Through the van’s windshield Dad was a silhouette. He walked bent, one hand groping, the other filling with thin shadows that looked like rose stems. “Kindling,” I said. I liked the word. He’d said it before getting out. He told me to wait. “Just look at the bridge,” he said.

I’d be with him for two weeks. Mom and John left this morning. Marquette to Chicago to New York to Paris. We’d be moving there in January. John’s transfer. “Paris,” Mom sighed, her eyes far away. She said it a lot. She told Dad this morning.

Dad told her we’d be here, camped on the beach near St. Ignace.

“We’re going to heat up pasties in the coals of the campfire,” I said.

“I’m not surprised,” she said.

“He doesn’t worry so much about the expense of things,” Dad said. He put his fingers in my hair. “So what happens to every other weekend?”

Mom shrugged.

Lit, the Mackinac Bridge looked to be floating in the darkness. Dad was almost gone. If I tried, I could see him crouched by the fire pit. I waited for a flame. When it didn’t come, I turned on the CB. Channel 19. “Where the lonely look for the lonely,“ Dad always said. There were more voices here, near the bridge, than I’d ever heard before. Deep, accented, foul-mouthed and misted over by a static that made them otherworldly. So many voices. “It’s the confluence of every U.P. highway,” Dad said when we came down U.S. 2 and the bridge materialized in the southeastern distance. I sucked my milkshake. Dad talked about slow ferries, the straits freezing over, the importance of connection. “Had to have some kind of bridge,” he said. When we pulled into the campsite, he asked me if I liked John. I shook my head. I lied. Dad looked out at the water for a long time.

“Does he treat you okay?”

I nodded.

I couldn’t see him anymore. The bridge made everything else darker. No fire yet. No tent.

The driver’s door opened, and Dad pulled in behind the wheel. A chill came in with him, and I shivered.

He stared at the bridge. “Let’s cross it,” he said.

“Okay.”

He started the van. The fire pit appeared in the headlights. No fire in it, but the twigs and small branches leaned against each other, tepee style. Kindling. He’d slid birch bark into some of the spaces, left others open.

“The space is as important as the wood,“ he told me two years ago. Mom listened, shaking her head. “He’s too young for fires,” she said.

“A fire survives on fuel and space,” he said. “Too much of either kills it. It’s a balancing game.”

The bridge hummed beneath us. Dad told me they vented the middle lanes to keep high winds from tearing it apart.

The van’s vents blew cold air. I shivered again. The lights of Mackinaw City glowed dimly ahead of us. The darkness beyond it was much bigger. “Where we gonna camp at?” I asked.

He told me he didn’t know.

ISBN 1-59661-001-8
28 pages $9

That the Mackinac Bridge ever came to be built was a miracle. In the face of outstanding financial obstacles, engineering nightmares, logistical hurdles, and legions of nay-sayers, it appeared to not stand a chance. But people of faith and vision persevered, and in the 1950’s construction got underway. After years of ferries pounding their way across the wind-tossed straits when weather allowed, and cars and their passengers bunched up in parking lots on either side in day-long delays when it didn’t, the bridge was finally finished and linked together Michigan’s two peninsulas.

The bridge, as the saying goes, is a modern wonder. Built in gale-force winds and freezing temperatures which turn the five-mile–wide span into a wind tunnel with killer instincts, it speaks in its own way about the chances involved in crossing and landing safely on the other shore. Con-nections in this life don’t come easy.

The characters in these stories, like the bridge, attempt to span the gap in the midst of physical and emotional storms and find safe passage to the other side. An aimless young woman after far too many one-night stands crosses the bridge then backtracks trying to find someone to talk to, only to discover that the bridge has been closed. In another story, a divorced father drives his troubled, estranged son for hours just to let him see the majesty of the bridge with the hope that he will be moved in some positive way by the experience. In yet another a son recalls a series of impressions about staying with his father while his mother and step-father travel to France. The memories are poignant and random—kindling, CB radios—“Where the lonely look for the lonely,” he recalls his dad as saying. The brief story ends with his father saying he doesn’t know where they will spend the night. One comes away with the impression that this is not all he doesn’t know. These are powerful stories, energized by an economy of language and treatment, resonant with arresting images. —John VandeZande, author of Night Driving.