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March 27, 2005
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| The pilot house is built into the middle of the aerial lift bridge, on the upper part of the section that lifts into the air. Two operators are on duty inside 24 hours a day during the shipping season. (MPR Photo/Bob Kelleher) |
Duluth, Minn. — The aerial lift bridge is all big steel beams and cross beams, sort of like an Eiffel Tower on its side. And it moves up and down. When it's down, the century-old bridge ties Duluth with a spit of land called Park Point. When the bridge is up, it clears the way for ships in the narrow canal between Lake Superior and the harbor.
You might think it's pretty romantic stuff, to be the guy who makes the bridge go up and down. But not so much to Steve Douville.
"It's just ... a little oddball job," says Douville. "We look at it as kind of an elevator. A big elevator -- four million pounds."
A four-million-pound elevator that everyone sees.
Steve Douville's career has been at the place where ships, tourists, and seagulls all come together. And now, he's stepping down.
Douville, 57, still sports a mop of longish brown hair, but a patch of gray is taking over his beard. He's been raising the bridge since he got out of the Navy.
The bridge-lifting ritual starts with red lights and cross bars that stop the traffic on Minnesota Ave. Alarm bells ring and the bridge slowly begins to rise. Two and a half minutes up, five or 10 minutes at the top, and two and a half minutes down. It's a routine Douville's known dozens of times a day.
"Lots of traffic, lots of boats," says Douville. "It routinely gets 60 operations in one day in, say, a nice Saturday in August."
Tourists love it. People stuck in traffic don't. Douville says the bridge is an inconvenient fact of life for people living on Park Point. They call it "getting bridged."
"The old-timers that live down on Park Point for anything over seven or eight years, they've got a pile of stuff in their car," Douville says. "They're reading or doing the crossword puzzle, or something else to bide their time."
And the bridge operators? Well, they just might be doing the same thing.
"Yeah, play cards," says Douville. "You know, you could do all kinds of things. I think the big one now is playing video poker. Books and stuff are laying all over the place; papers, and crossword puzzles, and all the other stuff."
Life takes a slower pace on the bridge. Between lifts, there's gears to inspect and rivets to replace. And once in awhile, something remarkable happens. Like the day Douville was ready to clear traffic for a lift, when all hell broke loose on the road deck below.
"A pickup truck drove head on into a DTA bus, right under the control house up there," says Douville. "Smack! And the steam and stuff, and things all over the place. The pickup truck all crushed, you know, and the people were trapped, kind of trapped inside. And here I am."
Douville recalls another day, when a troubled man decided to end it all.
"The poor guy was really having a bad day, and he must have been extremely depressed," Douville says. "But he parked his car on the bridge, and opened the door, and he ran over the sidewalk and dove right in the water."
Now, you've got to understand that when the bridge is down, it's about 15 feet above the water. That's like the high dive into the pool.
"He didn't hurt himself, but he dove right next to the Coast Guard rescue boat," Douville says. "He almost landed right in the boat. He was not having a good day."
A career at the end of Lake Superior leaves a lot of memories -- winter whiteouts and hazy summer afternoons. Douville has seen the green flash at sunrise -- an almost mythical event that happens when the sky is clear and the lake is perfectly still. But eventually, he says, you hardly notice the scenery.
"After a while, unfortunately, it's like a house with a great view ... got big picture windows," says Douville. "And after a while the curtains are closed. You know, you don't notice. You don't appreciate it, I guess."
But you can bet he'll miss the view when he's gone.
The bridge is 100 years old this year. It's been a lift bridge for 75 years. And for almost half of those years, Steve Douville has been one of the guys at the controls. Friday, April 1, is his last day.
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