Waiting for the day to begin

Sundial Bridge in redding, california

At the intersection of Telegraph and Bancroft, I stop for a second to breathe. The smell of fresh October rain hangs over the asphalt. The streets glisten like dim mirrors. Lights shimmer on its dark surface. And I hear snow being plowed. I hear a truck carving through a thick frosting of snow on a bright December morning. I hear it beeping and combing the ground and spewing showers of snow onto the side of the road. And now I’m back home, still in the fifth grade, laying in bed, tossing a Lego figure up and down and praying for a snow day. My eyes are on the ceiling and my hands are about to close around the toy. Then the street sweeper turns the corner and drives off, beeping loudly down the rain-drenched Berkeley street.

***

I plant my feet on the hard glass. Algae-like bubbles flower around the beams under my feet. The rest of my car and I have just passed by the sign advertising the Sundial Bridge in Redding, California. Designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, the support tower of this footpath over the Sacramento River uses witch magic to indicate the current solar time by the position of its shadow on the ground. The long shadow of the support tower sweeps across an arc marked from 11 am to 3 pm, speeding across at a rate of approximately one foot per minute. As we enter the throughfare, it’s just about left the three o’clock mark.

A boy is walking down the bridge beside me. Hand in hand with his mom, he shouts “Don’t touch the green! Stay on the silver!” as he jumps across the green bubbles. On either side of us is sparkling blue water. The shadows of people crossing by pass over the surface of the water like the figures in a shadow puppet play. The water lets them take on fresh and unfamiliar forms. The bridge is overrun with these people, all clumped together in families. It’s a warm September day and, strangely enough, even three thousand miles away, it feels like my childhood home in upstate New York. It feels like I’m little again.

***

Stuck in the dirty Berkeley crosswalk in the rain, I am, once again, only a dirty eyepiece. When I pan my view, everything is caked with grime and grease. All is goo. The wet asphalt is stained with sludge, the streetlights are spotted with slop. Sometimes I think of wiping it with my hands. But my palms are lined with even more sweat and dirt. It accumulates even thicker on my eyepiece over time. I close my eyes but I can no longer see the toy lego flying out of my palm. It’s all just a little smudge here. A little dust there. The stuff is like snow but it doesn’t melt. It doesn’t plow.

As I’m walking down Bancroft, I don’t register the music echoing from the familiar piano on Sproul. I could turn around and look. But still, I wouldn’t see anything but goo.

***

When I turn around, I see another dad showing his kid a trick on the cables of the bridge. While his son presses his ear against the wire, the dad taps a metal key to a spot ten inches above him. The son smiles in delight. My curiosity gets the better of me and I decide to ask the dad to demonstrate for me too. He seems surprised at my forwardness. With his agreement, I press my ear against the wire where I hear a zooming sound, like a laser gun effect from an old arcade game. I thank the dad and move on to the next cable. Each of the wires transmits a different pitch. The cables of the bridge are like the strings of a musical instrument - a large harpsichord suspended above the river.

A-tremendous-string-instrument-sending-harmonies-over-Sacramento-river. It’s a hidden connection, a resonating current. I’m a third grader again, going on a field trip to the local Albany Science Museum and marveling at being the very first person to ever discover how a sound wave works.

But as I strum my fingers over each string, the shadow of Time creeps its nails across the Earth. The top of the support tower pierces the blue sky like the fin of a colossal shark, its head buried in the bank of the river, its cables forming skeleton threads of a caravel sail. Its shadow falls on a patch of dirt placed at about what should be the four o’clock mark. I cross to the bank of the river and dip my hands in the water. Once rinsed clean, I wipe my eyes a little. As we leave the bridge, the shadow of the tower continues moving and pushing away time like snow in front of a plow truck, like snow off a windshield wiper — snow melting into the water of the Sacramento River. Already, this unfettered glimpse into the molasses heart of my hometown is flowing away. But just for a second, I’m frozen. Praying for that snow day, tossing a toy up and down, waiting for the day to begin.

Words: Andrew Tao

Photos: Kyle Garcia Takata, Niko Frost

Design: Khankamol Chor Kongrukgreatiyos