I left the house on Monday morning to go to Sparrows Point, an enormous steel mill in Baltimore's outer harbor formerly owned by American steel Giant, Bethlehem Steel. As the sparrow flies it is about 25 miles from my house, right across the shimmering Chesapeake, but semis don't fly and I don't care to find out if they can float so I took the roads down to the Bay Bridge and back up to the city.
The William Preston Lane [former governor of the Old Line State] Memorial Bridge, as it is more formally known, is a twin span 4.5 mile bridge that was, when it was built, the longest bridge of its type in the world, it is part suspension and part truss and very high so as to allow cargo ships to pass beneath it and cause panic attacks to those above it. It is the only crossing of the middle bay (another bridge crosses the Susquehanna at the northern end of the bay, and a 17.5 mile bridge/tunnel combination connects the Virginia part of Delmarva to the Virginia Beach Norfolk area near the mouth of the bay. It wasn't built until the 50s and up to that point the eastern shore was relatively isolated connected to the Baltimore/ Washington side only by ferries and passenger steamers. It was probably similar to the present system of ferries that like Seattle to the Sound Islands and Olympic and Kitsap Peninsulas. Many people think it would be nice if it were still isolated and, once you get away from the bridge, it pretty much is, especially if you go north to where I grew up.
Most of the traffic that crosses the bridge east bound heads south to the snooty getaway spot in Talbot County (Easton, St. Michaels, Oxford, many politicians, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, e.g. have houses here) or to the more proletarian beaches on the southern peninsula, Rehoboth in Delaware and Ocean City in Maryland. Until the bridge was built there were great amusement parks and victorian resorts along the eastern shore of the bay, especially in Kent County, directly across the bay from Baltimore and easily accessible by regular ferry service. The resorts of Tolchester and Betterton are pretty much dead now but there's an ironic twist.
The bridge at present is horribly packed in the summer with people going to or from the beach. The state wants to build another bridge with three options: 1.) a third span where the present two are, connecting Annapolis to Kent Island. (This is problematic since there is little room to add approach lanes on either side (we are dealing with islands and peninsulas here, at present packed with businesses on either side of the road)) 2.) a span further south connecting Calvert County to Dorchester, problematic since a span through Dorchester would plow through some extensive and significant wetlands and 3.) a span to the north, from east Baltimore to Kent County, right into Tolchester where once there was a great amusement pier the evidence reduced now to some curious paint on the crushed concrete that lines the banks. An amusement pier that was killed by the bridge to the south, whose congestion now threatens to destroy the county as a whole, turning what is an astonishingly rural appendage on the eastern seaboard into another burger boulevard. That would be bad news, if you ask me.
Anyway, I picked up two big coils of tin plated steel or some such things and had to secure and tarp them in the rain. By the time I was ready to go I was completely soaked and looking like a drowned rat. I changed and took off for Paris, Texas, the Paris of Texas to a Campbell's Soup plant so large that they had their own can manufacturing facility. The noise in the plant was deafening as huge presses stamped out and shaped pieces of sheet tin, the air smelled comfortable, in a soupy sort of way.
From there I was sent to the north side of Dallas to pick up 4x8 sheets of 2" thick foam insulation. The wind was ceaseless and the act of throwing straps and tarps over this load looked more like a three stooges routine than work.
That went to North Little Rock to a building supply store on a seedy street beneath a grey sky.
Another quick load assignment, this one to Malvern, Arkansas to pick up giant reels of cable from General Cable, a business so big it has no need for a fancy name. As you leave the highway and head toward Hot Springs the land suddenly bursts into swells unknown to travelers of I-30 headed to Texarkana.
I headed east and spent the night 40 miles east of Memphis. A beautiful evening, the air warm and breezy and easy to relax in.
These are headed to The City of Monroe, North Carolina, to maintain or expand their electrical infrastructure.
The delivery is not until Monday and I am spending the weekend in Asheville with some friends who went to college with my sister. Nice to have a weekend. and I'll be back in Chestertown next weekend, easy as pie.
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