For years the politicians have mumbled and pegged back and forth, back and forth, never once getting even close to nicking their fingers with any crap cutting decisiveness. Then the earthquake came along and literally shattered the community's sense of the value of eternal committee work. Two of the five ways into downtown were severed; the boulevard along the lake and the Fourth Avenue bridge. The way along the lake returned to its origins. After all, sand and fill are no foundation for a road. Especially one alongside a natural slough that has been dredged out to make a fecally saturated pond. Perhaps it was the liquefying factor of countless generation of acrid goose poop that weakened the Boy Scout Corps of Engineers' work and contributed to the liquefaction of the road bed. (A research paper in the offing for some local college student.) But the bridge... the bridge has stood for generations of people abuse. And now it's finally destroyed. And it's no good blaming the bums that live under it. Or the possible solvent activity of spray painted graffiti. The earthquake was just too much for its tired old bones of concrete to survive.
So now we need a solution. Gone are the dreams of refuge islands and roundabouts and sunken lightpoles and bikelanes and transit rights of way to shuttle the giant 60 passenger capacity busses with one driver and a single eco-conscious rider up to the Westside. Suggestions abound to fix the problem. Throw up an Army assault bridge, ply ferries across the bay, even put big pole on top of the hill with a cable so people could zzzzzzzzzhhhh down into the valley. But enough already! We need to get traffic moving quick, dammit. This is a code blue situation. Two of the main arterioles are blocked, and if we don't act quickly, we're gonna loose some vital civic tissue. The beating heart of downtown is about to have a major infarction. In public no less. And, as we all know, there's nothing worse than infarcting in public.
Well, you can stop squeezing your bulbs folks, cause I'm here to offer a possible angioplasty. Or more accurately, a bypass. And to stretch the analogy further, like a good surgeon, I suggest we solve the problem by taking some healthy tissue from some other section and grafting it onto the affected area. And what other mostly healthy transit tissue could we use that wouldn't be missed where we take it from, yet would reestablish the flow in areas where its currently impinged? What vein running down what leg of the vast body of resources that is Washington State? A broken-down ferry that's what.
Yeah. Find some damaged-by-drunken-captains-banging-into-docks dilapidated ferry. Tow and tug it right on down to the South Sound. Surely there's some limping Quillyute or San Juan or Mukilteo or something out there that's been languishing in dry-dock waiting for repair funds too long. Get it. Don't even bother to scrape off the barnacles, they'll help anchor it to the sludge off the old bridge. They couldn't build an Army Corps bridge because they couldn't figure out the proper engineering for the pilings. But anchoring a "ship" would be no problem.
Now I'm not saying it will be that easy. You'd need someone at the helm who's not afraid of tight maneuvering. The last thing we need is some tentative rule follower the would try to ease the thing in. We don't need someone who would act like a bluehair in a fender antennae festooned Caddy inching into a parallel parking stall. We need to run it aground hard, man. I say, call the drunken captain that originally disabled the vessel. Liquor him up and hand him the rudder. Tell him to pretend its a ferry dock and debark your ass over to Bayview Market to see what happens. Chances are good he'll plow that puppy right into place. Pile it into the pilings baby. Then just tie it off, remove the sponges and clamps, throw up a couple of berms to the ramps and -- Voila! Traffique Extrordinaire. Moi! The patient, she's doing fine.
I knew that double major in medicine and engineering would come in handy someday.
