PORTLAND BRIDGE RUN AND RESCUE AFTER DARK

This is my favorite Portland bridge, the Hawthorne Bridge.

The picture makes it look longer than it is on foot, or on a bike.

When I lived on the west side, I had a job on the east side and crossed it twice a day.

Then I moved to east side and worked on the west side and kept crossing it twice a day.

A metaphor of life?

It was the most convenient bridge and turns out I wasn’t the only one who thought so.

The Hawthorne Bridge is a truss bridge with a vertical lift that spans the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon, joining Hawthorne Boulevard and Madison Street. It is the oldest vertical-lift bridge in operation in the United States and the oldest highway bridge in Portland.

 It is also the busiest bicycle and transit bridge in Oregon, with over 8,000 cyclists and 800 TriMet buses (carrying about 17,400 riders) daily.

And one runner: Me.

From my NW Portland apartment I caught a bus to my swing shift job on the inner east side.

Around midnight I clocked out and put on my running gear to head home.

It felt magical running across the river and into the city on young, springy, legs that could still run a six minute mile.

Friends thought my habit was a little kooky until I got them all running too. It was the early 1980’s, and a good, hard, run fixed a lot of problems. As a weight conscious guy, running kept me in fighting trim.

I didn’t consider Portland my hometown since I grew up in this place, but it had a good feel to it at the time. I rode to town on a Greyhound after leaving NYC Port Authority three days earlier. Portland became my new small town after the big city.

Fighting Trim On A Portland Bridge

One night after work I changed, shook it out, and started on my usual LSD trip home, or Long Slow Distance.

After running up the east side ramp, the elevated road toward the bridge had a downhill slant for an easy cruise. Ordinarily I’d go slow, easing down the decline in neutral, then hit the jets when I got to the big part of the bridge.

One night while hitting my stride on the left side of the road I saw two people walking toward me headed east. Just two fellas out for a midnight stroll, or muggers, buggers, and thieves?

I had a plan for just such occasions: run away. Now and then news stories would report a body washing up on the river banks. I made sure it wouldn’t be me.

One of the two stopped in the middle of the bridge to take a pee into the Willamette. The other kept walking.

Once they came out of the super structure, one of them crossed the lanes to get to the other side.

By then I was running in place while they made their move. The flanking maneuver left me one on one. I could either run away, or drop the first guy before the second made his attack.

If they’d stayed together I was going to jam one guy into the other, throw hands, and leave them where they lay.

There I was, pretending to run, watching their plan unfold before I crushed them.

Things Changed In A Blink

The guy crossing lanes made it over the first of four. He got to the second lane just as a speeding car emerged from inside the bridge.

He took the hit and flew high into the air, landing with a soggy thump while the car didn’t slow down.

One down, one to go, I thought. I ran up to the other guy and yelled at him. Turns out he wasn’t the bad man I thought, but he sounded shocky.

“Who is that guy?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re not together?”

“No.”

“Let’s get him out of the road.”

The guy kept walking while I hopped off the sidewalk to pull the guy to safety.

I stood by the downed guy waving my arms at a car headed toward us. They swerved to avoid the fallen man and I jumped away.

Who would stop to help anyone laying in the road with another person flagging them down at night? No one, and I didn’t blame them.

A few more cars passed until a big red pick-up stopped and blocked traffic. A lady jumped out and I yelled that this was an emergency.

She jumped back in the truck and called out on her CB radio. More cars stopped, then the police and firemen showed up.

The guy hadn’t moved and I couldn’t tell if he was breathing. After the hit and run and flying and landing, I figured him for dead.

An ambulance arrived while the police were kneeling around the man. The medics broke out the smelling salts. About twenty people were standing near the man when he suddenly jumped up and started fighting the person closest person to him, a policeman.

The crowd stepped back with an audible “Whaaaaat?”

Portland Bridge Drama

With the situation covered by professionals I continued on my way thinking how fast things change.

One moment I’m prepping to defend myself against the bad guys, the next I’m dodging cars trying to keep one of them from being splattered a second time.

The two men were street people reeking of alcohol, but they deserved a human response. I could have run away, but the times called for something more.

Whenever I wonder if I did the right thing, I come back to values and care. I couldn’t just leave a down man, even though I was going to drop him if came at me.

He was one of the less fortunate, I was living alone in a cheap 3rd floor studio apartment. We didn’t seem that much different.

Would he have helped me if the roles were exchanged? Doubtful. Would he have stopped to take my wallet if I was the one in the road? Maybe, but that wasn’t how it played out. He ended up in the back of the police cruiser after the medics checked him out.

I was just another runner in the night, beating on like a boat against the current, getting pulled ceaselessly toward an uncertain future.

Nick Carraway would have understood.