My wife and I live in south Minneapolis a block west of I-35W. Her dad and stepmom live about a quarter mile west of I-35W in the suburb of New Brighton, twelve miles or so up the pike. Last Wednesday, my wife called me at work to say that she'd accepted an invitation for supper with her dad and his family at their house and that I should therefore pedal straight home after work (I bike to work in the unsnowy months). As luck would have it, I got delayed at work, left nearly a half hour later than I'd intended, and arrived home in a sweat around 5:30. My wife was strapping our 4-year-old into her safety chair in the back seat as I pedaled up the drive and we were soon on our way.
The obvious route is to travel north on I-35W, which bends east and back north around the east side of downtown Minneapolis, then crosses the Mississippi River before snaking northerly and northeasterly through northeast Minneapolis and Roseville to County Road H in New Brighton, where we exit and proceed the quarter mile west to her dad's house. On Wednesday, as we waited in the rush hour traffic to get on the freeway at the ramp by our place, my wife, who was driving, wondered aloud whether the normal and obvious route was the best one given the time of day and the fact that we knew there was work being done on the freeway bridge over the river. I put in a vote for the normal route and argued that, though it was depressing to inch along the freeway, the advantage of a less direct route was psychological only: the freeway would get us there sooner even if it seemed slower. While she seemed to be considering this I mentioned that in the event the freeway became a parking lot she'd be able to say she'd told me so--the ace of trumps, I thought.
As you approach downtown Minneapolis from the south on I-35W, the left lanes dump into a sort of staging ground from which you may choose various exits for different downtown streets, or the exit for west-bound I-94, which goes around the west side of the loop and then northwest to St. Cloud and Fargo. The lanes to the right join up with east-bound I-94 (the "commons") for the short stretch needed to avoid the loop before splitting off, I-35W bending north again just before crossing the river and I-94 continuing east to St. Paul. My wife had been able to drive the speed limit through south Minneapolis, but as we approached downtown at around 5:45 traffic became very congested. As is often the case, the commons was clogged and traffic was backed up on the approach to downtown. My wife, who had never bothered to respond to my advice, veered left into downtown and proceeded north on city streets along the west bank of the river until we arrived at I-694, the Twin Cities bypass through the northern suburbs, on which we proceeded east across the river through Fridley and over to New Brighton. We had just sat down to supper when the phone rang--a relative watching the news wanted to make sure everyone was okay. So we all got up from the table and moved to the family room, where we spent most of the rest of the evening looking at the same images as viewers all over the country. At some point it finally occurred to my wife to say, "Told ya so!"
Of course we had to play the what-if game. We're pretty sure that, had we stayed on the freeway, we would have been across the bridge before it collapsed. We were arriving at the commons no later than 5:50. From there to the river is perhaps 8000 feet, and the bridge came down at about 6:05. Fifteen minutes should have been enough time to travel at least two miles, even with rush hour traffic and construction. If so we could have told everyone that we'd crossed the bridge just a few minutes before the catastrophe, which would have been a better story.
And people seem eager for good stories. Next day, when I recounted for someone at work my movements of the previous evening, she submitted with reverent gravity the opinion that "someone was looking over you." You hear these kinds of sentiments all the time in Minneapolis these days and they are amplified by "journalists" who understand that people have an insatiable appetite for such rot. The pregnant woman, now confirmed dead, who went down with her toddler, also dead? I guess "someone" was too busy looking after me and mine to have tended to them.
The bridge collapsed. The explanation for this event has to do with its design and the properties of the materials from which it was built. Probably faulty human judgment exercised in the realms of engineering and politics played a part, too. But the mystic pronouncements of the theologically-oriented overwrought have no explanatory power whatever. Only so many cars could be on the bridge at a time. Given that some lanes were closed for construction, something close to the maximum number went down. Someone--Mark Twain?--observed that, while not a sparrow falls without Him knowing, still the sparrow falls.
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