Known (to those few who know it at all) as the Bridge to Dimension Zed, the bridge we used to cross the freeway traverses I-94 just over a mile east of the Mississippi River. Nobody we know is sure when or why it was built, but it is an artifact of the strange way Fairview Avenue in St. Paul interacts with the freeway.

Fairview is a mildly relevant artery through some of the western part of St. Paul, but it's also a residential street. As it approaches I-94, it splits in two. On each side of the interstate, one part goes up and intersects with other residential streets nearby; one goes down and passes under the interstate. For reasons unclear to us, there's a bridge connecting the two residential pieces of Fairview. It seems to be intended as a footbridge, and it goes from near one side of Fairview to the other, over the interstate.



Between the bridge and either half of the road, however, there is a wall, and a rusty chain-link fence surmounts it, overgrown with vines. That would be the first clue that the bridge hasn't seen all that much use in a very long time. A second clue is the fact that the south end of the bridge disappears into solid concrete, and the north end into a grassy hillside; near the north end it passes under a railway bridge with about two feet minimum clearance.

This bridge was how we crossed the interstate.



We should mention a little more about that railway bridge. Our first thought had been to climb it, which is why the Dok wore shoes, but on reaching it we realized that was not in the cards. The only way to get to the north end of the freeway was under. And when we say it gets down to about two feet off the Bridge to Dimension Zed, we are not kidding. Luckily we are both pretty thin people, so we could both make it across the interstate.



Help im a bear went first, and Doktor Harmon followed shortly after.

There are birds that seem to live in that space at least some of the time, and so as we crossed we were crawling through mostly very old bird guano, and help even encountered a rather startled pigeon as he went through the passageway.

Being in there is actually a pretty intense experience. It's cramped enough that you don't have the freedom of movement you'd like under the circumstances, the wind is amplified by the narrow space, and you don't have a good sense of how high up you are except for knowing that it's pretty damn high. Below you is the roar of the interstate, constantly reminding you exactly what will happen if you somehow fall, and above you is the railway, making going forward slow and turning around nearly impossible. (At this point we may also wish to mention that help is somewhat claustrophobic, and the Dok is just a little bit afraid of heights.)



Eventually, though, first help and then Harmon made it out safely, hands and shirts covered in gray dust whose origin we preferred not to think about, hearts still racing from the passage, bodies scratched and excitement high.