It has been nearly two days since the I-35 bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis fell. According to the latest reports, five bodies have been recovered and eight people are still missing. Many more have been injured. And all of us have been amazed that something we took for granted, the support under us while traveling across a major bridge, could so rapidly vanish.

In the time since the catastrophe, a number of friends from other parts of the country have contacted me to check on our safety. Fortunately, my family and I were nowhere near the bridge when it fell. As yet I’m not aware of anyone I know having been involved in the accident.

I’ve been thinking about times that I crossed that bridge. I did so quite often when I was a student at the University of Minnesota in the 1980’s, since it’s near the university’s Minneapolis campus. When I imagine crossing that bridge in a car, it’s as a younger version of myself, driving south with downtown Minneapolis to my right.

I’ve also been thinking about how a bridge like this one - a “steel-arched deck-truss bridge,” according to a StarTribune graphic - is largely invisible to us as we travel over it. In the case of a suspension bridge, we can see the giant cables that support us.

There is another bridge just downriver from the fallen bridge. It’s the 10th Avenue bridge, visible in photos as an attractive, white-arched bridge. I used to walk across it to the university’s west bank campus when I lived on 10th Avenue as a student. I didn’t pay much attention to the bridge not far away to the west, the I-35 bridge.

In fact as news reports showed the photos and video of the bridge, for some reason I pictured different bridges further downriver, bridges I had lived near and used more recently and more often. Only as I learned and talked about it more did I envision the correct bridge in the correct location - that is, envision the former bridge and its former location.

The I-35 bridge - or, more accurately, its wreckage - is no longer invisible to me. Its catastrophic failure has made its former presence remembered and known. I wish that it would have remained only half-remembered and still standing, still ignored by people traveling happily over it.

I’ll be taking a summer break and may be posting less than usual to the blog for a while. Our family will be visiting Washington state and Oregon - specifically Seattle and Vancouver, Washington, and Portland and Bend, Oregon. Most of our time will be in Oregon. My sister lives in Bend, and we also want to see the famously “sustainable” Portland, noted for its urban planning and public transit. Coincidentally, my wife’s family has scheduled a family reunion at Mt. Bachelor Village Resort, in Bend, so we can see a lot of people in one visit.

Vancouver, Portland, and Bend are also all designated as “bicycle-friendly” communities by the League of American Bicyclists, so I look forward to seeing what they offer in that venue.

I’ve been reading a Moon Handbook to Oregon (6th ed., 2004) by Elizabeth and Mark Morris. (I appreciated Moon’s Handbook to Northern California when we lived there.) In it I came across this info on bicycling in Oregon:

In the wake of the oil shocks of the 1970s, the Oregon legislature allocated one percent of the state highways budget to develop bike lanes and encourage energy-saving bicyclists. In addition to establishing routes throughout the state with these funds, many special parks were developed with bicycle and foot access specifically in mind. (p. 52)

What are the chances that Minnesota and other states could do the same? I also found this:

Portland has long been known as a bicycle-friendly city. Its nationally recognized bicycle program provides a comprehensive, safe bikeway network to increase the number of residents who bicycle to work, on errands, and for exercise or pleasure. To accomplish this, the city has created close to 200 miles of bikeways (bicycle lanes, boulevards, and multi-use trails). As a result, many more folks are riding bicycles. In 1975 about 200 cyclists crossed the Hawthorne Bridge daily by bike; today, it’s up to 2,400. (p. 122)

On a different subject, I’m intrigued by what I’ve read about another part of Oregon: southeastern Oregon. It’s one of the most sparsely populated regions in the lower 48 states. It borders northern Nevada, an area that has also intrigued me since my family drove through it on Interstate 80 when I was a teenager. These regions - along with Bend, which is in central Oregon - are part of the Great Basin high desert. Bend is home to the High Desert Museum, which I hope to visit.

There’s another Bill Ostrem out there. He’s Bill Ostrem of California, a successful developer, and vastly more wealthy than I, I expect. Among his projects are the very large planned communities, EastLake, near San Diego, and Yokohl Ranch, near Visalia. I’d like to visit and learn more some time.

Reading about his projects and having lived in California myself from 2002 to 2004, I know that development in the Golden State makes developoment in the Midwest look like child’s play. They build big and fast out west. I remember when Elk Grove, a suburb of Sacramento, added something like four elementary schools in one year, probably around 2003.

I believe Mr. Ostrem may be descended from some Ostrems who settled in Illinois, most likely Norwegians like my Ostrem ancestors. I’ll try to find out more.

The last couple of weeks have been quite busy. My many activities have included work as president of our small homeowners association, a position I held for a little over a year. Last night at our annual meeting I stepped down as president and, following the tradition of the association, took the role of vice president.

It was a hectic year for the association, and I was ready to pass the presidency to someone else. While we have only nine units, on August 24 of last year we had a nasty storm that rained down baseball-sized hail. (Some parts of Northfield had softball-sized hail.) You can see the proof in the pictures above.

The result was over $80,000 dollars worth of damage. As president I was responsible for managing the repairs. All roofs and gutters were replaced, and there was much repair work done on windows, siding, trim, doors, and more. We were fortunate that we had the able help of American Building Contractors, Inc., a Burnsville, Minnesota, company that specializes in storm damage repair. Their representative, Josh Moe, did a great job handling our claims and interacting with the insurance company.

It was bad luck to get stuck with this situation as president, but I got feedback that I did a good job managing the repairs. There are two accomplishments as president that I’m most proud of: 1.) improvements to gutters and drainage, which has helped solve some water problems in our courtyards, and 2.) improvements in attic insulation and ventilation. We discovered the need for the latter during our roof repairs; the result should be energy savings and reduced carbon emissions for a long time into the future.

You can see that I have a practical side. It’s something that the men in my family share, this appreciation of maintenance and upkeep. And it’s no wonder that I was tapped to be president.

I can only imagine what it must be like to be president of a large association. No, I wouldn’t want that job, thank you very much.

This past year our family has been blessed to get to know a visiting scholar at St. Olaf College’s Kierkegaard Library, Prof. Gabriel Merigala of Madras Christian College, as well as his family. (In India he is known as Merigala Gabriel, or simply Gabriel; Indian naming conventions differ from Western ones.) We quickly felt a kinship with Gabriel, his wife Nirmala, and their children Susan and Samuel. That was due in part to my wife’s connections to India (her father was born there), their family’s participation in our church congregation at the United Methodist Church of Northfield, and the fact that we lived near each other.

Gabriel was one of a handful of scholars who reside here each year to study in the Kierkegaard Library, which houses a world-renowned collection of works by and about the Danish theologian and philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. (The library is officially known as the Howard V. and Edna H. Hong Kierkegaard Library. The Hongs both taught at St. Olaf and translated Kierkegaard’s works into English.)

During his visit, Gabriel was in demand as a speaker, and I was fortunate to hear him speak forcefully and eloquently on Kierkegaard and Gandhi. I also enjoyed getting to learn more about his scholarship when I edited the book that he is working on, Subjectivity and Religious Truth in the Philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard, which has been accepted for publication by Mercer University Press.

As I read Gabriel’s book I learned a great deal about Kierkegaard, about whom I knew only a little before. I came away with a deeper understanding of Kierkegaard’s concept of the “leap of faith” and his role in the history of philosophy and theology. Faith, according to Kierkegaard, can’t be a product of reason. We can’t use reason to prove the existence of God, for example, or prove that Jesus was both human and divine. Instead we must accept these on the basis of faith alone. Faith exists in the realm of the “absurd” and the paradoxical rather than that of reason, and we must simply believe.

We give thanks for all that we have received from Gabriel and his family and we wish them the blessings and peace of Jesus Christ as they journey home and resume life in India. And we hope to one day meet with them again, whether here or abroad.

Yes, that topic again! Our local paper, the Northfield News, asked me to do a column on green transportation for their first “Living Green” page, and I focused on our newly created city Nonmotorized Transportation Task Force (which met for the first time this past Tuesday, by the way). The page features an article on local business owner Jesse Streitz, who gets all his home electricity from wind and solar. (Streitz, by the way, is a conservative who’s concerned about global warming and is taking action. I’m a customer, and his company newsletter has tips for reducing carbon emissions.)

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a link to my column online (the News does not consistently put everything online), so I’m pasting it in here. It has a graphic and some references that aren’t in the published version. I’ve also added some hyperlinks.

A New Northfield Task Force Advocates a Green Approach to Getting Around

by Bill Ostrem

We’ve heard about green building design and even green chemistry, but what about green transportation? It turns out that a New York City nonprofit, Transportation Alternatives, has created a “green transportation hierarchy.” It consists of an upside-down pyramid with pedestrians at the top, bicycles below that, then public transit, and on down to single-occupancy vehicles at the very bottom.

To give you a sense of why the hierarchy is ordered as it is, consider the energy use of different transportation options. To walk one mile, a 150-pound person burns 70 to 100 calories of renewable energy, whereas biking uses 25 to 65 calories. Driving the same distance in a Toyota Prius uses 585 calories, or 2,375 in a Cadillac Escalade sport utility vehicle—both generally using nonrenewable gasoline.[1] Read the rest of this entry »

I was listening to the radio while cleaning up the house this morning and heard an interview with poets Galway Kinnell and Josephine Dickinson. Hearing them speak brought back memories of the important place poetry once took in my life. When I was in academia, I read and taught a great deal of poetry, and I wrote quite a bit as well. When I left academia, I continued to read and write poetry, but for a number of years now it’s been a much smaller part of my life. The choice was a conscious one, and I don’t want to sound morose or whining about it. Simply put, I chose to focus on other things.

However, hearing Josephine Dickinson, a British poet, talk and read made me think I’ve let poetry recede too far into the background of my life. She caught my attention when she mentioned that she had lived for some time near Alston, England. Alston is a place I became familiar with through the work of the poet W.H. Auden, who loved and wrote about the area around that remote village in the northern Pennines. I also visited the town and surrounding countryside for several days about 10 years ago and greatly enjoyed its natural beauty and its connections to Auden and his work.

Dickinson, who became deaf at the age of six, spoke of her new book of poems, Silence Fell. The word “fell” here has a double meaning; besides its meaning as a verb, in Britain it also means, according to my dictionary, “a high barren hill or moor.” (I wouldn’t say “barren,” however; “treeless” would be better. The word fell comes from the Old Norse word for mountain; the Norwegian word for mountain is fjell.) Thus the title is also a place-name.

I hope to read the book and walk the fells again in my mind. Until then, I’ll dip into Auden. “Alston Moor” is a piece of romantic juvenilia by the teenaged Auden, but its opening lines are worth quoting, particularly given the time of year:

April, fair maid, is come with laughter in her eyes
And everywhere she weaves her lovely spells
On plain and hill; I know that now the South Wind cries
Her name upon the long slow curvings of the fells.

(Juvenilia: Poems, 1922-1928, p. 32)

I’m not sure how the subject of death came up for our three-year old daughter. Perhaps it was in trying to explain to her what Easter was and how Jesus died and was resurrected. Perhaps it was explaining that a relative had died and was no longer with us. Whatever the cause, our daughter has been asking questions such as, “Daddy, when will you die?,” and “Daddy, will you die?”

Of course such questions give one pause. But strangely enough, I don’t mind hearing them. I’d rather live with full consciousness of my mortality and full appreciation of the gift of life. I’d rather pause and consider my own end, then resume life with thanks and praise.

I’ve been following the new Minnesota Public Radio show The Loop as it seeks to become a full-fledged program. Host Jeff Horwich and staff member Sanden Totten manage to create radio that is subsantive without being too heavy - a difficult thing to pull off.

I haven’t been able to attend any of the show’s creative gatherings recently, nor have I been able to go to the live productions. However, I did recently submit a short essay about being a work-at-home and stay-at-home dad for its recent show on work life. It’s entitled “I’m a Lucky Guy.” The essay didn’t get put on the show, but they’ve included it on the show’s web page along with other submissions. Scroll down the page to see it.

It was a grueling weekend. On Friday morning our almost-three-year-old daughter said she felt sick and couldn’t go to day care. I thought this was one of her attempts to stay home, but when she vomited, my doubts about her being sick vanished. Read the rest of this entry »