"Bridge quiet now but life in summer hectic" from the November 16, 1972 Door County Advocate
By RANDALL NICHOLAS
Bridge quiet now but life in summer hectic
By RANDALL NICHOLAS
When you're the bridge operator you view life a little differently. Car life. Boat life. Draw bridge life. Seeing a long break in the traffic, I swung open the small gate on the pedestrian walkway and ran across the steel-canopied stretch of road to the door of the bridge house. Drab and inconspicuous, it hangs on the side of that long and lofty, shining architecture, the pea-size brain of a brontosaurus.
There's always a man inside. Then it was Oliver Anderson, foreman, who has been with the bridge edging sixteen years now. His house is a comfortable place: a stove stands warmly by the master control board, the "nerves" of the bridge; a desk sits across from the "fuse box," an upright small acre of them; a mirror outside, attached to the eastern corner of the house, lets you see what's out in the bay as you watch the flow of cars from the stop light.
Anderson sat there and, having laid aside the newspaper, rolled himself a cigarette. Not a bad spot to be for an eight hour shift, I thought.
"It looks easy now," he said then, "but in summer she goes up as much as fifty times in one day. You're on your feet all the time, and there's enough problems with both the over and under traffic to give anybody grey hairs." My eyes gazed at his sheer white head.
All the suspense you can conceive of concerning such a bridge is actual. Take one of my greatest fears —.getting caught on the wrong side of the black and white warning gate that's one of the least of Anderson's. He raises the gate, runs out of the house and yells get back, that's all, but the boat keeps on coming, of course. What about a car going on as the bridge goes up? Yes, that too, and they just roll back down. Jumping the bridge? No, not a car, but kids sometimes try to do it, on foot.
It isn't as if the operators weren't excruciatingly careful: when a boat sounds its horn, although it doesn't tend to slow down, it's pretty far off, and the operator has time to wait for a break in the traffic so he can lower the gates — a generous distance away from the actual draw section of the bridge — and only after another wait does he raise the bridge, slowly. But, Anderson insists, once you hear the boat's horn, you rely mostly on prayer.
Then, the boats. Just a few days before, a ferry coming into dry dock got caught in a cross current and took off a piece of the old wooden railroad trestle just north of the bridge, the structure first used for canal crossings. Twelve years ago a Swedish vessel hit one of the concrete footings of the bridge itself. Outside the house one can still see evidence of the damage where the girder doesn't quite match the concrete. The bridge was out of operation for twenty days, cars having to be ferried across.
One night a boat sounded its horn and when Anderson went to raise the draw the fuses blew. This had never happened before and now there are plenty of spare fuses on hand. Then Anderson and a friend who happened to see what was not happening got out and waved red warning lights, bringing the boat to a halt.
Some summer tourists, thinking a little too highly of themselves, sound their pleasure boats' horns and raise the bridge, back up traffic for miles, for a mere aerial which can be taken down and put up again. Sometimes Anderson and the others just don't let them through.
Each time the bridge goes up Anderson marks it down in a log kept on the desk. So operators have been doing ever since July 4, 1931, when the bridge was dedicated. Its openings have been tabulated by month, by year, broken down into "Commercial" and "Pleasure," and the log records, from one angle, the modern-day progress of Door county. After 1942 one observes a surge in the number of openings, indicative of when Peterson, Palmer Johnson and Leathem Smith were building ships for the war, which continued on in the commercial vein for the post-war years. Looking at more recent history, the past two years, one sees a definite mushrooming from June to September of pleasure crafts but, interestingly enough, a noticeable decline in that category for this year.
In 1955 the opening count jumped by 300; this the year, Anderson informed me, that Ed Anderson was bringing through so many potato boats from Washington Island. Also behind he numbers can be seen what seems to be that cycle in the water level people talk about: the most boats going through in the years of '32, '52 and '72; the least in '42 and '62.
"But tell me, Mr. Anderson, how does it work?" The grey-haired man got up with a simple explanation on the control board. Ironically enough, the bridge works like a car. You can put it into Neutral or Drive or Reverse. Once you do, the brakes come off. Once the operation is through, the motor off, the brakes go on, high near the concrete counterweight poised over the passing cars.
That's just the control board version of it. Out on the bridge itself, it's a different story. The boat's horn sounds. The warning gates go down. Red stop lights flash. A bell clangs. Along two steel-toothed tracks stretched out like huge zippers on either side of the roadway, move two massive steel quadrants — that's 90 degrees of a circle — until, tipped back 180 degrees, rolled to their zipper's end, they ground the concrete counterweight spanned between them, so, many yards off, the draw section, come apart in the middle, suspends above, in its highest upright position. At the point of fulcrum on top — a tiny gear by contrast — has underneath it now the edge of the quadrant that before was 180 degrees away.
How do I know all this? "Come here," Anderson said, going out into the traffic, "I'll show you how it works." First he showed me the quadrants, the tracks, the then-suspended counterweight. Then, crossing to the walkway, to started showing me the same things on the other side, only to disappear up a ladder. "Come on up," he said, "you haven't seen the good part yet." So, half-way up the bridge I climbed, knowing at least I'd hit the board walk when I fell and not the water. Very nice," I said, standing on a small platform, admiring the view of the girders.
Only my man had disappeared again, this time up a ladder overhanging the roadway. "The good part's up here," he said, out of sight. "No way," I said. "Aw come on, all you've got to do is grab hold." A quivering minute later found me at the top of the bridge; torn by winds, looking down at the thundering road, the far away lapping waters of the canal.
It was here I first saw the fulcrum gear, the brake drums snug inside a lightbulb-warmed shed, the concrete counterweight eye-level, and two funny-looking baskets over which protruded two long-handled cranks. "What are those for?" I asked. "Those are in case the motor conks out. You put a man in each basket, and as they crank the bridge up, the baskets swing as they go down so they can keep standing. So far the motor's never conked out."
"Well, when that happens," I said, "just remember I don't like heights."
Courtesy of the Door County Library Newspaper Archive
Articles about the Sturgeon Bay Bridge
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Articles by Randall Nicholas
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