Fifteen years

Fifteen years ago today, I got the crap scared completely out of me.  

I began the day in the northwoods of Wisconsin.  My son and I had participated in his very last Webelos campout.  It was a campout which was designed to entice those kids who might be waffling about Boy Scouts into getting into Boy Scouts.  We weren't waffling.  We were enjoying our selves.  

We were part of a group which had driven up to Tomahawk Scout Reservation the previous Sunday.  We were isolated in a small camping area which was right down the hill from the dining hall, and right next to the lake.  We were going to spend Sunday/Monday/Tuesday nights in that site, then we were going to decamp - that is, we were going to grab our stuff out of these pre-set-up tents and move to another camp site over on the other side of the camp which was much less ... cushy, far more like regular Scouts would Camp.  I didn't have my Holy Grail tent yet, we had a little two-man tent Jack and I were going to use there.  

We had some fun.  We also had some pretty painful moments - like the dinner where a couple of Scouts decided they knew what they were doing and used an entire bag of charcoal to make the cobbler.  My friends, let me tell you that a cobbler, typically a fruit and cake sort of arrangement, is done within a Dutch oven, which is, in camping terms, a cast iron pot with a lid which will allow you to place hot charcoal on top of it to heat the product within from above and below.  

Now, if you have a bit of experience in using a Dutch oven you are aware that heat should be applied equally, but briquettes do not heat evenly from above and below.  If I remember my dutch oven cooking basics correctly, the ratio is usually 3 to 5.  Three coals on the bottom, five on top.  If, say, you want 350 degrees, which is a typical cobbler cooking temperature, because that's what most cakes bake at, you will need nine coals below, fifteen coals above.  Keep them going for 45 minutes, and you should have a cobbler.

If, however, you dump an entire bag of charcoal on the ground and light it, you don't make cobbler.  You, at best, make more charcoal.  Although the very center of your cobbler might be edible.  Might.  And why is that?  Well, friends, as I've learned over the years, cooking is something that can be adjusted as you go along - as in "cooking scrambled eggs" or "cooking a steak" or "cooking macaroni and cheese".  These are often things done in an open pot, and can be adjusted as you go.

Baking, on the other hand, is not like cooking.  Baking is very much a science experiment.  It requires precise and exact measures, proper ratios, and sufficient, but not excessive, amounts of heat and time.  One cannot substitute one for the other, because an excess of heat will not "bake" faster, it will rather dry out the result, and the higher heat, when encountering an already dry target, will continue to burn that target.  A lower heat, left for longer, will not cause the proper chemical reactions to occur when they need to occur.  So, therefore, either follow the directions or get the hell out of the way for someone who can and will.

Anyway, fortunately, the remainder of the dinner was edible, and the food next day was also well-prepared.  And then we loaded into our vehicles after discussing our route home.  Because, like complete idiots, we had booked our trip and then scheduled the annual meeting which needed to occur as we set our various dates for the entire year into the schedule.  Yup.  Drag ass home from a poor night of sleep, clean yourself up, get over to the pizza place, have some dinner and make some plans.  

As our starting location was to the north and east of the Twin Cities, and our destination was directly south from Minneapolis, we had two options.  Leaving at 1:30 pm, we could take the local roads over to a state highway which would then take us over to I-35, which splits into two paths, east through St. Paul, being 35E, or west, through Minneapolis (which is, duh, west of St. Paul), down 35W.  Or the wild and crazy option would be to take the county roads to another freeway, I-94, then follow I-494, the southwards bypass of either downtown, which was going to take longer in terms of driving, might permit us to avoid a heck of a lot of traffic or get stuck in a lot of traffic, but it might be a possibility.

In the end, the country roads won out over the "get home faster" path, because some of us wanted to soak up a little more of our time in the nearly-wilderness.  It had been a good couple of days.  

So we headed south, west, south, west, and south.  I got dropped off in front of my home at about 3:30 pm.  I hauled our gear into the living room, checked my email (I'd been without technology other than my cell phone for emergencies for five days), and then hit the shave-and-shower circuit.  I got interrupted when my wife got home, I provided her the funny stories from camp, and then showered.  I got my uniform on, came out into the living room, and the news anchors had broken their routine.  You know the typical news cycle, around here it's news, news, weather, human interest, sports, recap, and they're done.  This would have been about the middle of the sports report when the anchors had broken in and were talking about the 35W Bridge.

This bridge, which crossed the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis, was one we'd considered going across on the way home.  One of our party had remembered something about road construction (our fifth season, we call it jokingly, because it's actually about 90% of the year.  Projects start in February, and often extend into December, if we're lucky.  If not, January get it too).  One of the anchors said "I'm not sure, but usually in that traffic cam shot, we can see the bridge.  It looks like it's not there." 

It was.  Well, it was still located there, but it was no longer maintaining the height above the water, which was what one expects from a bridge.  Without height, it's ... well, useless.  And in this case, the bridge had gone from useful to worse than useless - it had killed people.  We didn't know how many, but you don't drop fifty feet in a car, land on the roof, and walk away.  At least, those folks did not.

Which was where the terror set in for me.  I had a number of friends who worked in or near the downtown area, and their quickest way home towards the northeast was to take I-35W north out of downtown and then head across one of the many options north of town to get home.  I ran out of fingers counting up the people I knew who might have been in that disaster.

And what was the absolute worst was not being able to get in touch with any of them.  I tried their cell phones, no answers, and the network claimed congestion or "too many calls."  I tried their homes.  No answer.  

So I went to my meeting.  It wasn't until after 10:30 pm before I heard from a couple of them, and wasn't able to fully confirm everyone was safe until that weekend.  

I've been across that new bridge about four times.  I still hold my breath, knowing that it is much more safe and of a much higher capacity than the bridge it replaced.  But I'm still ... concerned.  As I am with most bridges.  Because I can no longer assume when I start at one end I'll reach the other, safely.  Sure, the I-35W bridge was put together with a mistake right in the center - the plates where multiple beams joined were half the thickness they were supposed to be, and this went unnoticed, here in the land of salt on the road every winter, for 30 plus years.  The video showing the collapse is almost as terrifying as anything I've ever seen - only because you only see the side of the bridge fail, you don't see the school bus full of kids, the cars full of people, and you don't hear the screams.

I was lucky - I wasn't involved.  But I still regularly spare a thought for those who were on their way somewhere and never arrived.  It's truly terrible when your life is lost to a mistake no one noticed for that long.  Your loved ones are left to wonder who could have caught it, and why they didn't.