October 24, 2006
The Bob Graham Sunshine Skyway Bridge
I 275 laid sleeping like a snake in the sun on the The Bob Graham Sunshine Skyway Bridge.
But there was no sun.
It was 4:30 in the morning.
We drove in a rental car on the road over Tampa Bay. It severed the water like a hairline crack in a solid slab of onyx, the break noticeable only in the faintest shifts of reflection in the moonlight over the still water.
The darkness spread out both windows like a velvet carpet on a painter's vacant still life. The emptiness unrolled beyond both edges of my peripheral into the middle of the night. I looked south out the window towards the mouth of the bay. there were no lights from the retirement homes, condominiums, docks and keys to separate the sky from the water. The horizon disappeared giving the illusion of the water floating away then wrapping back overhead again; of me being at once above and under water.
My father was driving and my mother was in the passenger seat. The car was silent, The night was dark. The water was black.
The present situation, in the back seat of a rental car while driving over The Bob Graham Sunshine Skyway Bridge at 4:30 a.m. might have very well been like my entire lifetime, i suspected; the metaphor perhaps becoming clear only in retrospect:
I sat silent and struggled to gain a sense of place. I searched for what existed above and below me; and difference between them. I overlooked and under appreciated the great construction made by previous men which afforded me the luxury not to need to navigate nor to think. I should have well enjoyed the convenience albeit separation from the space I was speeding right through; the path so clearly built and safely prescribed, to get me across the bay in the fastest and straightest path, the path my father was driving steadily down right between the lines.
Yet despite it all, my attention was drawn to the darkness beyond the guard rails.
And I had no clue how far it was to the other side.