Here’s a photo that seems innocuous enough. We’re sailing along—my son, oldest brother, and husband, and me up forward behind the camera. It’s Boxing Day, and we’ve won the winter weather lottery in Maryland, with 8-10 knots of breeze, bright, warm sun, and a sky so blue it makes your heart ache.
“Nothing gold can stay,” wrote poet Robert Frost. But of all the things I might have expected to change in this particular scene, the least likely would have been the Francis Scott Key Bridge, arcing gracefully in the background as we sailed away from it on the Patapsco River. It was always there. Until it wasn’t.
When the 984-foot Neopanamax container ship Dali lost power and propulsion outbound on the river early on March 26, it plowed straight into one of the bridge’s piers at 1:29 a.m. The bridge, which had stood as a gateway to Baltimore mariners for half a century, collapsed like a Tinkertoy. It disarticulated like a million brittle bones breaking.
In that terrible instant, thousands of lives inexorably changed, most especially those of the families of six Latino workers. The workers had been fixing potholes in the dark hours and couldn’t get off the bridge in time. Four of their bodies have been recovered, but as of mid-April two others remained missing. When the Port of Baltimore slammed shut, the effects rippled far across the country. The ninth largest U.S. port by volume, Baltimore last year handled 55.5 million tons of domestic and international cargo. Locally, tens of thousands of workers and business owners who depend on the port saw their lives turned upside down.
As a sailor who has known this bridge all my life, what I felt pales in comparison, but it’s part of the intangible aftermath. The bridge meant more to people than shipping statistics and traffic numbers. It was a backdrop to their stories, permanent and inviolable. It had character. It had presence. For sailors in particular, it had a deeper meaning.
“How long did I cry?” asks Bobby LaPin, a Baltimore native who, with his wife, Alicia Jones, owns Boat Baltimore, a small charter business that takes people sailing in the river aboard their 45-foot Hunter Legend. “I remember when I was a little kid and going under it on my grandpa’s boat, and it was so monstrous and loud and huge. It was terrifying and exiting at the same time.”
After growing up and becoming a sailor, he says, it became something else. “You cross under the Key Bridge and there’s that sense of security. It was that symbol of a start and a finish. It was always a welcome home and always a farewell.”
“It didn’t have sign that said, ‘Welcome home,’ but it might as well have, because that’s what it signified,” says Rich Shores, a member of Baltimore City Yacht Association and a regular racer aboard a J/105 on Tuesday nights, where the bridge has always been one end of the racecourse between it and Fort McHenry farther upriver. The first time he saw the wreckage, he says, “I was surprised at the emotional impact it had on me.”
“You take it for granted that it’s always going to be there,” says Doug Silber, executive director of the Downtown Sailing Center. Most of the organization’s sailing happens closer to the city than out by the bridge, he says, but for some of their summer campers, “the Key Bridge is their big goal.”
As sailors, we assign meaning to things that may seem odd to non-sailors. We name our autopilots and chartplotters and anchor windlasses. We greet like an old friend the lighthouse or bridge that marks our home, and when we leave it behind, we feel a flickering lonesomeness as it slips from sight. We find comfort and reassurance in these things because they seem steadfast in a world that is never the same from one moment to the next, that is ever-shifting with the vagaries of wind, weather, and tide. We know we can count on them to be there and help us find our way.
And when one is gone in a single breathless moment, we know our fragility, and we learn once more that nothing gold can stay.
If you want to help people affected by the Key Bridge collapse, boatbaltimore.com/love is a place to start.
Keep on sailing,
Wendy
[email protected]
June/July 2024
