IN MY THIRTIES I DEVELOPED a fear of bridges. I first experienced this fear on the Golden Gate Bridge that spans San Francisco Bay where it meets the Pacific Ocean.
When I set out on foot at the Fort Point end of the bridge, I had no idea what was to come. As I became suspended by the bridge rather than the earth, the ground under my feet began to move, rather like when you stand too close to a lift shaft. Cars and trucks whizzed by at great speed on the left. The blue bay was moving far below on the right. The wind blew me this way then that. Quite suddenly, I became afraid.
The Golden Gate Bridge is one of the longest suspension bridges in the world. Along its length, I discovered, are cement pylons which have something to do with holding the bridge in place. They appeared very sure of themselves on that flimsy structure of wires and bolts. The pylons are large—I could not get my arms around them—and painted the same russet as the rest of the bridge. I don’t know how many pylons there are on the bridge; I didn’t count them.
What I did on the Golden Gate Bridge that day when my fear of bridges hit me for the first time was walk between those pylons, and at each pylon I stopped. I didn’t care who was watching or what kind of ritual they thought I was enacting. As I walked, every muscle in my body was tense with fear. I stopped at each pylon and hugged it. The pylons were not quite safe, but they were heaven compared with the open bridge, which was less than air. I held each pylon until I felt I could go on.
My fear became more and more intense. My heart was pumping so loudly in my ears, my chest hurt. David read from a guidebook that the two main cables of the bridge each weigh 11,000 tons. They have 25,572 separate wires. Imagine if one unravelled, he said, trying to help with a joke. I did not laugh.
Afterwards, we told the story at dinner parties, him doing the walk, looking like the Tin Man, me describing the feeling. People wanted to know why I kept going. Some assumed I saw it as a way to conquer my fear, to show it for what it was, some memory of unsafety, but I had no such goal. Some thought me brave in a weird way. I am not brave.
It was simple. I am an optimist in my deepest heart and remain optimistic through much discouragement. I knew fear was behind me on the bridge. I’d felt it, each step leaden, my legs heavier and heavier, my arms and neck like planks, my head like a medicine ball on top of me. Behind me was fear—I knew that—and what lay in front must be better, I thought to myself. So rather than turning back to fear, I kept going.
The only way forward was through.
As it turned out, I was as terrified in the last steps of my walk—between the final pylon and the bridge’s end—as I was at the first. More so, because fear has a way of manufacturing itself. And the fact I walked across the bridge and lived made me no less frightened when, later, I was driving across the Oakland Bridge, a feat of engineering you might marvel at. All I could do was watch the bumper of the car in front, my shoulders hunched over the wheel, convinced I was driving to oblivion.
At the other end of the Golden Gate Bridge is Sausalito, an ordinary town where I walked around as if I was a normal person.
I went home to Australia and conceived a child most people thought was my first child.
The only way forward was through.