THE BRIDGE

The one thing in California that I am constantly drawn back to is the Golden Gate Bridge which is rapidly approaching the 75th anniversary of its opening although, like a lot of things which become “instantly iconic” landmarks, it really does seem like it should have been there forever.

The bridge has featured heavily in every single visit that I have made to the so-called “Golden State” over the years. Every single time I feel drawn to it, as if I need to see it because the bridge impresses me… and perhaps the bridge obsesses me… or even possesses me… even though I know that this is just melodramatic hyperbole and it’s just because, as bridges go, I do find this one particularly beautiful.

Every single time I take a ridiculous number of pictures of it, and yet every time I return to it, I still feel the need to take some more, often from the very same viewpoints that I took the last lot from, and looking very much the same as it did six, eight and sixteen years ago.

The very first time that I saw it “in the flesh” as it were (or should that be “in the steel”…?) was during that very first trip, and the very first thing I did, after becoming ridiculously excited as I exited the road tunnel immediately to the north of it on that long-ago February afternoon, was to drive across it. There it was in front of me, the north tower and, before I knew it, that now familiar “clunk, clunk, clunk” as the tyres passed over each panel of the roadway was being made by the green Mustang that I was driving and I was actually driving across the Golden Gate Bridge…!

Little old me from Nowheresville, Eng-er-land. Who’da thunk it?

The next day I walked along the Fisherman’s Pier on the sea front, just down from Pier 39, and took a ridiculous number of pictures of it as it “spanned the gate”, and then I drove across it in the other direction, parked up at the vista point, and walked across it and back, snapping away with my old Nikon, in what has turned out to be one of those more thrilling personal “moments” that we sometimes get to remember in our lives. Then I drove up onto the headlands, to the rather more famous viewpoints, and took a load more pictures.

And every single time I am lucky enough to return, I pretty much go and do exactly the same thing, more or less. One time that walk was taken after walking across the city and through the Presidio all the way from the Coit Tower and yet the excitement of being on that bridge again and taking those same photographs again almost managed to make me forget quite how much my feet were hurting.

On another visit, to those headlands viewpoints, a sea fog had rolled in which almost made the bridge invisible, but still worth the visit, even if my pictures taken in the fog were nothing like the beautiful ones which feature on so many of the postcards. How many pictures of that bridge could I possibly need? And yet it constantly draws me back, and I constantly find myself clicking away on the shutter of whatever camera I happen to be carting about with me this time.

I even buy books about its construction, (sometimes with the excuse that I once intended to write a play about it which I never seem to actually get around to doing…), or pictures to hang in my little house of the eye-wateringly vertiginous views that were taken whilst it was being built back in the 1930s, which I never could have taken if I’d been the photographer, such is my fear of heights.

I know that a lot of the workman involved in its building were there because of the absolute poverty brought on by what we now call the “Great Depression”, but I’m still pretty sure that I couldn’t ever have been persuaded to go up onto those high towers to hammer in any rivets, no matter what they were offering. I still get mildly giddy if I walk on the pedestrian sidewalk next to the roadway, and, strangely, I find myself feeling more queasy when I stand next to the towers and look up at them than when I look down at the drop towards the waters below. I even get slightly wobbly when the cyclists whizz past me as, in my mind’s eye, a topple over the handlebars could take you over the handrail and the inevitable sad outcome.

This time around, however, we did actually manage to find a new angle on the bridge. At least it was for us at any rate, although I’m sure millions of tourists both before and since have seen it in much the same way. We took one of those hour-long “Red and White” cruises to go out into the bay, pass under the bridge itself and then return via the island of Alcatraz, which gave us opportunities to see both of those iconic tourist destinations from what were completely new points of view as far as we were concerned. It’s always good to look at something familiar in a new light - It quite changes your perspective on it.

The problem with anything that is quite so familiar and (possibly – although I would have to dispute that) over-photographed is in finding a “new” way to do it. For example, this year’s San Francisco Visitors Planning Guide, to celebrate that 75th anniversary of the bridge, has it on its cover, photographed from a spectacular “new” angle (although I suspect that the agency employed to deal with it did have to wonder long and hard as to whether there were any new ways of taking a photograph of it) taken looking straight down the north tower on the Marin County side and it’s a pretty breath-taking shot which certainly caught my attention.

I can also be fairly certain that it’s not an angle which I will be considering photographing the bridge from myself any time soon, if I ever get the chance to return. That last angle, I think, will always be denied me. After all, the only real option to do so, apart from applying for a job in bridge maintenance which, I think you’ll agree, we’ve already pretty much ruled out, is to trust my fate to one of those helicopter trips, and, to be frank, I don’t think that you’re ever, ever, going to persuade me that getting into a helicopter is a good idea.

Even if it was to fly over that most iconic and beautiful of bridges.