Sunday, October 19, 1997

A walk across a river

By Bob Greene

WILLIAMSTOWN, W. Va. -- All over the world, electronics-manufacturing companies of recent birth work extra shifts every day to churn out hardware and software that enable people quick and easy access to the global computer network.

The headlines are full of stories about one worldwide telecommunications company trying to buy out another one, all in the pursuit of customers who believe they need to transport data right now, this second, no time to wait.

The biggest airports face the usual plane-traffic delays at morning and afternoon rush hours as business commuters arrive in and depart from the leading centers of commerce, carrying briefcases, laptops, overnight bags and antacids. .

The frantic stream -- of people, of vehicles, of information -- is dizzying and non-stop.

So -- once in a while -- it can be instructive to take a walk across the Ohio River.

Once in a while? I'd never done it in my life. But right here -- at the point on the river where Marietta nestles against the banks on the Ohio side, and Willamstown nestles against the banks on the West Virginia side -- it is doable. The river is wide, but not so wide you don't have the time to walk across; the Williamstown Bridge is built for motor traffic, but there is a pedestrian lane, protected by a restraining wall, that is there if you want it.

This is riverboat country -- or at least it once was. The Ohio River was more than scenery; it was a means of transportation through a new land. It -- and its giant brethren, most notably the Mississippi -- were the first superhighways. Before interstates, before modems and log-ons, the big rivers were the best chance to get somewhere distant. Before trains, even -- what lay around the next bend was every bit as magical as what lay halfway around the world.

On a bright early-autumn afternoon I walked through downtown Marietta, on the Ohio side -- on streets filled with antique shops and stores that sold dolls -- and saw the river not far away. It was a quick stroll over to the shoreline, and there was the bridge, waiting.

The vehicle traffic was heavy in the bridge lanes (to my left was a FedEx truck, most likely making its end-of-the-workday pickups -- the ultimate symbol of our changed world, an overnight delivery truck crossing the slow-flowing Ohio River); I was the only person walking across the bridge. Within minutes the land seemed almost an afterthought, a souvenir photograph -- the neighborhoods and commercial streets of Marietta, as inviting as they had been, now seemed disconnected from the larger world, now seemed merely decorations alongside the huge river.

Out here, all of a sudden, the river was everything. The river was its own context, and the setter of the context of all that was around it. Marietta, so pretty on the shoreline, was not the river town, as it had seemed 30 minutes ago; now it was a river town, one of so many the waters would pass in each direction. The trees had just begun to turn colors. To stand in the middle of the bridge and to see the colors of the leaves changing on the Ohio side, to see the colors changing on the West Virginia side, the brown-green water beneath the bridge branching toward communities in each state....

To see that from the middle of the bridge was to want to stay for a while. The bridge was not all panorama and history; there were little things to make you smile. Painted on the low pedestrian wall of the bridge was this message of romance -- or of something:

"I Love You Fool."

Not a bad sentiment for a late afternoon in early fall in a place you'd never expected to be; not a bad emotion to find by surprise on a span that crosses the river of your childhood dreams. Those dreams go away, to be replaced by adult realities even as new generations of children are stirring to their own fledgling dreams.

Everything changes, the names of the people and the look of the towns, but the river stays the same. And you never know what you'll find on the other side of a bridge -- even if, as in Williamstown, what you find, first structure waiting at the foot of the bridge, is the Sunnie Beaches Tanning Parlor.

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