The Bridge(s) of Hennepin County

I lived in the old empire, in the days when the Great Crumbling had begun. There was a bridge, somewhere up on the northern waters of the Mississippi, which collapsed during rush hour and sent dozens of cars into the drink, trapping and destroying many more. There was the New Orleans flood a few years before that, where the great levees gave way. And of course, the massive towers which collapsed at the behest of a few errant 747s. The very infrastructure was rotting like quicksand beneath our feet, and we had only ourselves to blame. For years we'd thought of our infrastructure as something erotic, and permanent, like the beauty of youth and the long legs of models who posed in crisp gowns. It was a solid, man-made ground, but it was ground nonetheless. But money, and croneyism, and war bonds: these all filtered money out in the wrong ways. The projects were quietly underfunded, the departments of public works slowly eroded by tax drip here, embezzlement there, and entitlements all around. The great civic geniuses were given to building new big boxes and multi-tiered (and -themed) shopping destinations, while the road beds and train trestles which bore these quiet burdens grumbled underneath. And then, at last, it happened: slowly at first, and then with ever-increasing efficiency and speed, like a giant, random game of dominoes set all across the country. An overpass here, a public pier there, and suddenly, the transit officials and police departments and dutiful, good-mannered engineers were overwhelmed. Foreigners and Europeans came in to help, but it was much too late: the cocky, loud empire was resting on powderizing bones, and we were all rattling at the rib cages hoping to break out. That's when I came here, to the fair, new, more boring land, where the religions and political parties form singular entities, where alcohol is outlawed and gambling a thing of dirty child's story books. I came here, where thick opaque fences block the public eye from surveying the ever-numerating landfills, and it's simply ok (and normal) to have to wear a gas mask to work and surgical mask to the play. And infrastructure? It's all soft, safe, and non-secular: God himself must hold these bridges and car queues up in the air, float as they do. Airplanes no longer hurl themselves into the atmosphere with a linebacker's fury: they simply flutter into orbit, blowing with the gentle breezes as they make their boring way into the lanyard-covered cloudforts of the sky. The cloudforts: this is where my daddy made his living, contemplating and redrawing the clouds from above. They made queer shadows on the ground from up there, and my childhood bedroom was covered with them. See here, how the giant, curly-haired monster angles his paws around the throat of Chicago! See there, the way the three-legged angel fish squats down and farts on the shores of Galveston! Oh, looky now, at how the man-eating pickle bats descend on the sanded plains of eastern California, looking for trailers and other thin-skinned prey! These white, impermanent creatures were in a never-ending quest to pick the planet clean of people, according to my dad's wild imagination. He could only wonder what those still left to suffer below must think of the clouds themselves.