Writing

From a nonfiction work in progress:

This particular morning, one day after the full moon, the early morning was bright. I reached to the pipe bridge across the Yarra without seeing another human; only cars, which are not at all the same thing. It was a few minutes after six am.

The pipe bridge is a weathered structure, accidentally beautiful in its engineering-led form and placement. Where the Yarra cuts through a steep-sided valley under the Wurundjeri Spur, a massive water pipe perhaps a metre across emerges from the ground and shoots straight through the air to the other bank, suspended perhaps 20 or 30 metres above the surface of the river.

Around the pipe there’s a painted metal frame of riveted girders that also supports a plate-metal footbridge, too narrow for two bikes to pass comfortably. The frame is an off-khaki tone, like clay, in places crusted with lichen like barnacles on a ship. Its struts are built in a criss-cross pattern, rising to two peaks each about a third of the way in from each bank, and descending to a low point overhead at about the centre of the crossing, at the midpoint of the river. The struts throw geometrically attractive designs of dew and shadow onto the metal footbridge, and frame in triangles the long boughs and hanging leaves of the tree canopy that extends out over the river.

As I reached the bridge, I observed as I always do the condition of its potentially slippery metal surface. It was wet with condensation, to be expected on cold morning high above a mighty river. There was one bicycle-tyre track and one set of dog footprints on the bridge, and I was considering how the bike’s front and rear wheels had followed different lines, creating a loosely threaded two-strand plait, when I saw, up and to my left, a man perched on top of the lattice of girders right at that low central point, facing north and upriver.

I stopped. I gently placed my bike upright against the wire safety fence behind me and took a step forward. I said hello. I asked something like – are you all right? – and then - what’s your name? – because that’s what people ask, isn’t it, when they are trying to talk other people down off bridges.