Cracked Window

Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual’s own will?

That, Thornton Wilder said, was the underlying question of his acclaimed 1927 novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. The book explores the lives of five people who fall to their deaths when a rope bridge in Peru collapses.

I don’t think about the book when I cross Portland’s river bridges. But I do when I pass one block of Northeast 33^rd Avenue. Several years ago I spotted two wooden bridges spanning small yards on opposite sides of the street.

No one will die if these bridges break, but I immediately linked them with Wilder’s work, which won a Pulitzer Prize. They’ve nagged at me ever since, something more than curiosities. But what?