The High Road (27 page)

“Okay. The bridge was built in 1900 and is sometimes called the Interprovincial Bridge. It’s about 575 metres long and made mostly of steel. Ironically, it’s been designated as a National Historic Civil Engineering Site by the Canadian Society of Civil Engineers. As we already know, it’s owned by the federal government through Infrastructure Canada.” I paused to check my notes.

“Don’t stop yet, laddie, you’re doin’ fine.”

“Each day, some 15,000 vehicles pass over it along with 1,300 cyclists and over 2,000 pedestrians. There was a major overhaul back in 1975 and the whole thing was repainted in 1995. The Tory government hit the pause button on another major refurbishment slated to start two years ago, but not much has happened since.”

“Right then, that’s the history. What were you able to learn about the collapse?” he asked.

“The bridge apparently started groaning shortly after midnight, and an alert pedestrian called police. An engineer from Infrastructure Canada arrived by 12:45 to assess the situation. At 1:04, the engineer was worried enough about what he’d found to give the order to close it down. The police dutifully complied and cleared the bridge. In the next hour or so, the groaning intensified and a mild shuddering could be felt and seen by police and the onlookers gathered. A loud metallic snap sent the police sprinting off their respective ends of the bridge. Three minutes later at 2:41, the centre span of the bridge broke free at the Quebec end and plummeted into the river. Witnesses reported that it made a fearsome noise. One guy standing on the Hull shore said it sounded exactly as you might expect a mass of iron and steel girders to sound as they broke away from their mountings, twisted around themselves, and fell onto the ice. That’s it. That’s all I’ve got so far.” I paused again before continuing.

“Did you discover anything, crawling through the steel maze?” I asked.

“I can tell you it was not a bomb, and it looks to me as if there was no sudden trauma that caused it. No bus rammed a support member. So I may not have learned much but I think I safely eliminated one or two possible explanations.”

I was tired. It had been a long day. But Angus seemed up, alert, and talkative.

“You know, Marin once told me that an insatiable curiosity was my blessin’ and my burden. Until she said that, I’d never
noticed. But she was bang on the mark, she was. I don’t care a fig for any political advantage we might gain by this little inquiry of ours. I just have to know why in blazes, after more than a century of service, a bridge would simply let go and fall. I have an idea, but I’m pushin’ it from my mind.”

“Why? What’s your theory?” I asked.

“I’ll not weigh you down with it just yet. We’re better if we make no assumptions. I want the facts and our findin’s to lead us to the promised land, not my suspicions and speculations.”

Just before crawling into bed, I took a quick look at my BlackBerry. I’d switched to silent mode earlier in the afternoon and had a raft of messages waiting for me. As I suspected, Bradley Stanton had called several times, even into the evening, no doubt to deliver his finely wrought invective, insults, and threats. I chose not to listen to the three voice-mail messages he’d left me. I turned down Lindsay’s side of the bed and left her light on.

The next week blurred by. The Leader was sworn in as Prime Minister and set about the delicate task of assembling his Cabinet. Meanwhile, Angus and I were consumed with the investigation, taking only about half an hour off so the Clerk of the House could swear in Angus as the Member of Parliament for Cumberland-Prescott. Then it was back to the bridge.

I recorded interviews with the eighteen people who were eyewitnesses to the collapse. Well, really seventeen. One community college student, who’d spent election night in a bar in Hull with friends, wasn’t that helpful. The group of them staggered out near closing time and lurched towards the bridge’s pedestrian walkway. Just before they reached it, the bridge broke away and fell. Notwithstanding their blood-alcohol levels, his drunken friends provided surprisingly coherent accounts of the bridge’s descent. But at the moment of truth, he’d been on his knees, head down, throwing up on the sidewalk. His most vivid memory is of the rather symmetrical splatter pattern his dinner made on the boots of his friends. I erased that part of the recording.

Despite the bitter cold, Angus spent much of his time clambering over the twisted iron with an aging blueprint always in his hands. On a couple of occasions, he had one or two engineering faculty colleagues in tow. No one could accuse him of taking the easy way out. He immersed himself in his work. Often, he’d don a safety harness and, with the help of several firefighters still on the scene, actually lower himself right over the edge of the
northern breakpoint and crawl up into the fractured steel girders. Sometimes he’d be up in there for a couple of freezing hours at a time. I felt nearly frostbitten after a quarter hour standing on the shore watching him. I cannot fathom how he could endure the sub-zero temperatures for such long stretches. Welcome to Ottawa in February.

Two days into the investigation, Angus complained that it was hard for him to handle the sheets of interview transcripts he needed to consult while climbing within the gigantic jungle gym of the bridge’s innards. So to free up at least one of his hands, I transferred my eyewitness interviews onto my iPod as one large MP3 file so he could listen while up inside the bridge. In addition to the interviews, I recorded my own step-by-step chronology of events that was based on the common elements in the seventeen eyewitness descriptions. This gave Angus one clear and definitive account of just what had gone down, when the bridge had gone down. Angus said he listened to my recording more than any of the others so I was glad I’d taken care not to dangle any participles, misplace any prepositions, or use any words like “impactful.” I’d considered overlaying dramatic orchestral music, as if I were narrating a documentary for the Discovery Channel’s Falling Bridges Week, but decided that was going a bit too far.

I would sometimes watch from the Hull shore as Angus scrambled about above me in the spars and beams, listening to my voice streaming through his ear buds. By watching his eyes and the order in which he focused on different sections of the ironwork, I could almost mark his progress through my moment-by-moment audio tour of the collapse. Every once in a while, he’d nod as if another piece had fallen into place. And every once in a while, the wind would lift his beard up into his face, so he could see nothing but swirling grey. It made him look momentarily like a geriatric sasquatch. But Angus never seemed too put out and would calmly shove the unruly cascade back down into the front of his snowmobile suit, to be constrained for at least a moment or two. Through it all, the media camped out on either
side of the downed bridge and dutifully recorded his exploits.

Watching him, I could see that Angus was clearly focused on three important sites. He marked and numbered each with bright yellow painter’s tape.

“What’s with the yellow tape?” I asked when he’d finally hauled himself back onto the topside deck and I’d made my way back up the path.

“Just a jiff to catch my breath.”

He wheezed. I waited. He said nothing until we’d entered the heated construction trailer that had been arranged so Angus could warm up between girder-grappling sessions.

“Based on how the bridge actually deformed during the collapse, I think I’ve determined the failure points in the superstructure,” Angus explained. “The points marked with yellow are the stress loci. After stress locus number three failed, the bridge was doomed.”

I nodded wisely.

“We don’t get a lot of locusts in Ottawa, and never in the winter,” I replied.

He didn’t even have the grace to smile.

“Aye, you’re a right laugh, you are,” Angus said. “The stress loci trace the line along which a succession of failures in rivets, bolts, welds, and a few steel flanges brought the poor beast down.”

“Um, just a reminder that I’m actually an English professor,” I observed. “Everything I’ve learned about bridge construction came from a classic Bugs Bunny cartoon that climaxed with the Rube Goldberg journey of a red-hot rivet.”

“Aye, it’s quite clear to me, and to just about everyone else, that you’re a wordsmith and not a blacksmith.”

When Lindsay and I arrived at the Riverfront Seniors’ Residence, peach safari-suited Jasper intercepted us and led the assembled residents in a round of applause. An anemic “Angus, Angus” chant surfaced briefly. Lindsay smiled and curtsied deeply. I just waved.

“Splendid job, you two!” he opened. “You really sent that jackass Fox packing!”

“Well thanks, Jasper, but Muriel and Angus had far more to do with it all than we did. I assume you give her a standing ovation whenever she arrives in the lounge.”

Jasper looked over at Muriel by the picture window, her usual perch, to find her glaring at him. He waved his hand in dismissal.

“Awww, we get to see that cranky old bat every day. We like to see young blood in here. Next to hiding whoopee cushions in wheelchairs, welcoming visitors is the high point in my day.”

“Speaking of jackasses,” the piercing vocal stylings of Muriel Parkinson boomed from across the room, “why don’t you let them pass and go iron your sock garters? They’ve come to see me.”

Jasper bowed and waved us through with a “see what I mean” uttered under his breath.

Muriel had the paper opened on her lap. Lindsay leaned down to kiss her on the cheek and I followed suit, before we both settled on the couch across from her. She was a bit agitated.

“Now Daniel, you’re supposed to be protecting Angus, even if it’s from himself,” Muriel scolded. “Why in hell’s name is he swinging from a rope like some circus acrobat without a net? He’s a Member of Parliament, not Karl Wallenda.”

She could curse like a coal miner. She waved the
Cumberland Crier
at me. Another front-page photo of Angus. This one showed him suspended below the bridge in his safety harness, his beard bent horizontal by the wind.

“I’ve tried, but stopping Angus from doing something he’s set his mind to do is kind of like sticking out your leg to stop a charging rhinoceros. The beast flies right by anyway, and you’re left with a broken leg, if you’re lucky,” I explained. “I only have two legs and I need them to keep up with him.”

“I must say, that was a colourful metaphor,” observed Muriel.

“Simile, actually, but it was the best I could do on short notice.”

“Well, do try to keep him safe. He’s not a young man any
more and he’ll do us all no good if he falls to his death.”

“Grandma, I can testify on Daniel’s behalf that he has tried,” Lindsay piped up. “I was there yesterday when Daniel once again warned Angus about plummeting to the river below. True to form, Angus simply said with a smile” – at this point, Lindsay switched into a very bad Scottish accent – “‘Will you stop worrying yourself, laddie, it’s not the fall that hurts, it’s the sudden stop at the end.’”

Muriel shook her head and looked out the window. It was overcast and the clouds seemed to crowd the sky, pushing down towards the frozen river. Chickadees dipped and darted about the feeder that hung from a tree by the shore. Upset birdseed lay scattered in the snow below.

“It’s been interesting to be close to Angus in the last week,” I noted. “He’s like a man possessed with the task he’s been given. He seems to know exactly what to do. I’m just following his daily instructions. He is Holmes and I am Watson.”

“’Twas ever thus,” Muriel said.

“Well, kind of you to say, but we’ve had our Laurel and Hardy moments too,” I admitted.

“Do stay close to him, Daniel. He needs your political insight. I sense this little investigation of yours is going to yield more than the Prime Minister ever bargained for.”

“That is my concern exactly,” I replied.

We visited for an hour, covering off a range of topics. Lindsay reached across and held Muriel’s hand for most of our stay. Our conversation was interrupted several times by residents, including several GOUT members, who stopped by to do a post-mortem on the Fox campaign. By the time we left, Muriel seemed buoyant. I made a mental note to visit her more often. When we left, Jasper appeared to be moving in on an attractive woman in a wheelchair. He pointed out something on her chair’s footrest. As she leaned forward, I saw the whoopee cushion flash by, headed for the seat.

——

The next day was Wednesday, more than a week after the election, and the first meeting of the government caucus. As usual, I tagged along, as an adviser of my seniority on the Hill could. The government caucus room was much nicer than the rundown opposition caucus space. Despite having worked on Parliament Hill for the past five years, I’d never set foot in the spacious wood-panelled room on the second floor, just off the main Hall of Honour. At one end, an enormous fireplace with intricate ironwork gave it an old-world warmth. Large paintings depicting Canadians hard at physical work were intended to remind the caucus of whom they served. More likely the artwork triggered relief among the MPs that their jobs were not so laborious. It was set up much like the room we used in opposition – the green chairs arrayed in classroom-style with a long and quite ornate table at the front. Usually, the Whip, House Leader, Caucus Chair, Prime Minister, Senate Whip, and Deputy PM all scrunched in at the long front table. But since the newly sworn-in PM had yet to appoint any of these positions, he and Bradley sat alone up there. The Prime Minister was due to announce his cabinet and the other related appointments at the end of the day. This timing was deliberate. It would make the evening news, but leave insufficient time for newly minted ministers to be interviewed and screw up in the first hours of their appointments.