There’s a bird at the end of time and a crocodile in the zoo we visited as children once a year when we were young with a packed lunch and sensible walking shoes. I’m not exaggerating or making it up, because, if you had to say where the bird is ‘the end of time’ would be your best answer.
It’s a Myna I think. The crocodile would sit and we would say to each other, Is it real? We would look closer and closer for a part of it which was moving and when we were at our closest, not breathing, not blinking, it would move its leg or flick its tail and we would say, Did you miss it? And some of us would, invariably, have missed it so we would all look at the crocodile again – still scales, pyramid teeth.
This large crocodile is nothing like a bridge, except it is long and has four feet and a cantilever at each end. At the end of time, when we are gone, the crocodile will find a way out by way of bridges and so will the bridges. Perhaps his escape will start when another animal builds him a bridge across the dry mote over the high wall. Perhaps an animal he has never seen before, a penguin maybe, or a mountain goat – although it is more likely to be an animal with an opposable thumb, depending on the complexity of the nature of the bridge.
And so to the nature of the bridge: beam, arch, cable-stayed, truss, cantilever, girder. Then to the nature of bridge collapse: bolt snapped, resonance of soldiers, washout, bad welding, load exceeding estimate, hidden defects, disputed and finally, without us – rust and weather. And now, to the animals walking from the zoo: over the bridge to the sun and the food and the open space of empty stadiums and the bird at the end of time saying the whole way and in the top of the new vines that rule the world, Papa, and, Mama, long after us and what we have built has fallen from lack of care.
By Pip Adam
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Mix & Mash 2011 - Literature Remix Category http://www.mixandmash.org.nz/
