I glanced over at my mother. She was smiling. The Key Bridge, with its towering arches and steel trusses, cast a glimmer of hope on her face. For years, my mother had juggled two or three income streams to support me and my sisters, from freelance writing to a fur trader’s assistant. But the spring of my 14th birthday, she found a new job at the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore, paying enough to finish the job. We moved from New York to Maryland, and the Francis Scott Key Bridge became the gateway to our new life.
We crossed the bridge and went into the future, and now that future is part of my past, the bridge is gone.
A freighter nearly as long as the Eiffel Tower and as heavy as the Washington Monument struck a concrete column, toppling it. More than 5,000 tons of roadway and girders fell into the dark waters of the Patapsco River. Trusses the size of a small house collapsed on impact with the riverbed and folded into twisted wreckage. The ship ran aground, with the remains of the bridge lying on top of it. Six Marylanders were killed.
To fully understand the tragedy of that day, you need to understand all of the days that preceded it. Key Bridge meant more to me than it does to history textbooks and old photographs. It was a living part of the lives of Baltimoreans. When I sailed on the Patapsco River, I always anchored under this bridge on the way home. Our beloved port city lived in harmony with the water, and the bridge provided shade for boaters and fishing families on hot summer days. In the afternoons, parents and children cast fish or fished for crabs under the bridge’s sloping arches. Overhead, longshoremen and truckers commuted between home and work, chasing opportunity just as my family had chased a new start.
Before I took office, I had been warned about late-night phone calls, ringtones that would interrupt my dreams, but I was completely unprepared for the 2 a.m. call from my chief of staff telling me the bridge had fallen.
“I felt a mixture of pain and disbelief. I had never seen Baltimore without a bridge, and when I rushed to the scene and saw the ruins, I knew that any loss I felt could not compare to the suffering of the people of Maryland who lost loved ones when their bridge collapsed.
But I experienced, and continue to experience, a kind of double consciousness: Maryland must grieve and move forward at the same time; we must remember and rebuild at the same time. And our common sense of purpose betrays a sense of shared pain that no executive order or bipartisan bill can repair.
What do you do when something you thought would last forever is suddenly gone? What if lives are lost and memories are buried at the bottom of a river? I don’t have all the answers, but I’m beginning to find clues in Marylanders. While the news focuses on a bridge replacement bill to avoid mass layoffs at the Port of Baltimore, what you don’t read in the newspapers are the everyday acts of healing and hope that move our state forward. A teenager in Baltimore’s Cherry Hill neighborhood who told me about the day he got his driver’s license and walked across the bridge for the first time. A father who found his first job at the port after being released from prison and counted on the bridge to get a fresh start. A mother who lost her son in a collapse but found the strength to let me know what kind of person he was.
Long after the wreckage is cleared away, the memories will linger. And together, we will not only commemorate this bridge, but rebuild it. And one day, soon, another family will cross the Patapsco River to start a new life in Baltimore, one filled with the hope and pride that my mother and I felt so many years ago.
