A pod of porpoise sports underneath, cuts graceful arcs of their bodies against the rigid body of the bridge. The bridge, without ceasing, Joe Fennell or no Joe Fennell, shakes itself apart and into these waters that flow into the Atlantic. The train rattles the bridge and the river in its primordial bed.

In 1925, the bridge, centered on several stories of bridge tenders’ shacks, replaces the bridge built in 1890, when newspapers reported gawkers gathered on wharves to behold the unbelievable sight of the long metal serpent thundering on water. The massive double-track bridge pivots on a central core like a see-saw. When the locomotive clears the river, the pivot point called the trunnion shifts against the great counterweight device called the bascule, which raises the road high up in the air and points diagonally to the sky, allowing boats and ships and barges to pass underneath. Late Thursday afternoon, March 29, 1924, he’s dead before they place him on the operating table at Old St. Passing a fellow worker at the top of a moving crane, Joe loses his footing, slips, falls 40 feet. Building the city demands lives, creation from destruction, gardens from burial sites. Johns River, he does so unaware of the sacrifice required.

When Joseph Fennell takes the job, lacing steel across the St. One morning, as stray figures walk the Acosta Bridge overhead, the winds batter the railway bridge without ceasing another morning the stagnant air hovers burning and motionless, singeing the wings of gulls and grackles and ospreys. This great beast hulks ponderously, strangely gracious in its industrial lacework, a dinosaur skeleton laid lovingly over the waters.

Steel webbings, mottled red, rise oxidized over the river, counterweight and span in continuous balance, boiling in the hot winds that scald skin.

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