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 Barf Bag |
 Suspended Bridge Mine, All Mine |
Right and below: Martin’s Ferry Bridge. Photo courtesy Humboldt County Public Works.
Suspended Bridge
You might think anyone living deep in the Klamath River boonies would be content with a certain degree of disconnect, proud of or at least resigned to the hardship imposed by deep wooded canyons, summer-bake and winter-freeze, rock-riddled roads, simple living and familial rootedness.
For the most part, this may be true. You’d have to ask them. But even the boonies, people — in particular those living on the south side of the lower Klamath River, downstream of its confluence with the Trinity — were happy when they finally got some power lines and telephone poles rigged up. That was just in the past few years. No more expensive radio phones or driving across the Martin’s Ferry Bridge to reach one of the lit-up outposts — Weitchpec, Hoopa, Orleans — every time they wanted to phone somebody.
But now, ironically, the Martin’s Ferry Bridge has been shut down, declared on the verge of collapse. No cars can cross it. People aren’t supposed to walk on it. The school bus stop on the north side has been whisked away to make sure kids stay off the bridge. And with the sudden closure comes a whole new set of civilizational challenges for the several hundred people — Yurok families and other folks — living along the river. Now everyone has to drive 100 extra miles or more to get anywhere, on alternate routes that get mud-mired and snow-choked.
The county bridge is the quickest link to schools, jobs, groceries and more. The bridge connects the Bald Hills Road, on the south side of the Klamath, to State Highway 169 on the north side; 169 heads downriver to Pecwan, and upriver to Highway 96, which takes you either direction to more towns. The route up Bald Hills Road from Highway 101 and over the bridge is also the most direct route between the Yurok Tribe’s Klamath and Weitchpec offices. Twenty-one school kids cross the Martin’s Ferry Bridge twice a day to get to and from five different schools scattered about the region. Dozens of people cross the bridge daily to get to work, including the six employees of Glen Pitsenbarger’s Weitchpec Nursery, on the south side of the river.
“There’s nobody working here this time of year, but come the third week of January, we’re ready for employees to come back,” Pitsenbarger said. He doubts they’ll be willing to travel four or five extra hours a day to get to the nursery.
Pitsenbarger said he and his neighbors had about a four-hour warning before the bridge was shut down on Tuesday, Dec. 4. But officials have been eying the bridge for a long time; it’s been scheduled for a retrofit since 2002. Tom Mattson, director of Humboldt County Public Works, said although the bridge gets inspected regularly every two years, it was checked again in August after the bridge in Minneapolis collapsed.
Six piers hold up the concrete-and-steel bridge, and Pier 5 was found to be not only cracking but leaning oceanward. “There’s a huge hill that’s been moving, pushing the abutment, moving the pier,” Mattson said. “So we’re all concerned, and Caltrans is concerned, it could fall at any time.”
About $12 million in federal retrofit funds will be used to stop the sliding hill and install a new pier. On Friday, Dec. 7, the county declared a local emergency, and this Tuesday the Board of Supervisors ratified the declaration and asked staff to draft a resolution requesting the retrofit be sped up, and also requesting that the Governor and the President declare an emergency and send money to help improve the two alternate roads.
Until those roads are officially declared detours they can’t be used by the Klamath-Trinity Joint Unified School District to transport kids or teachers, said District Superintendent Doug Oliveira.
“Right now, some families are having their kids stay with relatives during the week,” he said. “But one family has talked about taking their travel trailer and parking it on the other side of the river. And some parents have been transporting their kids on the detour roads. And then we have several high school kids already doing independent study. The day after the bridge was closed, they were proactive and signed up.”
The Yurok Tribe, meanwhile, has offered to provide tutors and to open up an empty house on their side of the river as an education center.
— Heidi Walters
Last week, I called my brother in LA and told him that my husband Scott and I were buying an antiquarian bookstore. He considered our occupations — magazine editor, author, and now bookstore owner — and said, “Wow. Books, magazines — you guys are really getting into a growth industry up there.”
“Yes, we believe the printed page is the wave of the future,” I said, “and we’re investing in it heavily.”
Yikes. As I write this, I have been the part-owner of Eureka Books for less than 24 hours. It’s a grand, glorious old place, crammed to the ceiling with odd and offbeat treasures like Victorian marriage manuals, yellowed sheaves of sheet music, and even a Zane Grey novel bound in flamboyant marbled papers for Liberace’s library. A few days ago, a book scout came through looking for inventory to sell to dealers, and he pulled out what may be the first novel about Alcoholics Anonymous. The term “alcoholism” was so new, back in the 1940s when the novel was published, that it had to be defined on the dust-jacket flap. The scout paid four bucks for it and may sell it for $20 to a dealer who specializes in AA books. The dealer might sell it to a collector for $120. Every book finds its home eventually. So it goes in the rare book trade.
I don’t know a damn thing about rare books — I like my paperbacks cheap and tattered — but I know that I plan to fight long and hard against the alleged demise of the book. Let the National Endowment for the Arts make dire predictions about the decline in reading. Let Sony, Apple and Amazon roll out one handheld e-book device after another. I’m having none of it. I love the smell of an old book, I love the heft of a hardcover, and I love getting to know a person by browsing their bookshelves. Surely I’m not the only one. Antiquarian bookstores all over the country are closing their doors, but by God, I’m going to wedge my body in the doorway of this one and keep it open.
Scott, who founded a magazine about rare books, is in charge of figuring out a strategy for making a 19th century-style bookstore viable in the 21st century. He’s been a book dealer before and he’s in touch with the movers and shakers in the antiquarian book world. Most of them are well past retirement age and their kids aren’t interested in old books. They give him fatherly advice and drop hints about where a few good private collections might be had for a decent price. Several of them have told him that he’s crazy for buying a bookstore in this digital age, but they say it fondly, the way your dad might tell you that you’re crazy for restoring an old Mustang or taking your rock band on the road. It’s crazy, but in a good way.
As for me, I hope to pull a shift in the store once in a while so I can live out my romantic writer/bookstore-owner fantasies. Just yesterday, I was browsing the shelves when I came across a whole section of books on a bit of obscure botanical history that I’ve been interested in lately. I started to pull the books off the shelf to see if I could afford them, and then I thought, “Wait a minute. I’ve already bought them. I totally own all these books.”
That’s a dangerous thought. On second thought, maybe I shouldn’t be allowed to work in the store. I never could stand to part with a good book.
— Amy Stewart
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