Standing on the Washington Avenue Bridge, suspended above the Misssisssippi between East and West River Roads, I am surrounded by a battle of texture. I nearly rest my hand on the dusty rusty metal walls of the pedestrian tunnel before thinking better of it and recoiling from the fuzzy coating over what once was smooth. The windows are hazy from years of inadequate cleaning and college students’ spilling or splashing whatever college students spill and splash.
But beyond is the river and the buildings and the trees, an urban riverbed, notoriously unnavigable. My instructor couldn’t find parking so we got started late. If your first travel plan fails in that strange intersection of pathways—river, train, road, highway, on-ramp, bike lane, bus lane, boulevard, sidewalk, plaza, layered both horizontally and vertically, you may end up in a different neighborhood, perhaps on the wrong side of the North America’s grandest river. Maybe under it.
From the vantage point of the bridge, the textures get more complex. The layout of brick buildings, old trees, riverbeds, humans, vehicles, and student detritus create an elaborate multidimensional, multimaterial quilt. Hard surfaces, soft surfaces, surfaces that are sometimes hard and sometimes soft.
The human-made surfaces vary in color within a limited range. Brown brick and gray brick. The pale concrete walls of the concert hall rise from the foliage, as if being nourished by the river along with the trees. It is dwarfed, though by the theater complex—browner concrete, older—beyond.
The highrise apartments have multicolored panels in a seemingly random layout. People used to tell me not to go there. Those apartments are dangerous. But then I started teaching at the other university across the street, a single building of which I can see slightly further and to the left. Many of my students live in those buildings. Concern and racism are only mistakable through intention.
Those apartment buildings have a distinct texture, uneven surfaces intermixed with blocks of primary colors. They contrast the art museum across the river, smooth and shiny, perplexingly shaped but smooth. It sits within the bluff leading to water, as the apartment buildings sit within an urbanity that, from this bridge, seems to grow naturally out of the green of the leaves below.
They aren’t far from each other at all, museum and apartment complex, but the maze of directions and pathways, grass and asphalt, overpasses and underpasses and pedestrian restrictions and pedestrian-exclusive paths, make them exist in utterly different spaces.
The water and the concrete are surrounded by nature, or the other way around.
As I stare at the patchwork, the web of stone and sand and water and glass, someone passes behind me, shouting in a language I don’t know at a companion who had run ahead. Sudden sound jerked me back to reality and I saw that multiple people were running across the river. It was raining, so their jogging paths shifted to lead through the pedestrian tunnel.
I’ve run through that tunnel multiple times, but not for fun or health. I studied primarily on one side of the river, but my graduate school desire to be multidisciplinarian often prompted me to go to the other. The university’s schedule meant there was limited time to move from one dimension to the next. I didn’t want to be late for Wagner class, so I would run, trying desperately to remember which permutation of the Spear leitmotif sounds right before Wotan encases Brunhilde in her prison of fire. It will be on the test.
Wotan’s Spear motive is direct and to the point, most of the time a strong, stepwise fall toward inevitability. What he wants and what he is required to do are at odds, though, as those things tend to be, and the spear twists and circles and breaks apart and gets lost after trouble starts at the bottom of the Rhine. A river confuses things for him, just as a river confuses movement between the banks of the University of Minnesota.