Part 8 of personal reflections and historic explorations of the Grafton to Cairo length of llinois Route 3 by writer and poet Richard Stimac.

I like to walk the Eads Bridge. I never park on the St. Louis side, in Laclede’s Landing, the slowly crumbling clump of less than a dozen 19^th century buildings that once were the centre of St. Louis downtown nightlife. In the early 2000s, many buildings were torn down on the Landing (as the area is called) to make way for a Las Vegas-style casino and hotel. On the north side of Eads Bridge, the Landing’s riverfront marks the spot where Piere Laclede founded St. Louis in 1763.

The fact that the area has become derelict is a harsh architectural metaphor for the decline of the city. Parking is not easy or free, as if the city were saying there’s not much reason to come here so if you do, we’ll charge you for it. Just off Illinois Route 3, the East St. Louis side of Eads Bridge has free parking in the commuter train lot that abuts the lot for the Casino Queen, once an actual riverboat. Now, to meet state requirements as water-borne, the gaming floor floats in a basin of water a hundred yards inland from the levee.

CHARYBDIS UNDER EADS BRIDGE

The pedestrian walkway has perches that jut out from the bridge. There I can easily look down at the river. The deck is almost one-hundred feet above the surface. I can feel the power of the water as it roils below me. The river pushes itself downstream, but the river also struggles against itself, turning upstream, whirling as if confused what direction to follow, collecting in dead spots, even at times pulling all the drift downward to the bed. The limestone and granite piers create eddies.

The circular turning of the water reminds me of Charybdis. Instead of a cursed sea nymph, these whirlpools are caused by giant catfish, I imagine, which grow to over one-hundred pounds and over five feet in length. Between the churning water are dead zones with no movement until the power of the main current pulls even this stilled water towards the sea.

The Casino Queen (image: Richard C. Stimac).

The Eads Bridge is a forgotten marvel. Tourists should flock to see it. They don’t. Railroads supplanted river traffic before the Civil War when the Rock Island (Illinois) Bridge crossed the Mississippi River and linked the east and west coasts. St. Louis riverboat companies sued on the grounds that the bridge blocked river traffic.

A young lawyer Abraham Lincoln defended the railroads. St. Louis river companies, and the state of Missouri, for that matter, continued to battle against the railroads. Even after the Civil War, St. Louis had no rail bridge. Train cargo had to be unloaded, ferried across the river, then reloaded to great expense to the railroads and great profit to the barge companies.

ARCHITECTURAL INNOVATION

After the Civil War, self-taught civil engineer James Eads designed a stone-and-steel bridge for St. Louis. Eads was unable to obtain public or private funding for his design, so he self-funded it from the wealth he amassed via a riverboat wreck salvage company. Eads’ innovations changed bridge building. He used steel for the first large-scale structural project in the world. Andrew Carnegie personally oversaw the manufacture and delivery of the steel parts. The caissons—water-tight retaining walls—used to build the piers were the largest and deepest at the time.

This first use of pneumatic caissons in the United States led to the identification of the bends (formation of nitrogen and other gas bubbles in the bloodstream) and de-pressurisation tank treatment. Eads Bridge also used the cantilever principle for the first time in bridge-building. These innovations were adopted for succeeding projects like the Brooklyn Bridge.

NONSENSE OF LIFE

I remember one walk on the bridge. A winter wind cut though my coat. An occasional car or truck passed alongside the pedestrian walkway. The commuter train rumbled on the tracks beneath the top deck. My life had been hard during that year. My family dissolved. My daughter moved 800 miles away for college. Her mother moved overseas. I moved to a condo with the cat. I was fired from my job; it was more a passive quitting. I’d been trying to leave as the manager of a small software company, to no avail. I began to hate business, in particular businesspeople who had two interests: making more money, and entertaining themselves with the money they had. I made them more money with little entertainment for me.

Image: Richard C. Stimac.

I distinctly remember looking over the railing of the bridge to the tumultuous river. It was brown and big and fast—as T.S. Eliot wrote, “a big, brown god”. He said that he was referring to the Thames, but we in St. Louis, his hometown, like to think that he returned to our river. As I stood there, I wondered what it would be like to disappear into that river, to be swept beneath the surface glinting with the winter sun, carried downstream, maybe all the way to the Gulf. I didn’t want to die, of course, in the physical sense, but in the psychoanalytical sense, the giving up of the responsibility of dealing with all the nonsense of life.

James Eads felt this pull of the river. Before he built the bridge, he patented one of the first bathyspheres for his salvage company. Eads walked along the bed of the river in a tarred whiskey barrel until he found a wreck. He’d attach a chain, haul the wreck up, and collect a commission. He made over 500 dives. After he built the bridge, Eads worked on the Lower Mississippi’s levee system and designed the first stable ship channel into the Gulf below New Orleans. He did it all with his own money, which he made back, and more. When I think about the relationship of Eads, Eliot, others, and my own to the river, I wonder if anyone who truly loves the river can really love the sea.

I walked off the bridge that time and haven’t been back.