Wondering at Overpasses

My Grandma lived in Bellevue, Nebraska–home of the gigantic Offutt Air Force base and suburb to Omaha. Omaha-Bellevue was the Big City.

We traveled there at least a half dozen times a year, for Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas and for each cluster of birthdays (January, March, July, and October). A couple times a year we’d make the trip from Grandma’s house to Omaha’s famous Henry Dorley Zoo (or Henry Dorky, as we called it.)

The trip between Grandma’s and the Zoo (“Goin’ to the Zoo, Zoo, Zoo, Zoo, the Zoo, Zoo, Zoo, Zoo–beeps and bomps and squeaks and squanks” we’d sing) was fast, on one or the other of the interstate highways running through and across and around Omaha.

But every time we came to a certain juncture, where two or three of those massive interstates met, I’d stop my singing and wonder at the “bridges”.

There were dozens of them, it seemed to me, curving and crossing one another. It was a jumble of engineering, one concrete structure arcing above the next. It was strangely exhilarating–and scary, at the same time. Drivers on the bottom road could have not one but three or four different cars atop them. Drivers on the top could look down and see dozens or even hundreds of cars driving their different directions.

It was wonderful.

I thought of the bridges this morning, as I arced across multiple off ramps getting onto Kellogg from I-135 after taking Daniel to work for a 6 am conference call with France.

Will my children wonder at the “bridges” as I did?

Or will they be calloused city-dwellers, inured to the wonders of human engineering, the miracle of layering human upon human driving at inhuman speeds?