Names
The City sits on a host of names… Stumptown, Port town, p-town, Port Inland, City of Smiles, Bridgetown… Most of them, you have to dig for the meaning behind the name, the history… All except that last one — Bridgetown — that one’s pretty obvious just driving through on the interstate; bridge after bridge across the River. Like it’s stitching the land together. Like the two sides would just drift and widen and open up a maw of water that might one day rival the very ocean that this River is itself ambling toward if they weren’t sutured together.
But while that may have more truth to it than many might even dream, it’s not much in the way of a visual metaphor for the many bridges in this town. The ones most people mean, the ones most people noitice are in no way quite so uniform as the stitches on a wound.
No. These were all built as organically as any City gets built, one after the other… each designed for its primary purpose of getting folks and getting there stuff from one side of the River to another. But also each with so many other purposes built in: service to vanity, service to aesthetic and style, service to more places and powers than most anyone crossing them might ever guess or dream… much less know.
Some bridges are tall, others shorter. Some go up and down. Several are bridges to only one apparent mode of transportation, where most accommodate at least two or three. And it is extremely important to know how a Bridge ties into each of the sides that it joins if one is to traverse a Bridge successfully; to get to the place that you are intending to go. For there are always more than two Sides to any of these coins… I mean, Rivers.
By the way… remind me sometime to talk about the coins placed upon the eyes of the Dead… a fascinating digression indeed!
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