Bridge of the Gods

Driving home from Utah, I had to cross through Idaho. Traveling from school to home, from Utah to the west, one moment in Idaho became my "crossing." Abrupt mesas replaced Utah's staggered mountains. I sat on the duct-tape covered seat of my grimy little white pickup that shares my age, a dorm's worth of junk in the back covered by a plastic tarp with some ski boots poking out, Kid Rock's "Bawitdaba" blaring from the radio, and tumbleweeds began to bounce across the highway. The moment made a sentence in my mind: "I am west." The sentence was as clear as any road sign. One actual road sign that caught my attention on that same trip: "NEXT RIGHT - Bridge of the Gods." In first writing about this trip, the unvisited roadside attraction "Bridge of the Gods" became the metaphor for my tumbleweed moment. Maybe as we struggle to describe feelings and ideas that seem evasively important, we're given these physical scenes and experiences to bridge the gap and make the connection. Maybe that's the Bridge of the Gods--a God-given, mercifully physical bridge between what we can see and understand and what we need to feel.