The Simple Pursuit of The Small Bridge
If you follow the brook all the way around the third bend, you'll eventually step into the shadow of an overpass, and as the water sweeps over and around decades of silt and soil, you'll notice half of a cog reaching from of a speckled block of cement. The metal teeth have rusted into smooth planes. A piece of debris during the last riverine flood has cracked a strange welt in the rust-skin, revealing not hollow alloys within, but clumps of grass sticky with mold.
Only after a few months of prodding and research can I reliably estimate at the purpose this forgotten gear of some machine once had.
A footbridge fords the brook half a kilometer upstream. Two cement pylons the diameter of a car wheel sink into either side of the bank. The railings along each length of the bridge are connected to the base by a trio of hinges designed to give way and lay flat when pressed by great force: namely, when the brook floods during heavy rainfall. At some point the council had experimented with using a winch and pulley system to draw back the bridge: a kind of hand-cranked retractable footbridge. This appears to have never progressed past a prototype being half-finished and abandoned, replaced by sturdy cement and the rather clever hinge railings.
When Cowan writes about this phenomenon they describe these failed machines as "aborted ideas" [1], bad drafts of a future tossed away without any particular consideration. But as Cowan lays out this sensation of careless disposal is a result of the systems that discard these machines being so large, so abstract and so often made at several levels of abstraction above the physical reality of the object itself that making reliable sense of an outcome is difficult without tracing years and years of history.
I've been hard at work on my The Walking Dead book and have been attempting to write my way into a discussion of Rick's departure from the story. Rick ultimately sacrifices himself to keep a bridge he has built from being destroyed. The bridge represents expansion and security for his peoples: a permanent, safe freeway to other critical settlements. Each morning when I walk past the little cement footbridge I find the sequence revolving in my mind.
Being speculative fiction The Walking Dead is tasked with deciding what infrastructure exists, what used to exist, and what characters deem worth rebuilding or preserving. While obvious, Rick's bridge is the rare occasion the show provides the foundations of a previous piece of infrastructure to be restored. Not build atop. Not adapted into new useage. But just restored. Rick simply wants to rebuild the bridge that, at one time, had crossed the river.
Rick is pushing his crew too hard. A lack of food and water put the delivery of the bridge at risk before the weather grows bad again. But they complete the bridge, ultimately at the cost of a survivor being thrown out of camp for their behaviour.
It's strange - such a comprehensively absurb fictional universe has the capcity to collapse the aperature onto something so simple and real as a bridge, and how to make the crossing reliable and weatherproof. The allision of the spectacular with the mundane obstacles and outputs of technological determinism: we have a body of water, and we need to build a damn bridge that will last the weather. The very same problem those who lived by the brook contended with every few years without a relaible solution.
Reading accounts of the brook flooding before my grandmother was born is eerie and comforting. At "around 1.00am, there were approximately six feet of water at the intersection" says a married couple, or a local Joyce describing the waters as "shady and cool" and fishing by hand, taking eels and yabbies "home" to "cook it and eat it" [2]. Both feel of a piece with how we speak about the brook each time the waters rise or the way the locals talk about their relationship to the brook.
I wonder the names of those well-paid and well-educated figures tasked with experimenting and iterating this bridge until they landed on the correct alternative machine, unfettered by their conditions enough to produce the small marvel of their flood-proof bridge.
Perhaps this is where the criticism of Marx theory of material history feeling "trivial" can be located. That it is self-evident that all material objects are conditions of the modes of production of their time and place. But as we see in even the simplest examples of the history of any given machine, while the observation may be trivial, the systems that produce the dominant machine are varied and complex. So too the bridge is varied and complex yet trivial. Even the little cement footbridge with the latching railings. Simple, trivial, and perfect in its own small way.
Sources
[1] MacKenzie, D., & Wajcman, J. (Eds.) (1985). The Social Shaping of Technology: How the Refrigerator got its Hum, Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
[2] State Library Queensland, McDowall Bridge over Kedron Brook, Enoggera, washed away in flood, 1931, Get Archive. Accessed 15 January 2025.