adventures in photography: tressel bridge
It was a 2002 photo hike with my good friend Charlie. We'd been out exploring Toronto and taking photos. It was Autumn, and the lush greenery of Toronto was beginning to turn yellow, gold and red.
We'd headed to one of the large cemeteries in the centre of the city, and from there had followed a ravine path down to the Don river valley. Here's Charlie on that ravine trail.
Along the way, some angry individual came stomping by. He saw that we were taking photos, and started bellowing, "Ah, more wanna be photographers!"
Charlie said, "Heh, yup, that's right."
I wasn't so sure that it was a moment of levity. The guy had a really unhinged look to him, the kind of high-functioning angry little man who goes around flexing his jaw muscles. Angry Man stomped past us in his Doc Martens (what is it with those boots), yelling, "What's an emulsion?" and other things of that nature. He seemed to think that because Charlie was using a digital camera that that somehow meant that we didn't understand the mechanics of film photography. As if it mattered.
For people unfamiliar with Toronto, this may seem pretty bizarre. Nope, that's Toronto. I've been challenged on the streets on all kinds of things. This angry man was par for the course.
Two hours later found us on one side of the Don valley. We wanted to be on the other side. A long train's tressel bridge spanned the valley, crossing the river, Bayview Avenue, another railway and two busy four-lane interchange. Toronto has some of the busiest highways in the world, and the interchange in particular was an excellent example of a major thoroughfare jam-packed with 120kph traffic.
You can see the tressel bridge in this Google maps image, it's the long dark vertical line. As you can see, it's quite a stretch, and being caught out there while a train appeared would be hell. There aren't even handrails.
So we crossed the bridge.
It was at about the midway mark when I realized what a stupid thing this really was. It's not as simple as crossing a pedestrian bridge, or even dashing over a vehicle bridge. The bridge is made of railway ties, those big wooden lengths of creosote-soaked lumber. These were regularly spaced, but there was nothing between them but air. If you missed your step, you'd wind up with a leg down between them.
And that's if you were lucky. I could just as easily imagine tumbling right off the thing, or breaking a leg.
But those imaginings only occurred to me when I was actually out there, of course. When it was far too late. With the roar of the traffic making communication impossible, the railway ties wobbling loose underfoot, and a gentle breeze behaving suddenly seeming like a gale.
Needless to say, we survived unscathed if a little abashed. And we went on to do the rest of the river valley, enjoying the fine weather in Toronto's finest season.
It's now 2012 as I review this page. I saw that tressel bridge from the subway and thought of this day. I hadn't realized that it had been ten years already, wow! The bridge still stands, though I don't know how active the train line is. It's a good span, I think we were dummies to cross it as we did, but then again I've done plenty (plenty!) worse.
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