It was shocking in its silence: no bombs bursting in air, land, or sea. Just the grainy footage of a hulking container ship as its shadowy figure slowly forced itself through the tree-trunk legs of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge. Then, like a sped-up scene from the silent film era, an entire pile of matchsticks tumbled into the dredged depths of the Patapsco River. A boxer’s knees buckling in the tenth round of a title match. How did it happen so fast? How did it happen at all? Just…How?
Those answers are still coming, but some we’ll never get.
We know that a bridge that stood for almost a half-century is gone. During that time, it carried everything from sedans and semis to motorcycles and motorhomes, 11 million per year. It was the artery for hazardous materials, which aren’t permitted in Baltimore’s underwater tunnels. For six years, it carried me on my morning commute to the United States Coast Guard in Curtis Bay, where I worked with the same men and women now patrolling in small boats and looking for survivors. It carried my two-year-old son to daycare. I tell him to look at the ships: “Over there! Aren’t they awesome?” On winter evenings, it gave views of city sunsets so beautiful that it was hard not to wreck into the Jersey wall while taking it all in.
We also know it carried the name of the man who wrote The Star Spangled Banner, his words still sung before sports games and school days. Key’s memorial buoy is painted with stars and stripes, floating right now just a ship’s length away from the wreckage of the Dali. His paean for American resilience in the War of 1812 may make him Baltimore’s greatest hero, but he’s right up there with Thurgood Marshall, Cal Ripken, Jr., Edgar Allan Poe, and all those characters from Barry Levinson movies and The Wire.
We also know that eight construction workers were working the graveyard shift when the 984-foot Singaporean freighter slammed into the span. First responders rescued two. Six were presumed dead. We know they were standing on the doomed span as officials at either end stopped traffic from entering the bridge, saving countless lives. We know that they were all heroes.
The bridge served as the gateway to the Port of Baltimore, which had made steady strides towards the return of its glory days and was primed to keep growing. It’s a global economy, and with steel mills gone, the stevedores unloading Subarus from Japan and loading John Deeres from Iowa had their work cut out. In a town within a city, the workers were real-life Baltimoreans doing those real-life American jobs we hear about every four years, which are now in the balance. Supply chains will be disrupted in the foreseeable future as one-way traffic into the shipping hub is suspended until further notice.
There’s also the legacy of the laborers from the working class and immigrant enclaves of Highlandtown, Dundalk, and Sparrows Point. Many of those who built the bridge are still alive and beaming with pride for the last five decades. Building a bridge is something to be proud of, whether you’re seven years old with Lego or 70 with memories of welding steel. It’s a dark irony that some of the immigrant construction workers who fell with the bridge lived in the same neighborhoods as the men who built it.
The things it carried and didn’t carry are all the things that make Baltimore what it is, from Under Armour apparel to Ravens fans to drug shipments on their way south. Baltimore has been bloodied this week, even while older bruises still linger in a city whose poverty, drugs, and struggling attempts at renewal have been documented by the likes of David Simon and a new generation of journalists at The Baltimore Banner, the nonprofit newspaper leading the coverage—the never-ending flurries of political corruption, the salt of segregation (this is the home of the NAACP), the left hooks of unconstitutional policing, followed by the right jab of civil unrest. The uppercut of the pandemic and now the Key Bridge are knockdown blows.
Going forward, it will be a monumental test for Maryland’s young governor, Wes Moore, who, at 45, holds office for the first time. It is, too, for President Joe Biden, who is not young but who started traversing the city thousands of times as a 30-year-old senator and widower heading to and from his boys in Wilmington, Delaware, the smaller, banking-centered city, 65 miles away. Biden promised the federal government would pick up the tab for the Key Bridge, but that will be harder than it was for George W. Bush, who pushed through a massive federal aid package following the 9/11 attack.
Whatever happens with the money, Baltimore will persevere. How?
I just revisited a video I made 2014, a highlight reel of some of my favorite memories from that year: weddings, road trips, vacations, and the like. But so much of it was Baltimore: the monthly citywide rides of Baltimore Bike Party, the view from Federal Hill over the Inner Harbor, Christmas lights in Hampden, and the Orioles clinching the pennant at Camden Yards. High-fiving friends after Delmon Young hit the double heard a mile away in the second game of the American League playoffs.
Also, in that video, I was in the passenger seat of my Toyota Corolla, filming some (really poor) iPhone footage as my wife and I drove across the Francis Scott Key Bridge on our way to somewhere we’d be happy. The highway stretched ahead while the lattice beams above us looked ready to catch any dreams trying to cross county lines. Two hundred feet below us, the beginning waters of the Chesapeake Bay. Pan to the right and its blue skies forever, a red and white container ship moved past the abandoned island of Fort Carroll moments before it slipped beneath the bridge on its way to deliver its cargo on the other side.
How could we think of that arched steel span as fragile? After this century’s shocks to the system—9/11, the financial crisis, political turmoil, and COVID-19—we should probably have known that everything is not solid.
We’ll be alright. Baltimore is good at getting back off the sweat-soaked mat when everyone outside the 410 has written us off. It’s neighborhoods inside of neighborhoods, with genuine people already caring for the families who lost loved ones beneath the bridge, figuring out how to get to work and rebuild.
I’d like to think there isn’t symbolism in the namesake bridge of our national anthem’s author falling into the brackish backwaters of the Patapsco in this fraught election year. But maybe there is. Perhaps the symbolism is that you keep coming back, even when the bridges that bind us collapse in the darkest part of the night.
You say you can see, even when you can’t, if only to give proof, by the dawn’s early light, that our flag is still there and that we’re still standing.
