A bridge falls in Minnesota

A modern freeway defies the contours of the world through which it passes. Have you ever thought about it that way? We drive without a thought at 70 mph, hour after hour, on a broad highway that is either level or gently graded. Engineers have assured that we cut easily through mountain passes without blinking an eye -- the hills have been lowered for our benefit. We cross rivers and canyons unawares -- gaping holes in the ground have been seamlessly bridged, and today's bridges are often free of superstructures that would even remind us that a bridge exists.

So we zoom along, day after day, year after year. And then one day, the I-35W through Minneapolis simply collapses. A few drivers die. The rest of us are forcibly reminded that the earth hasn't changed, the laws of physics have not changed. The world remains tough and full of obstacles, exactly as it was for the earliest pioneers. Our nonchalant assurance of an effortless drive, mile after mile, is a gift of engineering and technology. When the engineering and technology fail, we are returned in an instant to the harsh world of our ancestors.

In an instant. Anyone who has survived an earthquake knows the feeling. One moment you are staring off into space, wondering what to eat for dinner. The next moment, a fault slips a few feet, a mile underground, and the stable world you believe you inhabit is a shaking, rolling, convulsing fun house. You have no idea whether you are just experiencing a brief tremor, one that you can later joke about with your friends, or if the shaking will go on and on until everything that gives your life meaning has been leveled to the ground.

And so goes life itself. We live our days, one after another, uneventfully. Or rather, we consider "eventful" to mean an argument with a spouse, a problem at work, a steak that has been over-cooked when we specifically requested "medium-rare." The next minute, an aneurysm bursts, a coronary artery is blocked, a truck leaps out of the street and onto our sidewalk, a steam pipe explodes under the street, a lightning bolt hits the golf club we had just started to swing. Suddenly, we realize how foolish we've been in assuming that we would always walk life's path on Persian carpets and rose petals. To believe that the nature of the universe had been designed so that we could always glide across any river, climb any mountain, simply by pressing down the accelerator.

Foolish, but necessary. We can't live, we can't make decisions for ourselves and others, without trusting in a certain stability. But we must remember, occasionally, that our trust in a perpetually easy and effortless life relies on a fiction, a fiction that, to be maintained, depends on a million little things going just right. When the wrong load on the bridge meets the wrong engineering decision or the not quite correctly installed I-beam -- and sooner or later, it metaphorically always does -- we and the bridge hit the river. We discover with horror that, beneath our dreamy, American middle class illusions, real life is harsh and has always been harsh, a fact that to much of humanity is all too obvious.

For each of us, there invariably comes a time when dreams come to an end, when not all our education and skills and prestige and bank accounts can shield us from reality. The shock is easier to bear when we're prepared mentally. When we enjoy the drive, but take the precaution of learning how to swim.