I’ve written about our bridges before because, well, bridges are important.

They called it a crack, and they called off river traffic below it, and car and truck traffic on it for the foreseeable future. When we saw the photos, we knew why. If that’s just a crack, a compound fracture is just a crack.

In just a few days of backed up barges, the commerce of the entire country was altered as businesses of all kinds adjusted their plans and their projections because the supplies that kept them flowing ­– literally – had come to a dead stop in Memphis, Tennessee.

Latest I-55 travel times show almost smooth sailing on Monday

As a recent and excellent guest column by river commerce executive George Leavell reminded us, 430,000 tons of commodities pass under our bridges on barges the size of football fields every day – a yearly passage of 150 million tons.

After a few of those days and a few million backed up tons, the huge barges started churning wakes again below, but the Hernando DeSoto Bridge above remained closed and all the I-40 traffic it carried diverted to the I-55 Memphis-Arkansas Bridge to the south, creating an east-west-north-south traffic jam for America.

That crack drew the around-the-clock attention of the crew fixing it, and even the attention of the Tennessee General Assembly who usually doesn’t pay much attention to us - helpful attention that is. State senators are now calling for a third Memphis bridge for cars and trucks. Maybe they’ll even start getting serious about the roundabout they approved years ago to relieve the traffic congestion leading to the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge.

That crack brought U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to town to take a look and to spend some time with elected officials, city leaders, and transportation and logistics industry big wigs to talk solutions and schedules.

Alternate route: Bridge-detour signs could be clearer

Bridges are hard.

I came to that realization a lifetime ago in engineering science lab. In front of me was a pile of balsa wood, popsicle sticks, string, rubber bands and a slide rule. The assignment – design and build a bridge. At that moment – while I was trying to figure out whether the number on my slide rule was 10,000, 100,000 or ten million, while those around me began to conquer canyons with their popsicle sticks – at that moment I knew I would not be an engineer like my father or the architect I had in mind.

Bridges are magic.

They connect, enable, overcome, elevate. They make big things possible when they weren’t before. They make it reachable for the many rather than the few, doable, accessible. I can continue on a path, finish a journey.

I can get there from here. And I can get back. The bolts in their bones that master the mysterious forces of nature, the breadth of their spans that takes our breath away, the height of their towers and the might of their cables that suggest the work of giants rather than mere mortals. The very fact that they exist is a symbol of human accomplishment, testimony to the human spirit. Come on. Tell me you don’t get a little rise every time you drive across a bridge high above the most powerful river in America, our powerful symbol of home.

Third bridge idea ‘long term,’ takes back seat to repairs

Bridges are historic.

In the big bubble-shaped cars of the 1940’s, the space – the shelf, if you will – between the back seat and the rear window was roughly the size of Overton Park, a place for picnic baskets, hatboxes, shopping bags, and babies. Like me.

No baby seats. No seat belts. The only things that would keep me from flying into the front seat and beyond would be the sure hands of my brothers in the back seat, and I’m pretty sure they’d be watching out for themselves.

That’s how I made my first crossing of the Mississippi, and one of the very last crossings of that span, bumping along the wooden single-lane roadbed toward family friends in West Memphis to show-off my chubby brand-new self in 1949, the year I was born and the year the Harahan Bridge was closed to automobile traffic when the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge opened. And I knew and appreciated about as much about that as most Memphians do today.

That old roadbed is 14 feet and a nation wide.

Through historic New Bern and on through downtown Raleigh, Durham and into the mountains through the Beaucatcher Tunnel into Asheville. On through Knoxville, Nashville, Memphis, across the Mississippi and into Arkansas to Little Rock and out through Broken Bow in the old Indian Territories of Oklahoma and the Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation in New Mexico. On to out-of-this-world Roswell and Area 51, and on to way-out-there California and downtown Los Angeles.

It’s Kingston Pike in Knoxville, Grand Avenue in Hot Springs, Broadway in West Memphis, and Crump, Danny Thomas, Union, East Parkway and Summer in Memphis.

And it’s the Trail of Tears for the Cherokee and our own Chickasaw, simultaneously staining and marking our history.

Buttigieg hears of disruptions caused by broken bridge

It’s the storied route Robert Mitchum wrote and sung these words about from the 1958 moonshiner of a movie he starred in, and the title road in Bruce Springsteen’s hit in 1975.

“Sometimes into Asheville, sometimes Memphis town The revenoors chased him but they couldn’t run him down Each time they thought they had him, his engine would explode He’d go by like they were standin’ still on Thunder Road”

It’s Thunder Road. It’s the Lee Highway of the 1920’s, the southern coast-to-coast route to complement the northern route, the Lincoln Highway. It’s U.S. Route 70, originally dubbed “The Broadway of America” because of the swath it cut across the country long before interstates.

Maybe that history landed the federal grant to resurrect the roadbed as a biking and hiking trail across our country’s shared path and most significant river, connecting us, and bringing it all gloriously down to our level.

Maybe it had to do with the Harahan itself and its next-door downriver neighbor, the Frisco Bridge, the first steel span across the lower Mississippi and the longest of those in America when it opened in 1892.

Maybe the money came our way, quite simply, because this is one of the country’s great ideas.

Bridges are inspirational.

Imagine walking or running or biking across. Imagine a view of our skyline like no other, pausing over the churning current for the long view past the Hernando DeSoto Bridge to the north and around the big bend to the south. A soaring city on a bluff over here, the oxbows and wildlife over there, and the reason we’re here at all flowing far below.

The boundless imagination of Charles McVean and visionary, patient and determined partners public and private have made that idea and that view a reality against all odds.

That reality is a memorial to McVean, who died on June 6.

They resurrected the northernmost roadway of the Harahan Bridge that I crossed as a baby, built in 1916 and shut down in 1949, and converted it to pedestrian use – the longest pedestrian crossing of the Mississippi under the sun, beautifully LED-lit by night, an accomplishment and view stunning enough to give us pause along the way

The reality of the Big River Crossing and the Greenline and all the work along the Wolf means that somebody in Collierville can soon – sooner than anyone thought possible – take a bike or a hike on a dedicated trail all the way to Arkansas – and north and south along the western levee.

Big water, big bridges, big skylines, and big vistas experienced up close and personal can provide new perspective for big problems. Sharing a trail can give new meaning to sharing views. Providing all of that on a people scale is a trail marker for a big-time city.

Bridges are symbolic.

“When I die,” my father said, “I want to be cremated, and I want you boys to put me in the river. And,” he added, that bad boy twinkle in his eye, “I want you to take a shot of whiskey when you do it.”

We did.

When Dad died, I called a friend, Ham Smythe, who kept a houseboat in the Wolf River Harbor. My two brothers and I stepped on board one very early, very cold morning in late January of 1987, Dad’s ashes in hand, a bottle of his whiskey, Jim Beam, in my pocket. We rounded the tip of Mud Island and headed upstream fighting heavy current under a heavy winter sky, three brothers at Ham’s transom fighting memories.

We heated water on a camp stove and made really atrocious instant coffee. Ham had found a very old jar of it next to a bottle of antifreeze and a can of 3-in-1 oil, either one of which would have tasted better and warmed us up faster. The whiskey was for later.

North of the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, several long rock fingers reach out for Harbor Town from the opposite shore, soldiers in the Corps’ constant battle against the river. We marked the first and, as we passed it, each of us put Dad in the river. We continued north a bit and then turned back downriver. As we passed again, just the way he wanted, each of us took a long pull from the Beam and said goodbye, each in our own way.

When the crack is repaired and I cross the bridge again I’ll look to the north as I do on every crossing, to that azimuth formed by that finger of rock in the river below, and I’ll reset my compass.

I’m a Memphian, and we should all know exactly where we stand on our bridges.