Best of Beth Ashley: Waiting for the next disaster to strike

Editor’s note: The IJ is reprinting some of the late Beth Ashley’s columns. This is from 2007.

If you’ve ever been nervous about bridges, you must be sweating now.

The recent catastrophe on the Minneapolis bridge has us span-o-phobes shaking in our boots. Have you ever felt more vulnerable?

The events of Sept. 11 were just the beginning of an underlying angst that has all of us on our toes, waiting for the next awful hit.

I am one who trembles in tunnels, gets shaky at more-than-normal heights, keeps her fingers crossed whenever she’s driving the Golden Gate Bridge.

These creations are indeed wonderful, but who said we have figured out all that could go wrong?

Obviously, we haven’t.

Maybe events like the bridge collapse are reminders that we can’t conquer everything, and it’s sheer hubris to believe that we can.

But bless our analytical hearts, we will someday decide what actually happened, structurally, and we will go on trying to master the forces of gravity, the mysteries of stress and structure and overload.

Fingers will probably be pointed, one of the many ills of modern life. Is someone always to blame, or can we just concede that bad stuff sometimes happens?

My life in recent months has been fraught with bad luck — a family death, an auto accident — so maybe I’m more on edge than most.

But I am sure that almost everyone has internalized the feelings of unease that were set off on Sept. 11 and that have kept us ultra-sensitive to the horrors that play out every hour all over the globe.

Every day, newspapers describe explosions in Afghanistan, lethal floods in Europe, starvation in Africa, random shootings in the East Bay, murders of innocent people, savagery against children, war, war and more war.

It’s enough to make your hair stand on end. Sometimes I put down my paper in anguish.

We never know when disaster will strike next door.

Not that I don’t half expect it.

Ever since the earthquake of 1989, when hours afterward I drove the Golden Gate Bridge twice in total darkness, I’ve been wary.

I’m sure the most vulnerable part of the bridge — the part that would (gulp) drop into the ocean — is the midsection between the two towers.

I find myself holding my breath.

I hold my breath in tunnels, too.

And when forced to visit the top of a high-rise, I can almost feel the sway, imagine the topple should a big quake hit. When I climbed to the crown of the Statue of Liberty, I refused to look out. At the top of the Washington Monument, I shrank as far as I could from the railing.

My 1999 visit to one of the Twin Towers was a nightmare I’ll never forget.

And don’t even talk to me about airplanes, which have always seemed like an exercise in fantasy — how can they possibly stay up? — and a god-awful invention that just flirts with death. The only reason I fly is because I desperately want to get where I’m going. My knuckles are always white.

Now my daily rounds grow more difficult.

The day will come soon — tomorrow? — that I will have to drive the bridge again, and I’ll do so with heart in mouth, and images dancing in my head of collapsed roadways, submerged cars and people free-falling toward the water. Gawd.

So what does it all mean?

It means that I — and everyone else — will just have to swallow our fears and move on.

The phobias will remain, I’m sure — but the joys of day-to-day living are so compelling that we keep keeping on.

I will dare the gods and drive the bridge. I will mourn for all of life’s victims, but I’ll continue to bless — and appreciate more than ever — every day I survive.