Bay Bridge Walk

I walked the Chesapeake Bay Bridge one Saturday in May more than a dozen years ago.

I was fresh into walking then. Had just turned the big 4-0. Was getting over the most tempestuous, roller-coaster-y love affair I’d ever spiraled down into. Didn’t know that any interaction between two people could cause that kind of hurt. At the time, it was the most excruciating emotional pain I’d ever felt. Little I knew.

So I walked, that spring, all around the Northwest neighborhoods of Washington, D.C. where I lived. I walked up and down the trails in Rock Creek Park, where the bamboo grew wild in the spring. I walked around Dupont Circle and up to Adams Morgan where the smells of ethnic cooking filled the sultry spring air as expatriated men from African nations sipped coffee in outdoor cafes. I walked across the Duke Ellington Bridge into the heights and over to the Washington Zoo, where admission was free and I could continue on up the trails that led to the animal habitats.

While I walked, I listened to The Doors, thrilled anew by their music after Oliver Stone’s movie came out. I was in love all over again with Jim Morrison, dead Jim Morrison, leather-pants-wearing, make love-to-the-microphone, acid-consuming, in your face Jim Morrison. Or maybe just his voice. Or maybe I was actually in love with Val Kilmer, who played Morrison in the movie.

I pounded my sneakers to the beat of Whiskey Bar, Break On Through, Love Me Two Times, and every song from every cassette I could get my hands on for my newly purchased Walkman, over and over for days and weeks and months. I walked to lift my spirits; I walked for exercise and to lose weight; I walked to anesthetize the raw pain in my heart.

And then I saw a poster for the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Walk. It was scheduled for the first Sunday in May, before it got so oppressively hot that nobody would bother to show up. I’d never heard of the Bay Bridge walk before. The poster encouraged everyone: families, runners, sports teams, even the disabled and senior citizens to join in and walk—just for the fun of it.

I’d driven across the bridge many times, back and forth from New York City to D.C. The bridge is really two for the price of one: twin spans, one each for east- and west-bound traffic across a narrow part of the Chesapeake Bay near Annapolis that connects the main part of  Maryland to its Eastern Shore and points beyond. Every year since 1975, tens of thousands of walkers cross one of the spans that has been closed to vehicular traffic while the other bridge accommodates both directions of cars and buses and trucks for most of the day.

I was excited by the idea of taking my heart-healing walk to the next level. Since I was averaging about an hour and change each day, I figured the 4.3 miles shore-to-shore, one way, would be perfect for me, and maybe would take me an hour and a half, depending on the day’s heat and my energy level.

And the Maryland Transportation Authority made it easy for would-be walkers. We were given the parking lot at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis to park—free–and then shuttled in air-conditioned buses to the starting point, which switches sides each year. There were also free water stations thoughtfully placed at set points on the bridge so no one would collapse from dehydration. And at the end of the walk was a Maryland Crab festival with fresh crab cakes, cold beer, and corn-on-the-cob awaiting hungry trekkers. 

I got there about 11 a.m. on that shimmering Sunday morning. The already-hot sun glinted off the steel stanchions and sparkled on the cobalt blue water below. All around me were a vast diversity of bridge-crossers. There were the tank-topped, short-shorted, Nike-clad runners, complete with stopwatches and pulse-gauging gear. There were soccer moms and grandmoms with fanny packs and dads, uncles and cousins. There were happy swarms of college students and Annapolis cadets and entire multi-generational families including toddlers in strollers and infants in papooses.

And there were school groups, church groups in matching bright T-shirts, boy and girl scout troops singing as they went, lovers hand-in-hand, and then there was me, alone with my Walkman. I didn’t sprint like the seasoned runners, but I felt a smug satisfaction blithely passing clusters of saunterers as I brought my aerobic heart rate up. At the top of the hump that is the bridge I looked down on an impossibly pristine bay, and off toward the southern end I saw silhouettes of sailboats gliding toward the horizon.

In my ears, in my head, was the familiar strain of Crystal Ship:

“Before you slip into unconsciousness I’d like to have another kiss…Another flashing chance at bliss…        another kiss, another kiss.

“The days are bright, and filled with pain…”

Sweat slithered from my hairline across my sun-screened cheeks, onto my neck and into the T-shirt I wore. I stopped briefly for a cup of water and moved quickly on. I had ground to cover. My flesh radiated heat.

I reached the end of the span in an hour and ten minutes—a personal record. Through my pumping lungs, in my thumping head I heard imaginary cheering, adoring chants encouraging me on: She crosses the finish line ahead of the pack! She sets a new world record! The crowd goes wild! I put my hands up the way I’d seen track athletes do as the ribbon breaks across their chests.

My fellow bridge-spanners looked at me strangely. I smiled back, because for at least the last two-thirds of the 4.3 miles—which I knew had to be closer to 5 miles, once you got back to the shuttle bus and all–I had not thought of my lost love, had not wondered if he’d be proud of my achievement, had not remembered my pain or heard anything except my steady, rapid footfalls and the sound of Jim Morrison’s voice. 

I plopped myself down onto the padded seat of the air-conditioned shuttle and spanned the bridge–in reverse–in a motorized flash. I let the bus drop me off at the crab festival.

Two crabcake sandwiches, a buttery corn on the cob and one cold beer later, I was set to head for my car and the hour’s ride home. The sated, triumphant feeling buoyed me through the rest of that humid summer and made my neighborhood forays seem like comfort strolls. I vowed to make the bridge walk an annual personal ritual, a victory march for surviving each year.  But I moved back to New York the following winter and did not look back. 

I can still easily cover two or three satisfying miles on the YMCA treadmill where I work out several afternoons a week. A Discman with ska and cumbia has taken the place of The Doors. And I have learned with each passing year that there are deeper wounds than those inflicted by a callous lover on a tender heart.

But walking remains my therapy of choice, though no accomplishment has filled me up as much as that Sunday on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, 4.3 (but, really, you know, closer to 5) miles shore-to-shore. So, I’m reserving the first Sunday in May for next year. Maybe.