Careers of Danger and Daring

by Cleveland Moffett

Then another man told the story of a falling bridge that thrilled me more than this one, although there was in it no loss of life. I always feel that a man who faces death unflinchingly for a fairly long time shows greater heroism, even though death be driven back, than another man who suffers some sudden taking off with no choice left him. This bridge was building at White River Junction, Vermont, over the upper waters of the Connecticut. There was a single iron span reaching two hundred feet between piers of masonry, and everything was ready to swing her off the false work except the driving of a few iron pins. And a bridge swung is a bridge practically finished, so it was merely a matter of hours to put the contractors at ease of mind against any dangers of the torrent. Meantime the dangers were there, for heavy rains had fallen and angered the river with a gorge of mountain streams.

At five o'clock of an afternoon the engineer in charge saw that a crisis was approaching. The waters were sweeping down runaway logs in fiercer and fiercer bombardment, and it was a question if the false work could hold against them. And for the time being, until morning surely, the false work must carry the span. If the false work went the span would go, and the bridge would be destroyed.

So the chief engineer ordered all hands down on scows and rafts, which were straightway jammed close against the false work by the current. Down on these lurching platforms went seventeen bridge-men, and set to work with iron-shod pike-poles, spearing the plunging logs as they came by and swinging them out through the bents of false work, down roaring lanes of water twenty feet wide between the legs of scaffolding. If these could be protected from the logs, the bridge might be saved; if they could not be protected, the bridge was doomed. It was the strength and skill of the pike-pole lads against the fury of the river.

For nine hours the battle lasted, and all this time the bridge-men worked wonders down in the black night, with rain beating on them in torrents and the logs coming faster and harder as the hours passed. Every man in the crew realized that the false work might give way at any moment, for the whole structure was groaning and shivering as they swung against it, and they knew that if it went at all it would go as one piece, without a moment's warning. And that would mean sudden death in the river under the crush of a broken bridge. Yet no man shirked his duty, and long after midnight they were there on the scows still, fighting the logs with bridge-men's grit and the comfort of steaming hot coffee—well, we may call it coffee.

But it was a hopeless fight now; the engineer saw this, and at two o'clock ordered all hands off the scows and back to the shore. There is a point beyond which you cannot allow men to go on offering their lives. And scarcely five minutes later—indeed, the last man was barely off the structure, so our friend declared, and he was one of the seventeen—the false work ripped loose and was swept away, and the iron span crashed down into the furious flood.

After this Zimmer described his sensations in a fall of one hundred and thirty-five feet from the eighth story of a skyscraper they were putting up out West. He was sitting on an upright column of the steel skeleton, waiting to pin fast a cross-beam, when a girder swung over from the other side and struck him. It weighed a matter of six tons. Down went Zimmer, and, as he dropped, he caught at a granite block resting loose there and toppled it over with him. And the thought in his mind as he fell was that here was an interesting illustration of what he had learned at school about a heavy body falling faster than a light one, for although he had a start of eight feet on the granite block, it passed him one story down, and smashed ahead through a staging that might have saved him. Then, as the stone sheered off, he estimated, did Zimmer (falling still), that its weight was about fifteen hundred pounds. Then he himself smashed through two stagings and caught at a rope, which burned through his gloves, and the next thing he knew was days later at the hospital, where somebody was bending over him saying: "Will you please tell me about your sensations coming down?" "And there was a newspaper reporter trying to interview me," said Zimmer, "which is what you might call rushing things."

"Tell ye a fall that stirred us boys all right," said another man. "It was in the big shaft at Niagara Falls. You know where they send electricity all over the State. The shaft was a hundred and eighty feet deep, and they used to lower us down in a boat swung from an iron cable. Well, one day the drum slipped and let the whole business fall free with five of us in the boat. We went clear down one hundred and seventy feet, and the boat fell away under us just like that granite block of Zimmer's, and there we were hanging fast to the corner chains and every man of us expecting to die. But somehow the engineer got his brakes on just as we were ten feet above bottom, and blamed if we didn't land fairly easy without a man hurt. Just the same, we'd looked over our lives pretty well in those few seconds."

After this came tragic memories from other men. One recalled the terrible wreck of the Cornwall bridge over the St. Lawrence. Another the disaster at Louisville, when two great iron spans, reaching a thousand feet, went down into the Ohio, with false work, "traveler," and sixty-five men, of whom only four escaped. "And one of the four, sir, was on the "traveler," two hundred feet above the water, when she went down. Never had a scratch."

So the talk ran on, and I came away with mingled feelings of wonder and admiration and sadness. Here are men who leave their families every morning with full knowledge that before nightfall disaster may smite them, as they have seen it smite their comrades. Why, one asks, do they keep to such a career? And if they believe, as apparently they do, that bridge-men are fated to violent death, why do they not leave this work and seek a safer calling?

I suppose the same reason holds them to the bridge that holds the diver to his suit, the climber to his steeple, each one of us to his particular path—it is so hard to find another. And then there is the lash of pressing need, the home to keep, and no time for experiment. Yet there are the hard facts always, that no insurance company will take a risk upon these lives, that bridge contractors are not philanthropists nor issuers of pensions, and that if a man fall from the structure, say at 11.50 a.m., his pay stops short not at twelve o'clock, but at ten minutes before twelve. Which is probably excellent business, although it seems poor humanity.