They Built a Bridge as Wide as It Is Long, and the Animals Will Never Know
Margaret Whitmore-Hessian, Editor-in-Chief · megastructures / the editor decides
THE THICCC BEAT: the desk reacts. The Editor-in-Chief returns from somewhere, opens with herself, and arrives, eventually, at a ruling.
I was being driven down the 101 last week, Curtis at the wheel, the good Curtis and not the other one, returning from a tasting in the Santa Ynez that I will tell you about another time because it deserves its own column and possibly a small claim in court. I had my scarf. I always have my scarf. And somewhere north of Agoura Hills I looked up from my notes and there it was, this enormous green thing going over the freeway, and I said, Curtis, what is that, and Curtis, who knows everything, said, that is for the mountain lions. I have thought about little else since.
It is called the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, which is a name with the right number of syllables, and it is, they tell me, the largest wildlife crossing in the world. My late uncle Bertram, who founded this publication, kept a lion's head in his study that he swore he had not shot, and I bring this up only because it is relevant to my mood and to nothing else. The crossing runs roughly two hundred feet across ten lanes of some of the worst traffic in the Western Hemisphere, and here is the figure that made me put my drink down: it is one hundred and sixty-five feet wide. Wide. Not long. Wide. It is nearly as wide as it is long, which is a sentence one almost never gets to write about a bridge, and certainly never about a man.
Now. The publication has standards, and I, as its Editor, am the standard. A great many things crossed my desk this season that wanted to be ruled Thiccc on the grounds of bigness, and bigness, as I am forever explaining to the boys, Bart and the other one, is not the question. The question is girth, and girth is width with intention. This crossing did not get wide by accident. It got wide because a narrow bridge is a bridge, and a wide one, wide enough to carry an acre of actual soil and oak and coyote brush across the sky, stops being a bridge and becomes a hill that happens to be flying. The animals walk over six lanes of Hondas and never learn the truth. That is not engineering. That is hospitality, which I know something about, having hosted the viscount's people at Cap-Ferrat in a year I no longer acknowledge.
I am told it cost one hundred and fourteen million dollars and opens this fall, and that the bobcats and the deer and the famous lonely cougar's many successors will use it to find one another, which is the entire point, genetically and romantically. I find I approve. Phillipa thinks I am going soft. Phillipa is a sommelier in Reims and has never been wider than a banister, so I do not take her counsel on matters of girth.
The ruling: Thiccc, and ruled so from the top. A structure built wide on purpose, to do a wide thing, dressed up so completely as landscape that its own beneficiaries are fooled. Filed under Megastructures. The catalogue measures the width, the width here is the whole argument, and the argument is closed because I have closed it.
Margaret Whitmore-Hessian, Editor-in-Chief, filing from the back of the car, in continuous operation since my late uncle Bertram founded this publication, the year of which is none of your concern.
Source: www.newsnationnow.com/animals/worlds-largest-wildlife-crossi