Bridges Raised and Fallen

Art and Commentary by Brett Busang.

The James River was never a tidy place, even before Western man came and put down iron roots. It steams and brawls. Its reputation as a man-killer is so well-deserved that people never stop preparing – off-site - for its snags and rapids. Even so, many are killed there still – mostly on a lark. Well, to die in the embrace of Adventure is not the worst way to go.

My own introduction to the river has struck itself into my brain-pan forever. I can hear, rather than see, the moment when my friend, Virginia, and I approached it from a parking-lot north of the floodwall. We were half-a-mile below the fall-line and the river was churning hard underneath us, this great well of thrashing energy along which debris rapidly floated. It was wildly intent upon moving hard and fast – a kind of undifferentiated force that produced a strangely relaxing image. Photos don’t do it justice because the sound is gone and the movement is arrested. The experience is wildly captivating; the image is a thing one might forget, like a shoe, and leave behind.


Here we have a somewhat serener picture of the river, when it holds fewer terrors and invites one in. But human history is there, in the straddling pillars, the toppled concrete pyramids, the hard, iron-dark masonry of a bridge that seems more akin, in spirit, to the ancient world than to ours. Yet all of these human occurrences are there, still, in the water and they drew me in. When I was a boy, I used to pore over books that showed both the carnage of war and its sour aftermath, in which the living cart off what is usable and leave the rest. What fascinated me most was the ruins of fort and factory; the man-made casualties, the finality of disuse playing out over an old facade. I tried to draw these things and failed miserably, though I was serenely confident that I had done something for the ages. I am humbler now that there are fewer of these things to draw.


Post-Civil War Richmonders fled the city after its own citizenry torched it. The James River provided a frantic people safe passage into a dark age that would last for years and years. One might easily imagine this particular scene illuminated by the out-of-control fires set to foundries and financial institutions; a population in agitated search for safety; explosions going off in the powder magazines at Tredegar. Having been defeated, the South delivered this final blow. . .to itself. It would not let the Yankees come in and steal its foolscap, drink its beer, shoulder its rifles. Such a pathetically prideful act seems so very Southern to me, a Yankee who has spent a great deal of time south of the Mason-Dixon. It’s not enough for a Southerner to lose; the loss must be dramatized.


And so here’s what’s left. I find a kind of solace in this river’s force. It seems to make our particular transience seem right somehow; our brief, but complicated, occupation both necessary and irrelevant. Here we are and here It is. Who’s gonna win, I wonder?