Don't mess with lumberjacks

It was a hot July in 1871. Lumberjacks working along the Mississippi and St. Croix rivers had been quenching their thirst with whiskey and beer. Then they heard that some big railroad company was building a bridge across the St. Croix near Hudson, Wisconsin. The bridge would be built on hundreds of pilings driven into the riverbed, which would work fine for the railroad but would interfere with the annual floating of felled trees from the north woods to the mills in Stillwater. On July 7, a rowdy bunch of lumberjacks marched to the river near Hudson, removed about 100 of the pilings, and dragged them back to Stillwater, where they built a massive bonfire and drank some more.

The event becomes known as the "Battle of the Piles."(I will refrain from any stupid references to the human posterior.)

The lumber interests prevailed (for a few years) in defending their stomping grounds. Not many lumber mills in Stillwater any more, but you can still get whiskey and beer.

Bridges

We’ve all heard quite enough about the infamous ‘bridge to nowhere’ in Alaska. And yesterday, the new I-35W bridge over the Mississippi in Minneapolis opened. So bridges are on my mind.

Italy has its own bridge controversy going. For decades, some folks have advocated a bridge between Sicily and the mainland (Reggio di Calabria), over the Straits of Messina. The project has been on-again, off-again while the merry-go-round that is the Italian government tries to finally decide. Silvio Berlusconi, the once and current Prime Minister, is all for it.

This would be a very costly proposition – 4.4 billion Euros, which is somewhere near 3.1 billion dollars. The bridge would be about 2.5 miles long, so that’s more than a billion per mile. Yikes! And a major fault line runs right under the proposed bridge route. The bridge would cut the crossing time in half – but that means saving all of 15 minutes!

People have been crossing that narrow strip of water in boats ever since boats were invented. The huge ferries and the hydrofoils (see photo at left) are famous. And they work quite well. I have enjoyed two crossings -- admittedly as just a wide-eyed tourist.

Bridges can be beautiful, famous, iconic. But I wonder if this isn’t just a big ego thing for Mr. Berlusconi (and a power thing for mainland interests). Pyramids are passé, and Italian prime ministers don’t build palatial libraries like ex-presidents in the USA do. So maybe a big fancy bridge with his name on it is Berlusconi’s best shot at immortality.

My biggest objection: The bridge celebrates the hegemony of the automobile at the expense of everything else – history, tradition, serenity, sanity. Sicily, like most other islands, has its own languorous pace. Please, Mr. Berlusconi, don’t wreck that.