There is a bridge to nowhere where I love to go. The sculpture is a meandering walkway of wood and steel that rises into the trees with seemingly no real purpose whatsoever. As I approach the entrance I have two choices. I can enter on the left or take a few steps to my right and enter there. The bridge then takes off in slightly opposite directions, winding up and around to meet under an archway of tree branches in the middle where I stand and stare out at more trees. There is no grand view as reward for my troubles. I have simply reached the point where the two paths meet and now continue on. I finish my journey by winding back down the other side and out of the entrance I didn’t choose.
Lisa Cole Smith
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I love this sculpture because I can participate so intimately with it. I become part of the piece as I walk along the wood planks. It feels like something both temporary and permanent in these woods. The steel makes it seem as if it will last forever and yet the wood is already graying, one day to rot away.
The artists describe the piece as a journey that reflects memory as a composite experience. It is “an experience of place at different levels and from different perspectives. This work reflects the roads, crossroads, zigzags, and benchmarks that constitute one’s memories, like a surveyor’s map.”
I like that change is an implicit part of the experience. I feel that as I walk along. I become more aware of my surroundings — looking at a tree from this angle, now this, and now this. And I am aware of the experiences of others who have also walked this path. I think of who they are and what their lives were like at the moment they walked here and wonder if they thought about those of us who would come later.
On the plank floor of the bridge, locals have carved inscriptions that are already faded and fading still. These memories will pass away in time and new ones will be written over top. As I walk along I think about how place is a repository for memory. We may live in the same house, work in the same building, drive along the same routes for years, and while they seem to remain the same they change and our experience of them changes because we are changing.
That awareness of the past, the present and the future make me feel as if I am changing now, even as I walk. Within this small section of woods I have traveled a much more complete journey in a short bit of time than I did even a few minutes ago while walking in the woods. As I exit under the steel archway that leads me back to the forest path, I wonder what it would be like to walk through my day that way. What if I climbed the steps in my house intently aware of the change in height and perspective as I go, wondering what the experience is like for my dog, so much closer to the ground, and for my husband, who is taller than me?
I am definitely aware of composite memory when I walk through the halls of my church thinking of all the people who were born and lived and died within the communities that have inhabited the place over the last 67 years. I feel their prayers, joys, and struggles mix with mine and feel in good company. I remember the people who have come to our church for only a little while and gone and wonder if they know that they have left their mark and will never be completely forgotten.
I feel like my memories are filled with “crossroads, zigzags and benchmarks” and what this sculpture does for me is allow me to walk that path inside my head in a tangible way. It allows me to exorcise the pain of difficult memories and be immersed in the blissful ones. Like a labyrinth, it teaches me to be fully present wherever I am with not only my own thoughts but with the reality of time and the experiences of other people. It leaves me in awe of God’s attention to detail in his creativity and grateful for the simple gifts he gives — like a sense of place.
Lisa Cole Smith (lsmith@convergenceccf.net) is pastor of Convergence: A Creative Community of Faith, in Alexandria, Va. A Surveyor’s Map (1998) by Jann Rosen-Queralt and Roma Campanile can be found at the Ann Marie Sculpture Garden in Solomons Island, Md.