The Bridge Painter
There were days, many days actually, when everything below the bridge just disappeared. Not like a man going crazy saw things disappear but like it’s not important, ignored, or just faded out of sight out of mind. When your hundreds of feet above the water with a heavy nylon strap the only thing between you falling, your mind tends to do things to keep you focused. That’s the first thing they teach you in this business, stay focused, and of course don’t spend your time looking down. Being a bridge painter was hard enough without a constant nagging that you were going to fall to your death. Looking down was something you had to do from time to time, but never something which took control.
Painting bridges was a pretty steady gig, and the money was there. Over the years he’d seen everything the job could throw at him, and never once let it get to him. He worked with reckless guys, fearless guys, guys who wore two safety harnesses, and even one guy, God rest his soul, who thought he could get away not wearing one. Funny thing about the bridge painter crowd, they mostly kept to themselves. There were guys on his crew that he saw every day and the only thing he knew about them was their name; not their last name, just a first name. That was it. Men who worked long hours high above rivers and highways had a way of only caring about what was necessary. Nobody cared where you were born or who you used to be. They cared whether you would freeze up and panic when the wind kicked up from beneath you, at five hundred feet, whether your hands stayed steady on wet steel, whether you knew how to tie off and not need to check every five minutes. Names didn’t keep you alive.
Over the years, Vic became one of those guys. He rarely talked to anyone, ate his lunch alone, usually on a high perch, took the train both ways to work, and always sat in a window seat looking out. It’s not that he was being purposefully reclusive, he’d just learned how to be happy with his own company. If anyone asked if he was ever afraid, he’d admit it happened on rare occasions; more early on of course. Now, after more than dozen years on the rope, he rarely thought about falling. After all, if you fell, that was it. Gravity took over, a split-second of life passing before your eyes, his frail human body accelerating until it struck something hard, and your world ended. That was that, so why worry about it.
On the morning of June 11th is when this story truly begins. Vic sat high atop the western arch of the Uptown Bridge, a bulky paint sprayer resting beside his leg and the city still asleep beneath a thick morning fog. It was so thick that the river below was invisible. From his perch, the world seemed very small, just a lone man, rusted steel, and an endless sea of white in every direction.
Vic liked these kinds of mornings, the silence before traffic began, fresh air, free from exhaust fumes, a kind of peace rarely found in the city. He wasn’t a spiritual person, but if he was, this would be where he found his Zen space. A bridge before dawn belonged to itself, it was the master pathway, the looming guardian over the river, a force of nature, despite not being natural. Once the morning commuters arrived, it shifted, morphed into something quite different. That same bridge became a metal vein pumping impatience, anger, and pollution from the suburbs into the city.
He stared into the fog, knowing that time was short. He could already hear the earliest of the early ones speeding by. His mind had been occupied for weeks with the idea that human beings were incapable of understanding scale. Not mathematical scale like the size of this bridge, but emotional scale.
People understood a dead pet. They understood a dead friend or relative. But a thousand dead strangers became an abstraction. Ten thousand became politics, beyond comprehension. A million dead became statistics, part of the historical record. Somewhere between one and infinity, the disconnect happened. But where, he thought? That was the answer he sought, the answer that he just couldn’t grasp. It wasn’t troubling, but neither was it something he could push away from his thoughts.
Below sat a city of more than a million people, each one carrying their own private fears, their own thoughts and wishes. Some held secrets no one else would ever fully know. Some were as transparent as plastic wrap. Each of those individual realities stacked beside each other in apartment towers and row houses. Every day on buses, busy streets, and shopping malls, they rubbed shoulders, shared space, breathed the same air, and yet still remained isolated.
Vic often imagined all those thoughts, those fears and insecurities, rising invisibly into the air above the city like an angry storm. He wondered what the world would be like if those thoughts somehow took on a physical form. Probably dark, like a huge cloud of grief and misery. Maybe they would settle on the bridge or maybe he would be pushed away from his high perch by this nefarious cloud.
His imaginary world of grief was abruptly interrupted with a cracking tired voice calling out from his radio.
“You awake up there Vic?” It was Donnelly, an electrician by trade who somehow made his way into managing a crew of bridge painters. Vic never could figure that one out. The guy never once scaled a span, carried a sprayer, or even picked up a brush, but somehow, he was in charge.
“You painters are all lunatics,” he said. Vic responded back, “at least I don’t talk to wires.”
“Very funny, get to work.” That was the length of most conversations on the bridge. A quick smart remark and then nothing. No, how’s the family, or want to go for a beer later, nothing more.
It was time. The dawn had begun dissolving the fog into pale silver. From this height, sunrise appeared less like light arriving and more like the world remembering itself. Soon the moisture would lift, and the rusty steel would be dry enough to start painting. Funny thing was that he didn’t even like painting, not now, not from the first day he started. But then again, painting was a good living, especially painting hundreds of feet from the ground. Very few guys had the stomach for it.
Anyone who claimed to love industrial painting was lying or insane. The work was repetitive, dirty, brutal in winter and suffocating in summer. No matter how much your tried, you couldn’t avoid the chemicals getting into your lungs. Rust embedded itself permanently into fingerprints. The back pain was always there, and you eventually lost the taste for everything worth eating or drinking. But the taste of the bridge was always there – rusty metal, oil, old rain. Vic wondered if it would ever go away, maybe when he retired, or maybe not.
The solitude however, now that outweighed the hazards of the job by so much that he remained a bridge painter for this long. The height removed him from the noise and jumble of ordinary life. Up on the bridge, the world rearranged itself into something cleaner and more honest. Not perfect, but better than the crushing weight of something down below. Up here, the petty things vanished into the morning breeze. Bills. Television. Politics. Social media. All gone. While down below, faceless people performed the formatted versions of themselves endlessly, over and over again. No variety. Not even a hint of understanding how they’ve become robots. Up here, a man became singular. He became a force of his own mental capacity. A logician of sorts.
Steel either held him or it didn’t. Wind either respected him or it didn’t. Nothing else really mattered. Every day, counting today, they did, and that was alright with Vic. Over the years, especially the last few, he’d become increasingly aware that most of what people called progress, was nothing more than inventions developed to prevent people from thinking deeply. Everywhere he looked there was the digital noise. Screens everywhere, glowing in waiting rooms, at the airport, and in the hands of everyone old enough to hold a phone or tablet. Music, or what they call it today, used to only fill elevators and department stores. Now it was everywhere. And where it wasn’t, streaming video filled in the gaps. A bunch of noise.
But Vic knew that silence was where thought evolved. He lived it, high above this river or one of the others, that silence was enormous. A true force of nature. It wasn’t forceful, nor did it try to sell itself. Silence was just that, silent. There for him or anyone else to take in, be a part of, or disrupt.
The motions of his day were like a ballet; move, anchor, spray, review, and then move again. Each hour, each day, and on and on. He’d look down from time to time. Watched how the traffic crawled beneath him in glittering rows. How the heat rose upward from the concrete. The ant farm of humanity had no idea he was high above watching them.
His thoughts started drifting again. The steady hum of the paint sprayer kept him grounded. This time toward memories. He wondered why certain moments survived while entire years disappeared. He could remember his grandmother’s kitchen at age six watching balls of dust move slowly through the sunlight. Yet he could barely remember high school. He remembered seeing movies but couldn’t remember most of his brief marriage to her, her, oh, Evelyn, yes, the brief marriage to Evelyn. She always wore blue, and she worked nights.
How did the brain decide what deserved permanence? Maybe memory had nothing to do with importance. Maybe it was something altogether different. But how, what was the criteria? Balls of dust versus years of school? Movies or marriage? It was perplexing, for sure.
He stopped spraying and pulled off the worn respirator to catch a breath of fresh air. A tugboat moved slowly beneath the bridge leaving a long V-shaped wake behind it. Vic imagined the captain inside drinking a coffee, perhaps thinking about bills or baseball scores or whether his wife still loved him. The strange thing was that the captain probably felt central to his own existence while standing in that dingy wheelhouse. And from his perch high above, in Vic’s eyes, he was nearly microscopic.
If that was true, then he also was seen as microscopic from somewhere by someone else. Oddly enough, that thought pleased him rather than frightened him. One more understanding gleaned from the silence. Human beings suffered tremendously from believing themselves too important. Today’s self-aggrandized, wanna be influencing, random person, almost to the number, believed they were not only the center of the universe, but also had the power to change it.
But not Vic, the bridge made sure of that.
He ate his lunch in silence, watching the sky change from blue, to grey, and then unsettled. Clouds gathered from the north. The wind picked up sharply. He stuffed the last few bites of a turkey sandwich in his mouth, secured his equipment and sat astride a beam while the first volley of thunder shot across the valley.
Vic had learned many years ago that storms radically change the psychology of height. Beam walkers took to roosting. Experienced men became quieter, more careful. Lightning reminded everyone that the sky was more than just scenery. He pulled up his hood, cinched the thin string around his chin and waited.
As the wind strengthened, Vic found himself thinking about death again — not morbidly, simply analytically, just as he always did. Over the years, he knew of three bridge painters who died. One guy missed a step; he was there and then he was gone. Another was the victim of bad rigging; a kid with just a few months on the job; too much confidence, not enough practical knowledge. The other guy had a heart attack climbing up a suspension tower and toppled backwards. He landed on the bridge in morning traffic, now that was a long day.
The strange part was how quickly the world absorbed their absence. He remembered getting a ten-minute safety refresher when the kid fell but that was it. Crews changed. Projects continued. Bridges still needed bridge painters. Steel rusted. Vic wondered whether that was the true source of human loneliness: the realization that existence continued without much fanfare after someone went away.
Another deep though broken by the sound of someone approaching. It was Donnelly. Vic was taken aback, for the first time ever, the boss was on the beam. He chuckled at how the man approached carefully, clipping his safety line as he moved, and holding on for dear life.
“Storm’s coming in fast,” Donnelly said. “we’re calling it.”
Vic nodded but didn’t move immediately. Donnelly followed his gaze toward the river below. “You ever get tired of staring at nothing?”
“It’s not nothing.”
“Well, it looks like nothing to me.”
“That’s because you’re looking at the river,” Vic replied with emphasis in his voice.
“What’re you looking at?”
Vic took a long moment before answering. “The distance between people,” he said quietly, knowing his answer would be greeting with confusion.
Donnelly frowned, still clutching tightly to a support girder. “What the hell does that mean?”
Vic looked toward the city again. Thousands of windows reflected the dying light. Somewhere down there, people were going about their lives, eating, working, cheating on spouses, rocking infants to sleep, contemplating all sorts of things, laughing in bars, washing dishes, writing novels no one would read. All of them trapped inside themselves forever.
He spoke while slowly securing his sprayer for the trip down. “I think everybody’s alone in almost exactly the same way,” he said. “But we experience it so privately we think it belongs only to us.”
Donnelly stared at him for several seconds. “You spend too much time up here.”
“Probably true.”
Thunder rolled again, louder now. The two men began making their way back along the beam toward the access platform. Wind howled through the steel arches with a sound unlike any other.
Halfway back, Vic paused one final time. Far below, headlights had begun appearing in long streams across the bridge deck. Thousands of strangers were crossing, trying to get out of the city before the worst of it started. Not a one ever once considering the men suspended above them making their way off the bridge. For a brief moment, he imagined the bridge after humanity vanished. Steel standing over empty water, rusting in the sunshine. No traffic. No voices. Just weather moving endlessly through the steel cables and girders. The coveted silence waiting for something, or perhaps nothing at all.
And somehow the thought did not seem sad. Only quiet. Very quiet.
Additional Reading
R.J. (Ralph) Schwartz is an American poet, author, website owner, and online publisher. His writing spans several poetry collections—ranging from spiritual and romantic to fear-driven explorations—and even extends into science fiction. Notable works include:
- Normal Was the First Casualty – A Collection of Dystopian Poetry
- Hope – Inspirational and Spiritual Poetry
- Things That Go Bump in the Night – Poetry of Fear and Fright
- The Lover’s Thread – Poetry for Couples
- Poetry of the Human Condition – The Ups and Downs of Modern Living
- The Secrets of the Moon (a sci-fi novel co-authored with his son Sebastian J. Schwartz)
Schwartz’s work is described as purposefully wordy, richly descriptive, and thematically grounded in nature, romance, antiquity, and forgotten histories. He writes regularly on platforms he manages, including The Creative Exiles, a collaborative venue for writers, and The Gypsy Thread, which delves into offbeat histories, pagan lore, and poetry.
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