1:45 p.m.: The bulkfleet Texas, out of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, loaded with 120,000 barrels of oil, is running completely on instruments in the thick Atlantic fog. It is bound for the oil terminals of Boston harbor's Chelsea creek, pulled by a single twin-screw ocean-going tug. Last radio contact was made with shore off the coast of Marblehead; now the dispatchers of Boston Fuel Transportation monitor their ship-to-ship radios and wait for word from the overdue vessel.
In the bridge house of the McArdle drawbridge, Joseph Fidler has just arrived for the ll-to-seven graveyard shift. He can barely see the superstructure of the bridge through the controlroom window; only the red channel light glows dimly in the fog. It could be hours before the Texas makes it into the harbor.
11:15: Still no word. Finally, as 11:30 approaches, the Texas confirms that she is safely inside the harbor and will be anchoring up for the night -- the fog is much too thick for the boat to pass through the narrow bridges of Chelsea creek. The dispatcher signs off, and a quick telephone call relays the information to Fidler. He settles in for a long night at the bridge.
6:00 a.m.: There is a touch of gray light outside the bridge house window, the fog is still heavy, and the bridge is ghostly, weightless, in the half-light of dawn. Below the steel girders of the roadway, Chelsea Creek runs sluggishly, dirty at dead-low tide. Nothing moves on the water.
One of the gatekeepers naps on a makeshift bed. In the kitchen, a cold pot of coffee sits On the electric stove and a black-and-white television flickers silently in a corner. Fidler is at the desk in the control room, making notes in the bridge logbook.
For every bridge opening the drawtender must record the type of vessel, its name, and the number of tugboats accompanying it. Tonight there were no openings because of the fog -- but summer is a quiet period in the harbor. A look at January, however, shows that 30 tankers, 719 tugs, and 254 barges required more than a thousand openings of the bridge, roughly one opening per hour.
Shortly before seven o'clock Anthony Rodrigues arrives to relieve Fidler in the control room. Rodrigues has close-cropped graying hair and a ready smile, and he wears a visored cap, even indoors. He is the drawtender, and has been working on the bridge since 1954, the year it was built. As drawtender he has the preferred seven-to-three daytime shift; he has seniority over those who work the less desirable shifts -- the drawtender assistants, as they are called. A crew of 15 men (there are, as yet, no women in the business in Boston) is necessary to keep the drawbridge fully manned.
By 7:00 a.m. it is fully light outside, but the fog is still thick, and there won't be any water traffic until it lifts. Rodrigues settles back at the desk with a cup of coffee to wait. He explains how the bridge works, with a wave of his hand toward the window.
"The whole thing is kept in line by the drive locks," he says, pushing the cap back on his head. "You can see them out there, in the middle of the bridge."
Indeed you can. At the center of the span,. where the two segments - called "leaves" - meet, you can look down through the iron girding under your feet and see the drive locks that pin the bridge together. They are three-foot bars of steel, heavy and well-greased and shiny where their sides slide against the lock casing. They are driven into place when the bridge is down.
From a position over the drive lock you can see most of the working parts of the bridge. Above rises the superstructure, I-beams nearly two feet wide joined together by eight-inch bolts, all hanging in delicate balance with the 800-ton counterweight at one end of the bridge. At the axis of this balance is the bull gear, nearly the size of a man, that turns the drive shaft, and various smaller gears that raise and lower the bridge. The power is supplied by a DC (direct current) motor, housed under the current roadway.
"The McArdle is a bascule bridge," Rodrigues explains. "That means that it rocks back and forth on-a roller [roughly the size of a car], like a giant see-saw. The Chelsea Street bridge further up the creek Is a bascule as well. They also make bridges that retract, and that revolve. There's all kinds of ways of getting a boat under a bridge."
As Rodrigues finishes his coffee, he talks about some of the accidents that have happened here. They are rare, but they involve ships weighing up to 40,000 tons and they can be spectacular.
"We banged up the bridge pretty good in '78," he says, putting his empty mug down on the desk and leaning back in his chair. "The drawtender saw a woman crossing the bridge just as he was about to raise it for an incoming ship. He ran out to stop her, and she argued with him, and he forgot all about the ship. It couldn't stop in time and took a big piece out of the bridge. He was found negligent in court.
"The Chelsea Street bridge has been knocked around, too. A freighter ran into it and banged it so far out of line that it was stuck up in the air for two and a half years. And back in the '50s, I think, a drawtender at the same bridge parked his car in the wrong place and brought the counterweight down on top of his car. Flattened it right to the ground.
Rodrigues laughs. "He got his picture in the paper, though."
The fog lasts all day. At three o'clock, Charles Thaice relieves Rodrigues in the bridge house. Rush-hour traffic from East Boston starts to pour over the bridge, the car tires singing on the metal grate of the roadway. Six o'clock, and it begins to get dark. Finally, as night falls, the fog lifts.
At 7:30, the bridge house receives word over the radio that the Texas is on her way. The night has cleared rapidly and the waters of the Chelsea creek glint dully, reflecting the lights of the city. At 7:40 the tug's whistle is heard: two long, two short, one long. The ship is several minutes away.
Thaice is standing at the control bank by the desk. The bank is black, waist-high, and has gauges, buttons, dials, and foot pedals on the floor. "Be sure the leafs are seated before driving the locks," a nearby sign warns. The bridge is raised by a complicated process of releasing the locks and brakes, choosing the degree of torque, and providing the right amount of power from the motor. The two gatekeepers are out on the roadway to shut the gates, once all cars and pedestrians are off the bridge.
The drive locks retract loudly. Then the bridge starts to rise, and the counterweight comes down. The entire bridge rocks slowly back on its immense steel rollers, and rises almost to vertical, a huge slab of concrete and steel pointed 83 degrees up into the night air.
The passage of the bulkfleet does not take long -- several minutes, at the most. The vessel passes by silently, a dark, enormous shape down in the creek. The tug pushes from behind, its engines a deep rumble from under the water. The running lights can be seen as it emerges from the confines of the bridge. It continues slowly on upstream.
Thaice is at the controls again, and the bridge comes gently back down. The tugboat is out of sight by now, probably almost up at the Chelsea Street bridge. The drive locks can be faintly heard, grinding into place; the gatekeepers swing the gates open. The cars rush back through.
