Travel as crossing bridges

Hue, Vietnam

Robert Frost, in his poem Mending Wall, famously said “something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” And indeed there are many walls, past and present, in places like Berlin and Bethlehem, that are difficult to love. But this is not so with bridges. They invite us to venture to the other side and see what is there, and allow others to visit us where we are too. They have style, architecturally at least, and they carry life. And so to borrow from Frost’s line of thinking: something there is that loves a bridge!

Bridges are an integral part of most journeys. They take you across the Nile in Cairo, across the bay in San Francisco, and from one continent to another in Istanbul. They carry you across creeks in Appalachia and over canals in Venice. They take you into colonial towns in Colombia. And some, like the Allenby Bridge in the Jordan Valley, even whisk you from one political context to another.

Yes, something there is that loves a bridge. But even more, I think, something there is that loves being a bridge. Long-term travel may not be the same as a salaried career in the diplomatic corps, but it does offer the opportunity to encounter real people and to have them encounter us. It allows for movement that takes us across divides. And this, much like the Golden Gate and other spectacular structures across the world, is no small thing.