The Bridge

The Bridge


I have always been something of a wanderer, a cheapskate, and an asker of too many questions.  This fit perfectly for me being born late into the hippie era, when the culture was still sort of ok with a young guy hitchhiking to get where he needed to go.   By the time I was 20 I was hitchhiking between working in the oil fields out west, and going home to see my family in NYC during the holidays.

One time I was coming off of an oil crew in Wyoming  and somewhere in the middle of Kansas and eighteen wheeler stops and the driver tells he is going all the way to NYC but has to stop in Toronto first, and I can get in if I can stay awake with him all the way.    Hell.  I'm 20 years old.  I can stay awake forever.

Well, 18 hours of coffee and conversation later, we roll onto the Peace Bridge in Buffalo NY at midnight heading to Toronto, but we get stopped at the Canadian Border for incomplete customs paperwork.   It turns out that it will take another 24 hours to sort out, so I do the math, and reckon I can get down to NYC quicker than that, so I thank the driver, hop out, and head back to America.

I start to hitchhike but get no luck and its then that I realize my predicament.  Middle of the night 20 years old, a young hippie, long hair, unshaven, backpack.  Havent showered in 3 days, so I'm ripe, and I had to get by some very bored American border guards looking like that.   They would see me walking up to them the whole way and be laughing at the entertainment value of finding themselves someone like me.   I had no interest in being picked apart

But then I look at the bridge and see its a girder bridge.   Well hell.  I'm young.   Being young means you are made of 1 part bluster, 1 part dumb luck and 2 parts stupid.    Being young and male just means you get a double dose.

I climb up and over the side of the bridge above the Niagara River, and begin to crawl amongst the girders underneath it.   I manage to get from the first to the second girder, then the second to the third, and after bit I have a technique going, and I eventually get to the other side, and drop down on the river bank of the American side, climb up to the Scajaqueda freeway, find the NY state thruway and get back to NYC by noon the next day, all in one piece, still young, dumb and lucky.

Little did I know then that within 12 years I would be living in Buffalo with my wife, she in Graduate school, me in technology, a regular citizen, and we would ride our bicycles over that same peace bridge on weekend mornings to get a cup of Tim Horton's coffee and a donut, back in those storied days before Starbucks taught us all how good a cup of coffee could be, but only if you had the money for it.