The Scene That Isn’t There Is Amazing

The Red Bridge is only a bridge in the figurative sense. It does not physically connect two places. Rather, it is a narrow walkway that reaches a terminus. There is room for one person at a time to walk single file to the end. Imagine “walking the plank,” but with barriers on either side.

The end of the plank juts over the edge of the hill and overlooks a gulley. There’s nothing monumental or significant about the gulley. There’s nothing special to observe and admire. No awe-inspiring vista. No monumentality. No dizzying heights to induce vertigo. You’re not even that far off the ground. A fall is unlikely to end in death. It’s a scenic overlook without a scene.

And the scene that isn’t there is amazing.

The Expectation of an Overlook Sends You Reeling

Here’s why I think The Red Bridge is a tantalizing work of art, worth visiting:

• At a typical scenic overlook, the boundary between scene and barrier is nominal. Take the overlooks one encounters on a highway. You pull into a parking lot, walk to the overlook. The barrier is often a fence, maybe even less, a warning or caution sign. At most, the barrier impedes your progress forward, but not side to side.
• The Red Bridge is the opposite. Your approach is defined, circumscribed, limited, contained. Nonetheless, your expectations are the same. At the end of the plank, you expect a payoff. You assume a scenic overlook, a scene worthy of your attention and admiration. But there’s nothing extraordinary about the unstructured scene in front of you.
• Because the bridge leads to nowhere, the momentum generated from your walk forward reels back. When you stop at the end of the bridge, a part of your mind carries forward into space, expectantly, and finding nothing but void, springs back to the point where your body rests.
• In other words, to walk the Red Bridge means to walk forward on a set path, no deviations. It means to walk forward to a point, then stop. At that moment, your expectations carry forward, stretch like a yo-yo, beyond your body, until they’ve reached the end of their tether, to hang for a moment over the gulley, spinning, held briefly in abeyance until gravity starts to tug and the whiplash of disappointment yanks them back to the present. The experience is relocated from outward to inward, from the “out there” to the “here and now.”
• The scene is what you bring to it. The Red Bridge marks the place and space as meaningful, as worth attending to, as having significance. It that way, it functions like the marker at a tourist attraction. That is, neither the marker nor the overlook itself are set apart as distinct until they are brought together.
• Once the bridge was set in place, the otherwise undifferentiated gulley became a place with new meaning. It became remarkable and re-markable. Every visitor who walks the bridge participates individually and cumulatively in the scene.
• I felt tranquil when I stepped onto The Red Bridge. When I reached the end, I felt irritated. My expectations were thwarted, subverted, inverted. I thought, “This is bullshit.” Then I thought, “Why do I feel this way?” Then I felt very self-conscious about my body and my surroundings.
• Whatever your experience, one thing is certain – when you walk The Red Bridge, you are not passively observing nature nor gazing at an art object. You are fully immersed. In this way, the bridge connects inner and outer, here and there, you and them, nature and art, and every other duality treated scientifically as separate, distinct, categorical.
• In fact, there is no good way to describe the experience. I can describe the dimensions of the bridge, the depth of the gulley and so on, but to appreciate The Red Bridge, you must go to it.