Today someone shared a photo on twitter of the Golden Gate bridge before it was built. Just the bases on each side of Marin and SF were there, and an open exposed bay in the middle. It’s funny how much a bridge can grow to mean to us. When I first went to San Francisco I was 13. My dad had taken me for my birthday as a special father daughter trip. We did every possible tourist thing we could jam into three days including taking a ferry around the bay and underneath the Golden Gate. There was something radiant and magical about it. This place looked and felt nothing like LA where I grew up. I felt the cold wind on my face, craned my neck to look up at that burnt orange-red paint and thought one day I am going to live here.
Several years later I moved to San Francisco and I spent 16 years in and around the city, graduating from college, starting and ending careers, getting married and getting divorced and yet one thing remained constant for me during that whole time–-the bridge.
It’s of course one of our great symbols in addition to being the literal bridge between two pieces of land. There is something special that happens when you cross a bridge if you stay aware—you transition from one place to another and in such an extreme yet smooth fashion because many hundreds of people spent years of their lives to allow your passing from one place to the next. Over those 16 years the Golden Gate only became more important to me, so much so that I carry a tiny piece of it around on my keychain—a remnant from its restoration many years ago.
To me it always represented the dreams I had for my life. Dreams even that went beyond San Francisco. Every time I crossed it, it was some small reminder that a much younger and less capable version of myself decided, this is where I will go, and I made it so. At 13 I was still naive enough to have a solid bank of hope for my future. I had no idea what it would look like or what would become of my life, but I knew somehow that glowing red bridge had something to do with it. It contained my dreams, all unknown, just whispers in my heart.
When I decided to move to New York and leave the bay after almost two decades, I drove to the Marin side of the golden gate to say goodbye to it. I stood there leaning against the side of my car during peak quarantine and watched the sun paint its reflection on the water. I fell back in love with the bridge all over again. Even then though, I knew it was time for the next dream and whatever that would contain, I had no idea. After all, that’s part of the fun. I knew I would have other bridges to cross in my future between other pieces of land in another city.
This photo though really strikes me––the unbuilt bridge. How often do we see such grand things like this, when they are just ideas and peoples dreams. It’s not often, but it’s a good reminder that even dreams as big as this have steps. First you build the base, then the towers and then you connect them. We take for granted these types of monuments because once they exist as a whole we become so familiar with them that we forget they were just once whispers of an idea in someones mind, or a sketch on a piece of paper.
So much of what we all want in life begins like this—one piece at a time. But first, the dream. The crossing is the easy part.