visit him at gerardsarnat.com.

Once, in Pittsburgh by Mary C. McCarthy (LANDMARKS Series)

Once, in Pittsburgh
by Mary C. McCarthy

my home town, city of three rivers
and many bridges, steel city,
moving from its dark
industrial past
toward the shining dream
of a tech renaissance,
moving sometimes so fast
a project was half done
before they knew
how to end it…
Like our “Bridge to Nowhere”
arching up and over the river
but with nowhere to land —
hanging there for years
ending in a 90-foot drop
to the water,
access blocked to stop
people driving right off,
though one guy did it —
crashed through the barricade
and sailed off the end in his car,
surviving, as part of the story
we liked to tell ourselves
about our crazy, daring,
restless luck.

There one night, at loose ends
somewhere
between midnight and morning,
the three of us, each one the first
from our family to go to college,
looking for something
to fill the space
between when the bars closed
and our sober-up breakfast
at Ritter’s diner,
decided to climb up on that bridge
and stand suspended
over the drop
without destination
or direction
with nothing to count on or expect,
no sure conclusion
but the deep pull of vertigo
in the wind’s buffet
and the sough of steel
intent on its own trajectory-

A lesson sudden and strong enough
to scare us back
from the tipsy lip of temptation
to roads more safe and boring
that crossed rivers in the ordinary ways
and ended up in places
almost as familiar
as those we always knew.

PHOTO: The Fort Duquesne Bridge (formerly “Bridge to Nowhere”), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, by Mihai Andritoiu, used by permission.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: The Bridge to Nowhere was a temporary landmark but hard to forget. Our late-night encounter seemed just right in terms of our own uncertainties at the time, taking off in directions no one was used to even in imagination — something new in our family histories, well outside the comfort zone.

PHOTO: Fort Duquesene Bridge — The Bridge to Nowhere — in 1966.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Fort Duquesne Bridge spans the Allegheny River in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was called “The Bridge to Nowhere” because the main span was finished in 1963, but due to delays in acquiring right of ways for approach ramps, it did not connect on the north side of the Allegheny River. The lack of approach ramps meant the bridge ended in midair, rendering it useless. On December 12, 1964, Frederick Williams, a 21-year-old chemistry major at the University of Pittsburgh, drove his 1959 Chrysler station wagon through the bridge’s wooden barricades, raced off the end of the bridge, and landed upside-down but unhurt on the other side.The northwestern ramps were completed in 1969, allowing access to Pennsylvania Route 65. (Source: Wikipedia)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mary C. McCarthy has studied art and literature, and has always been a writer, though most of her working life was spent as a Registered Nurse. Her work has appeared in many print and electronic journals and anthologies, and she has an electronic chapbook, Things I Was Told Not to Think About, available as a free download from Praxis magazine.

Jack Kerouac on San Francisco

“It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.” JACK KEROUAC, On the Road

Photo: Sunset Magazine, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The fabulous white city of San Francisco, quote by Jack Kerouac

“It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.” JACK KEROUAC, On the Road

Photo: Sunset Magazine, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
*****
May 27, 2012 marked the 75th anniversary of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. Renowned the world over as a masterpiece of art and engineering, the Golden Gate ushers 120,000 cars to their destinations each day.

In a 1987 newspaper column, journalist Herb Caen described the Golden Gate this way: “The mystical structure, with its perfect amalgam of delicacy and power, exerts an uncanny effect. Its efficiency cannot conceal the artistry. There is heart there, and soul. It is an object to be contemplated for hours.” 

Jack Kerouac and San Francisco

“It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.”

JACK KEROUAC, On the Road

Photo: Sunset Magazine, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

*****

May 27, 2012 marked the 75th anniversary of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. Renowned the world over as a masterpiece of art and engineering, the Golden Gate ushers 120,000 cars to their destinations each day.

In a 1987 newspaper column, journalist Herb Caen described the Golden Gate this way: “The mystical structure, with its perfect amalgam of delicacy and power, exerts an uncanny effect. Its efficiency cannot conceal the artistry. There is heart there, and soul. It is an object to be contemplated for hours.”