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Losing Our Way
An Intimate Portrait of a Troubled America
By Bob Herbert Random House LLC
Copyright © 2014 Bob Herbert
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-385-52823-8
CHAPTER 1
Falling Apart
I am not going to die today. —Mercedes Gorden
Mercedes Gorden glanced out at the highway, which she could see from her third-floor office on the sprawling campus of the Best Buy corporate headquarters in Richfield, Minnesota. It was after five, rush hour, but the traffic wasn't too bad. She didn't really care. She'd recently been promoted by her company, Accenture, which did employee relations work for Best Buy, and her raise had kicked in that day.
"I wasn't in any hurry," she would later recall. "I was in a great mood. I thought about picking up a bottle of wine on my way home and maybe celebrating my raise with my fiancé. There was nothing out of the ordinary about the day."
Nothing at all. August 1, 2007. Newspapers were reporting that the Italian movie director Michelangelo Antonioni had died. Presidential candidate Barack Obama, a long shot for the Democratic nomination, was meeting in Washington with members of the 9/11 Commission. A pair of senators, Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, had scheduled a press conference to discuss the sorry state of the nation's infrastructure, but few reporters were interested, and the press conference was a bust.
It was around 5:30 when Mercedes collected her keys, smiled at a couple of co-workers who teased her about her promotion, and headed for the parking garage.
Mercedes was thirty-one years old, dark-haired, athletic, and known for her quick smile and contagious laugh. She had a gift for making friends easily. She loved to dance and was in love with Jake Rudh, who was trying to make it locally as a disc jockey. Marriage was a given, and the additional income from her raise would help. They hadn't set a date, but Mercedes had already purchased her wedding dress. "I was ready," she laughed.
She climbed into the black four-door Ford Escort and buckled up. As she pulled out of the campus parking lot and headed toward the highway entrance, there was no way to know that she was on her way to what would seem like a glitch in the universe.
"It was very hot," she would say afterward. "Ninety degrees. But it wasn't that humid, so when I got onto the highway I put the windows down. It felt great. I had the jazz station on and I was just cruising."
The ride home to Minneapolis at rush hour usually took twenty- five to thirty minutes. That particular stretch of Interstate 35 West was given a small taste of fame in the movie Fargo, when a pair of characters come around a mild curve and watch the Twin Cities skyline slide dramatically into view.
"The sun was off to my left," Mercedes said. "The traffic was moving okay for a while, but then construction work on the highway slowed it down."
Four lanes of highway had been reduced to two, and traffic slowed to ten miles per hour. Mercedes passed the Metrodome stadium on her left, an architectural eyesore that was home to the Twins and the Vikings. It looked like a giant piece of furniture that had been wrapped in a sheet by departing tenants.
For drivers heading north, there were no real visual clues that the highway was becoming a bridge that crossed the Mississippi River some eighty feet below. But Mercedes knew very well that the river with its muddy, treacherous currents was down there.
As she approached the bridge, she could see the construction crew hard at work in the intense heat as the two lanes of traffic inched past. "I'll tell you the truth," she said, "I never felt that safe on the bridge, you know, with all the construction work going on. They were always jackhammering or something, and it looked like tons of equipment were piled up on the bridge. I hated driving over that bridge."
There is an exit just before the bridge that leads to an alternate route, and Mercedes considered it. A mental roll of the dice. As she remembered, "I thought about it, but in a split second or however long it was, I just said, 'Screw it, I'm taking the bridge.' So there I was in all that traffic. I got over probably the first half just fine, maybe a little more than halfway. And then all of a sudden I saw the pavement ripple like a wave. It looked like an ocean wave almost, like a tide coming in. It was just up and down. I thought, 'What the hell is this?'
"I saw a look of panic on a construction worker in front of me. It almost seemed like he was bracing himself, trying to get his balance, because the bridge had started to sway back and forth and I could feel my car doing that."
And then, in a horrifying burst of clarity, Mercedes realized—with the traffic still moving slowly, helplessly forward—that the bridge was going down.
"I thought, 'Oh my God, you're kidding me!' I was in disbelief and instantly pissed off. Fear was not my first emotion. I'm like, 'You're fucking kidding me! This thing is coming down and I'm on it?' I'm thinking, 'What are the freaking odds? Impossible, right?'
"So I thought, 'Okay, if this thing's coming down, I'm going for a ride, and it's going to suck. It's going to be bad, bad, bad, and it's going to hurt. But, you know, I am not going to die today. I am not going to die.' I'm thinking all these things in a matter of seconds because the bridge was opening up in front of me. Two pieces of concrete that were connected opened up, and I could tell that I was going to go flying through that opening."
For a split second she thought she might get a reprieve.
"I was hoping I could get past the opening as the concrete was pulling apart because the car in front of me made it over, but I didn't know whether I should step on the gas or the brake or whatever. And then all of a sudden my car was plummeting through the opening.
"It was really bizarre and surreal. I just held on to my steering wheel and gripped it really tightly and just said, 'Here we go.' And, you know, I think I made my anger and my stubbornness work for me because I had decided this wasn't going to kill me, no matter how horrible it turned out.
"I plummeted I think around six or seven stories. I had this feeling of weightlessness for a moment, and even though it was a bright, sunny day, everything went dark, I think because of all the dust and debris of the bridge falling apart. On the way down, everything got dark. I don't know, I guess my eyes were closed part of the time. It was dark, and I could feel the descent. And I had no idea where I was going, where I was headed. It was just this abyss. And I just thought, 'Jesus, what's going to happen?' I just prayed that things weren't going to smash me to bits. There was so much concrete falling apart and so much steel bending, and there were cars flying everywhere."
Because she had driven more than halfway across the bridge, Mercedes's Escort came down on the far side of the water. With a tremendous crash it pitched head- on into a concrete retaining wall and landed right side up on the riverbank. A minivan immediately crashed upside down onto the trunk of the Escort.
"I didn't feel the slamming into the wall so much," Mercedes said. "What I remember feeling were my tires finally landing on the ground and I felt quite a bounce. I had no idea I had broken my back at that point because, you know, I went right into shock. I remember the minivan crashing on my trunk. A couple of more feet and it probably would have killed me."
When the I-35W bridge broke apart high above the river and came down in a stunning explosion of concrete, steel, and rock-pitted debris, it was more than a horrific real-life tragedy. It was a metaphor for the widespread deterioration of American society. The bridge collapse came two years after the submersion of New Orleans and four months before the start of the Great Recession. As the eight lanes of the forty-year-old steel truss bridge began to ripple and sway on that steamy August evening, it was almost as if something related to the solidity of the society itself was giving way. There were signs everywhere that the American center was not holding, from the wretched job market to the deplorable state of the government's finances to the increasingly prohibitive cost of a college education to the steady decline of the middle class. As I moved about the country, covering one disaster after another, I couldn't help but think that there was a great deal of denial about how bad things had become. America was hurting, and an area in which the evidence was both stark and deeply symbolic was the nation's once-gleaming but now increasingly decrepit physical plant-its roads, bridges, drinking water systems, electrical grid, ports and levees, and so on. Large portions of those vast and complex systems, some dating back to the nineteenth century, had reached the end of their useful lives. Buried in those strained systems were important answers to the major dilemmas facing the country. Neglect, underinvestment, and denial had all contributed to the increasingly dire state of the nation's physical plant, and that echoed what was going on in other important sectors of the United States.
There had always been a link between the state of the infrastructure and the social and economic health of the society. Time and again an economic boom has followed periods of sustained infrastructure improvement. It is impossible to calculate all of the benefits from (to mention just a few examples) the Erie Canal, which connected the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean and helped make New York America's premier city; the rural electrification program and other capital improvements of the New Deal; the railroad and aviation systems that helped knit the nation together; the schools, colleges, and libraries that are so crucially important to the life and culture of the people; the interstate highway network launched by the Eisenhower administration; and the space program. But in recent decades, the challenge of maintaining the nation's physical plant has joined the many other challenges that the U.S. has been unable or unwilling to meet. The human toll has often been profound, as the tragedies in New Orleans and Minnesota have demonstrated. But the social and economic costs—the lost prosperity, the forfeiture of discoveries and innovations that would have come with modernization, the myriad employment and other opportunities that never materialized—have also been enormous. Those losses have damaged the nation as surely as the I-35 bridge collapse damaged the victims and their families.
Mercedes remembered being very calm as she sat in her smashed car on the bank of the river with the van still upside down on her trunk. "I was kind of debating," she said. "Am I alive? Am I not alive? When I figured out that I probably was alive, I took an inventory of my body. Was I impaled anywhere? Was I bleeding? I didn't see anything. My clothes had a little bit of debris on them. I was wearing a white blouse that day. And black slacks. I was like, 'Is that it?' There was an inner sense that there was something wrong with my legs, but I couldn't quite place it because there was no pain. Little did I know that my legs were completely mangled beneath the dashboard."
Time seemed to cease as Mercedes sat in her car. Then came the sudden thought: "I need to get the hell out of here." She began struggling to get out. She could move from the waist up but couldn't extricate herself. "I was trapped. My legs were completely pinned.
"My next concern was that there was this hose hanging above me—I assumed it was a deicer hose—and it was dripping deicer fluid on my neck. It was burning me. So I grabbed my bag and held it up to block the fluid. Then I saw little puffs of smoke coming up from the hood of my car, and I thought, 'Jesus, is this thing going to catch fire? Is my car going to explode?' So I had all these thoughts about being pinned in the car and dying in a fire.
"It was eerily quiet at that point. And I'm looking around, having no idea where I'm at."
Remnants of the wrecked bridge were hanging overhead. Mercedes had been traveling in the northbound lane. When she looked to her left, she could see what was left of the southbound lane dangling from the highway. "I could see some other vehicles that had fallen from the bridge. I remember seeing a truck, but that's about it. I knew a bunch of people must have died."
Mercedes's mind slowly cleared and she began screaming for help. Behind her car and the flipped van on the trunk was another vehicle, also upside down, with a family of four inside. Mercedes couldn't turn around far enough to see it, but she could hear what sounded like a teenage girl screaming for help for her mother, who apparently was unconscious.
People began showing up on the riverbank, first staring in disbelief, then trying to help. Mercedes would later remember that she didn't own a cell phone at the time. "I was still holding out, trying to be the last person in the country to get one. But a Good Samaritan let me use her phone. I called Jake. I told him I'd been in a horrific accident, but he had no idea it was me because apparently my voice was strained and really high, just very different. Once he figured out it was me, he said, 'What are you talking about?' Rather than explain it, I told him to turn on the TV. By that time I could hear the helicopters above me, and I'm like, 'I know this is already on television. There is no way it's not.' So he turned on the TV and he sees it instantly and he's like, 'Oh my God, are you in that? What can I do? Can I come get you?' But I said, 'No, I have no idea where I'm at. I'm sure somebody will call you from the hospital, if I don't myself."
The girl whose screams had echoed Mercedes's was seventeen-year-old Brandi Coulter. She and her father, Brad, her mother, Paula, and her eighteen-year-old sister, Brianna, had been two vehicles behind Mercedes on the bridge. Brad was at the wheel of the Honda minivan with Brianna next to him in the front passenger seat. Paula and Brandi were in the back. Paula was dozing. The Coulters were planning to meet up with relatives for a family celebration at a restaurant in Roseville. They had inched across the midpoint of the bridge when the roadway began to shake. Brad looked around and saw the construction workers scurrying about. And then the bridge gave way. After a sixty- or seventy-foot free fall, the pale gold minivan crashed upside down on the riverbank, leaving all four members of the family dangling wrong side up, held in place by their seat belts. Three were dazed and profoundly disoriented. Paula was unconscious. She would later explain details to me that had been told to her again and again in the aftermath of the accident. There was a period of stunned silence that was broken first by Mercedes's screams, which seemed to come out of nowhere, and then Brandi's. Frightened and in pain, Brad (who suffered from claustrophobia) and the two girls struggled to climb through shattered windows and get out of the van. Brandi was unnerved by the periodic groans that came from her mother, who was bleeding and still trapped in her seat. Brad could see that his wife was badly hurt and was afraid that trying to pull her from the vehicle would only worsen her injuries. He could barely stay upright himself. Five of his vertebrae had been fractured. He would later recall looking up and seeing a portion of the bridge that hadn't fallen hanging precariously above them. He worried that the rest of the structure would suddenly come down and crush his entire family.
The warm evening air began to carry the sound of people calling for help. Wrecked cars were scattered in the water. With Brianna weeping and Brandi nearly hysterical, Brad waited what seemed to him an interminable time until rescue workers arrived. They managed to get Paula out of the van but not before dropping her one time, which horrified everyone. Paula does not remember the accident, but she told me about a brief moment described to her by Brad and the girls. Brandi, nearly overwhelmed by the sight of her helpless mother, could not stop crying. "She was so upset," Paula said. "And apparently, even though I don't remember it, I had a brief moment of consciousness after they got me out of the van. And I said, 'Honey, it's okay. Brandi, we'll be fine. I love you. We'll be fine.'" Brandi, still sobbing, managed to calm down. The rescue workers placed Paula on a plywood plank and carried her to a triage center.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Losing Our Way by Bob Herbert. Copyright © 2014 Bob Herbert. Excerpted by permission of Random House LLC, a division of Random House, Inc.
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