Old Bridge, New Bridge
A letter to Thoreau.
To arrive at the exact location this photograph was shot, one is required to walk. Such a walk is only plausible during the months of winter when the Zanskar River, flowing through the valley of the Great Himalayan Range, solidifies into ice, creating a path for one to walk on. The path is often referred to as ‘chadar’ — translating as ‘sheet’. The powdery snow which blankets the ice creates this deceptive white sheet. Very easily one falls under its illusion. An hour into the walk one notices their hesitant footsteps transform into confident strides. One begins to believe that they are walking on solid ground — concrete surfaces from back home. A single hidden crevasse is all it takes for an entire leg to become submerged into icy water. The cloud dissipates. Shattered ice cuts straight through the layers and layers of material. Shards thrust deeply into one’s skin. It is at this point that a local reminds one that they are lucky they haven’t fallen all the way in. Too many wanderers hearts have stopped beating. The water is just too cold and we happen to be just too fragile to survive it.
Temperatures here range anywhere from -10 degrees celsius during the day and at night reaching below - 35. It is therefore a very cold walk, and neither a short one. It takes about three days of walking over 31km in hostile conditions to arrive at the ‘summit’ — a frozen waterfall at Nerak, situated adjacent to this photograph. Tens of people who have endured the journey, surround it, in wonder. The over fifty-five feet tall waterfall stands still, both suggesting a presence and absence of motion. At this moment, the walk suddenly seems worth it. But if one decides to take just a few steps forwards, away from the cinematic frame, then their vision will encounter a vast expanse. Aquarelle mountains, fading. Fading as a bridge connects them. It is bewildering to see a human construct, here, in the wilderness. Perhaps it is even more strange to see an old bridge suspended tenuously below it. Why was it not removed? Why does it still remain there? Has ‘nature’ been obstructed?
If one were to sit for long enough on the snowy sheet below, then, Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: an Ode’ (1802) inevitably will come to mind. The poem commences with an epigraph to the ‘Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence,’
Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon,
With the old Moon in her arms;
And I fear, I fear, my Master dear!
We shall have a deadly storm.
Whereas Coleridge’s speaker yearns for the violence of a storm to awaken him from his worldly-dejection, no such thoughts arise upon seeing the old bridge and the new bridge in the arms of the valley. The romanticists’ nostalgic recollection of a prelapsarian relationship of ‘man’ with nature is not evoked here. Rather something else is suggested.
It is only by walking below the new bridge that we see the old bridge hang, languishing, weakened by the passage of time. It is from below and not above that its existence is revealed. From above, one wouldn’t even know of its presence. Only from within things, we begin to see traces of attempts, both past and present, to bridge the nature/culture divide. The human intrusion between the two distant precipices, perhaps then, can be re-read as a connecting force, creating a pathway for us to walk through these otherwise unimaginable landscapes.
And in walking, we must reassure Thoreau, that we walk like a camel. After all, the camel is said to be 'the only beast which ruminates when walking.'
~ Vedika Rampal
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Cited Texts:
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Dejection: An Ode,” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43973/dejection-an-ode
Thoreau, Henry David. “Walking,” The Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1022/1022-h/1022-h.htm
