Visitors “all call it red,” said Russell.īack in the day, the US Navy, then part of the War Department, oversaw the waterways and wanted to paint this bridge black and yellow for high visibility, like a bumblebee, said fellow painter Jarrod Bauer.Īs the bridge was being erected in the 1930s, the steel brought to construct the bridge had a coat of red lead on it. It’s not red, although you’re not crazy to think so. Why is it called the Golden Gate Bridge? It’s not golden. I love it out here.”ĬNN Travel spent a day climbing into and around the bridge, learning these 10 secrets from the people who know and love it best.ġ. “My favorite part is just to be able to say that I work on the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s just a beautiful, beautiful sight,” he said. “When the moon is behind the bridge in the morning, it’s really nice and it’s really calm, clear skies. Ironworker Darren McVeigh loves to see the bridge when the sun is rising or setting. “You get those nice days where it’s 75 degrees out here and it’s clear, and you can see the Farallons (islands), I could see Alcatraz, I could see the whole city,” says bridge painter Brian Russell.”If we have a job on the cables, you get to walk the cables and you’re all like, “you know what I have a pretty cool job.’” They tie us to the past, to the shipping that once defined this place, to the sea, to the things beyond what we can see.The Golden Gate Bridge DeAgostini/Getty Imagesįrom the engineers and ironworkers and electricians who maintain the bridge to the painters who keep it coated in International Orange, there’s as much life under and around the bridge as there is moving over it. The International Association of Lighthouse Authorities has decreed that “fog signals are no longer necessary for the needs of navigation.” We San Franciscans need them for other reasons. A bed is a ship of sorts, but a foghorn can’t prevent the collisions that may take place there, awake or asleep. Maybe it is strange that a device meant to aid ships, according to the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, was one I heard when I was securely ensconced, heavy with sleep, at home in bed. The Golden Gate Bridge foghorns are the only ones left that have the sound you think of when you think of fog and foghorns, though there are a few Coast Guard foghorns elsewhere in the bay and along the coast, and ships have their own sonorous horns I hear now from eastern San Francisco. Summer is when I’d hear the foghorns most often, reminding me that I lived on a peninsula surrounded by a cold ocean. If you were to get seasonal affective disorder, you’d get it in August, and the knowledge that inland people were sweating and wearing shorts while you were piling on sweaters and praying for a glimpse of sun wouldn’t help. Designed to warn sailors at sea of unseen, unseeable obstacles, the sounds also let land-dwellers like me know what is there beyond the reach of our senses.įog is silent, and when you watch it from afar, it seems stealthy or even sinister - arms of fog reaching around the belly of Mount Tamalpais, then retreating fingers pouring over the Sausalito hills, drifting with languid weight down onto the town and the bay rafts of it sailing under or over or all around the Golden Gate Bridge a solid layer of the stuff over western San Francisco in late summer like a sodden gray blanket, muffling sound and sense of time, as though it were six in the morning all day until darkness returns. ![]() ![]() ![]() They are also an orientation there I was in a bed in a little apartment in the middle of a city where, the sounds told me, fog was rising up from the sea, traveling from the west, twining around the coast, sliding toward us. We still say horn, but foghorns are now mechanical devices with deep voices, because low noises travel farther. It’s a way to give a voice to as much as a million tons an hour of water vapor on the move. It’s a warning, an offer of assistance, a sound that says when seeing fails, hearing may succeed. San Francisco’s foghorns make a deep, plaintive bleat, like the call of a guardian. I heard them often, and in recollection the sound seems almost like a correlative of that middle-of-the-night state of being not quite awake, not quite asleep, with a wandering mind but a body pinned down by sleep’s Jupiterian gravity. Only in the middle of the night, only when all the background noise of the busy streets I lived on from 1981 to 2011 fell away, only when there were almost no cars abroad and the hum of city life died down, only when I woke up in darkness from deep sleep, did I hear the foghorns.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |