Bridge lovers share a heartfelt connection

If the weather holds and brings a glorious day, this Sunday about 60,000 men, women and children will make their way on foot across the eastbound span of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.

It’s an annual event begun in 1975, when a Baltimore County Boy Scout troop leader asked if one of the twin 4.3-mile spans could be closed to vehicular traffic for a few hours to let people walk across it. The Maryland Transportation Authority approved the idea, and the event was on.

It almost didn’t happen this year. The terrorist attacks of September 11 put a stop to the walk in 2002 and 2003, because police and emergency personnel were stretched thin to protect airports and other public places.

But with relative quiet on the terror front and two years of unused budget in hand, the MTA decided to organize a walk this year.

Every year since 1975 — except for 1980, when severe wind and rain forced cancellation of the walk, and 1977, when another wet-out pushed the event to a rescheduled fall date — the crowds have grown exponentially. Today, walkers include families pushing strollers, church groups, seniors, wheelchair athletes, Little Leaguers and Scout troops, along with a rich mix of young singles and couples of all descriptions who somehow heard about the wacky idea that they could walk across the Bay.

This Sunday beginning at 8:30 a.m., that army of bridge walkers will be shuttled across the eastbound span from parking lots at its west end and deposited at the eastern end to do their thing — that is, walk from east to west back to the buses on what everyone hopes will be a cool but brilliantly sunny day.

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The most recent walk — on April 29, 2001 — was blessed with precisely that kind of weather. Sunburn blistered the hatless, but salty breezes from the Bay made the climb to the roadway’s high point, 186 feet above the Bay, nearly effortless and perspiration-free.

What that day’s walkers found, and this weekend’s will find, is a kind of art: the mechanical wonder of a suspension bridge put up in 1952; the surprising quiet of a truckless, carless, vanless roadway; the unexpected harshness of the sea gulls’ cries; the sheer serenity of the bayscape beneath one’s feet and the pleasure of taking one’s own sweet time to see it.

From the heights, a good eye can make out to the north the downtown skyscrapers and urban haze of Baltimore’s skyline. To the east a bit, the smudge of steel mills rises over Sparrows Point. Annapolis sits clean and neat to the south on an elbow of green bending into the water, a city peeking from behind a curtain of trees.

Oceangoing ships plying the Baltimore trade sit at anchor awaiting docking time or swiftly make for the bridges and glide under them. Looking at first like toys, they grow into enormous, nearly cinematic creations, swift and silent as they slide below the bridges to emerge leaving a curl of propeller wash. All around, the little white sails of pleasure boats bend to the wind and trail lacy foam webs through the blue.

Peering down through the joints of the bridge to look at the boats can be unsettling: The bridge bends to the weight of traffic with joints separated by up to 6 inches of void. Walk organizers may mask the joints to keep walkers calm; in 2001 they covered them with long sheets of plywood bound with duct tape. But little boys may still drive parents crazy by trying to push debris through random open joint slots to the water far below.

The average bridge walk is about two hours, according to the MTA, time enough to connect not only the two shores, but somehow to become part of the beauty of the moment on the Bay, a moment that can be held in memory for years.

That could be the biggest kick of the Bay Bridge walk — a chance at insight into one’s own notion of what a bridge is and what it does both symbolically and in memory.

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