Cañon City
Colorado
June 2018
If you want, or if Lisa encourages you, you can walk across a bridge that is 955 feet high. That is, 955 feet of air below you. If your hat were to blow off, or if you dropped your book of Chaucer poems, it would take about nine seconds to get to the land below. This is a very long time to fall. If it were you who were dropped over the side, you would be moving at 110 miles per hour when you reached bottom. Or just before you reached bottom. I recommend against this.
Thoughts like these, as you know, strike great fear into my heart. I don’t like heights and I really don’t like falling.
Just thinking about walking across this bridge gives me the heebie-jeebies. Because thinking about walking across the bridge gets me thinking about falling off the bridge. (This, of course, can get you thinking about the nature of fear, which doesn’t help in the least.)
Then, as if to make fun of me, this area has been developed as an amusement park! “Amusement” as in “merriment” and “entertainment.” They have some nerve!
The Royal Gorge Bridge was built as a tourist attraction in 1929 and was for the longest time the highest bridge in the world. At nearly a quarter of a mile in length, it supports thousands of us tourists who choose the daunting task of walking across, above the gorge, without screaming. This elegant structure crosses the gorge created, over millions of years, by the Arkansas River one thousand feet below. And yet, the bridge serves no more function than to connect the two parts of the amusement park together.
Printed on the admission tickets…
Royal Gorge Bridge and Park
Combining God’s Splendor with Man’s Ingenuity
I assume that others who might be acrophobic as I am, imagine God in His splendor walking along with them on the bridge. I imagine no such thing.
Speaking of God’s splendor, here are some instructions for one of God’s creations. This sign is in the parking lot…
Lisa made me walk across the Royal Gorge Bridge. Lisa made me cross the bridge? For a guy like me, who is afraid of heights and also of falling, this is an unnerving, formidable trek. But it is so cool! I wanted to walk across the bridge. No I didn’t. Yes, I did. No. Umm, yes.
You see what I mean.
So Lisa made me walk across the bridge.