Sam Portsmouth Bridges

The statue up top is called “My Mother the Wind“, and it’s currently at the western tip of Four Tree Island in the Piscataqua River in Portsmouth, NH. The statue honors the immigrant women who came to America in days past.

I’d thought that it was, perhaps, Sarah Mildred Long, after whom Portsmouth’s Sarah Mildred Long bridge is named. It turns out that, far from being an immigrant woman, she was a native of Portsmouth, NH. Long worked for the Maine-New Hampshire Interstate Bridge Authority for fifty years, rising through the ranks until she had the authority to name the three bridges that cross between New Hampshire and Maine that connect the cities of Portsmouth NH and Kittery ME.

I’m kidding — the bridge was not named by her, and it was said that she shied away from the limelight. As Executive Secretary of the Bridge Authority, she was primarily responsible for getting it built, and the mayor of Portsmouth at the time thought there was no one who deserved the honor more than she.

Some of my cousins lived in Portsmouth when I was little. Visiting them was always an adventure. Sometimes — usually, actually — we’d head to Hampton Beach where I discovered how much I hated cheese sandwiches. I found out later that “The Hamptons” wasn’t just another way of saying “Hampton Beach”. I was a stupid kid. And adult. I was also a stupid adult.

I was such a provincial New Hampshire-ite that the rest of the world didn’t really exist for me. When I moved to California, I think that was my first time out of New England since we moved there when I was six months old. (People used to insist that that meant I wasn’t a native New Englander. Both my parents were born in New England. They leave for a couple years, have me, move back, and now I am cursed with being an immigrant to the only place I have ever thought of as home. Truly the immigrant experience. My Mother the Wind, indeed. (As a kid, I thought I could control the wind. The evidence mounts.))

When we moved to California, we moved to a beautiful little town, an army town called Marina on the Monterey Bay. I had some trouble fitting in, in California. I was so provincial that when someone talked about “the Bay area”, I assumed they meant the “Monterey Bay area”. No, it turns out there is another famous bay in California, the San Francisco Bay, and when people say “the Bay area”, that’s the one they mean. (I thought, when Steve Perry was singing about the city on the bay, he was talking about Monterey. He was not.)

I also pronounced the San Joaquin Valley, “San Joe-a-quinn Valley”. It’s pronounced “Wah-KEEN”. I’m just dropping this knowledge on you now just in case you come from the middle of nowhere to California and want to sound like a native. Which reminds me of a friend of mine, long time New Yorker, hated smokers, the thickest accent you ever heard, moved to California and first thing he did, he bought a bumper sticker for his car that said “Native Californian” just to piss people off.

Both of my children, BTW, are native Californians, but neither of them have a “Native Californian” bumper sticker. Just thought of a cool Christmas gift idea, though. (TBH, saying “native Californians” is a little problematic, given what the Spanish settlers did to the native Californians they came across.)

I apologize for the quality of the photograph. Back when I was a serious bridge hunter, I had a really good camera and a tripod. I still have the camera, but I couldn’t find the charger, so I brought my iPhone. Big mistake. This is zoomed in, and that doesn’t really work on the iPhone I have (a ten or an eleven, I dunno. Maybe they’re better now). I’ll dig up the charger and head back for a better look.

The bridge in the foreground is the Memorial Bridge, currently closed to cars and trains, but open to pedestrians and bicyclists. It is a steel vertical lift bridge with through truss approaches. It was completed in 1923 and closed in 2011. It’s currently awaiting replacement.

The next bridge back is the Sarah Mildred Long Bridge. It is a steel vertical lift bridge with deck truss, roadway, rail and approaches, completed in 1940 and recently refurbished. It carries the majority of the auto traffic between Portsmouth and Kittery.

The bridge in the back is the Piscataqua River Bridge, a high-level, steel through truss bridge, and is an icon of the Portsmouth area. It carries six lanes of Interstate 95 between New Hampshire to Maine. When I was a kid, my cousins told me that you had to start holding your breath on the New Hampshire side and you couldn’t let go until you hit Maine. The only reason I’m alive today is because there was never a traffic jam while we were crossing.

Long time readers of my bridge blog, Life, on a Bridged, would definitely remind me that the three river bridges are not the only area bridges worth visiting. The General Sullivan Bridge connects the cities of Dover and Newington at the point where Little Bay feeds the Piscataqua. When I lived in the area, a long, long time ago, I drove over this bridge every day on the way to work. A standard deck bridge was built parallel to it, and the Sullivan Bridge was closed to vehicular traffic. As of yesterday (actually for many years), it also seemed to be closed to pedestrian traffic.

Built in 1934, it is the only bridge of its kind left in New Hampshire. There’s proposals afoot to resurrect the bridge as a pedestrian and bicyclist bridge, a function currently fulfilled by the northbound Rowe bridge. It’d be nice. I don’t think I ever biked all the way to Portsmouth when I was going to school in Durham. I do remember getting close to this bridge, though.

I took the above picture of an unused railroad bridge crossing the Merrimac River in Hooksett, NH more than a decade ago. I used a real camera for that shot. On our way to visit my parents in Concord, we stopped to see what was up with the bridge these days.

This week is Introduction Week in Blaugust 2023. Well, hello. I hunt bridges.