Tale of Two Cities?? Hardly. Just another iconic bridge (in Boston; I'm sure you recognize it) on a beautiful, blue-sky day. And Newport's Bridge is bigger, if we want to get comparative/competitive about it, but that's because Newport's Pell Bridge was built to accommodate passage of aircraft carriers, the Navy Base being just north of the bridge. Two aircraft carriers lie moth-balled there to this day ...
In any case, we (Mr. Betty and I) crossed two bridges — at least two bridges — and hung out in Boston on Saturday. And that new bridge (the largest asymmetrical bridge in the world??) is cool, very cool. It's even cooler having the time to stop/pause/view it on foot — from Charlestown, in particular, where we started out (with a quick look-see at Old Ironsides) before taking a ferry named Rita across the harbor, something we hadn't done in ages, as we're usually zipping past/under/through that creepily long tunnel en route to points farther north and feel as if we haven't seen Boston at all ...
But way back when ("way back when ..."), when I was just out of school — at the precise age/stage our son is now — I saw lots of Boston, as I lived there and went everywhere ... on foot. My apartment was in the middle, at the top of a hill, and I didn't hesitate to walk or run, i.e. jog, at any time of day or night — which was pretty stupid — from one end to the other, harbor to Pru, or sometimes across two bridges, my favorite route (at 9 or 10 p.m., solo) being along the Charles to the Mass. Ave. Bridge then back along the opposite shore to the "Salt and Pepper Bridge" near the Science Museum.
It's not so different from what I do now — though I very rarely jog, let alone run — living at the top of another hill in a smaller seaside city. We never really change, do we?? Preferences?? Habits?? Cities, too, remain in essence the same (or so it seems), although Boston looks/feels very different with that new lovely bridge and having buried its traffic issues underground. Still, the two cities (my two cities??) have much in common. The scale may be different — I feel smaller in Boston — but some things are exactly the same ...
About that bridge: it appears it's not the largest asymmetrical bridge in the world. "It is the first asymmetrical cable-stayed bridge in the United States and the widest cable-stayed bridge in the world" (according to the website of Kiewit, the construction outfit who built it). And, in the process of checking (and disproving) my facts, I learned something — the bridge's proper name, for one thing — from Wikipedia: "On 14 October 2002, elephants from the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus crossed the new Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge to demonstrate the bridge's structural integrity. The 14 elephants proved that the bridge supports 112,000 pounds. The Boston elephant march resembled tests of the 1800s when bridge engineering was more questionable. Elephants were used to demonstrate the sturdiness of the Eads Bridge in 1874 and the Brooklyn Bridge in 1884. According to folklore, elephants are used for such shows of strength because they are widely believed to have uncanny instincts and will not cross unsafe structures." Now that's interesting ...
