Six Hours Against the Sun: the Cape Cod Canal Bridges

There is a particular misery in driving toward a sunset you might not beat. Six hours of it, in my case, most of them spent doing arithmetic I didn’t want to do, subtracting construction zones and restroom stops from a light budget that was never generous to start with. I made it, but barely. The sun had already gone gold on the water when I pulled in, and I was unpacked and in the air before I’d properly stretched my legs. Everything worth the drive happened in the ninety minutes that followed.

People have wanted a ditch here for four hundred years, and you can see why. A single mile of sand once stood between the Mamomet River, which emptied west into Buzzards Bay, and the Scusset, which ran east to Cape Cod Bay. The Pilgrims worked that out quickly and put a trading post on the Mamomet in 1627, hauling goods across the gap rather than sailing twenty miles around it. Washington liked the idea too, and in 1776 sent Continental Army engineer Thomas Machin to survey a route. Then a century passed in which a great deal happened and none of it worked. Surveys came and went. The money never showed. Ships kept piling up on the outer banks all the while, roughly one every two weeks by the late 1880s.

In the end it took a financier. August Belmont II assembled the Boston, Cape Cod & New York Canal Company in 1904, hired civil engineer William Barclay Parsons to tell him the thing was possible, and started digging in 1909. The canal opened on July 29, 1914 as a private toll waterway, seventeen days ahead of the Panama Canal. It was a handsome piece of work and a poor investment. The channel was tight, the current was mean, and captains learned that the movable bridges usually sat down while their ships fought the tide waiting on them. Belmont sold out to the government in 1927 for $11.5 million. The Army Corps took over the next year, dropped the tolls, and between 1935 and 1940 spent $21 million widening the cut to 480 feet and dredging it to 32, which made it the widest sea-level canal on earth at the time.

That widening is the reason all three bridges look the way they do. The railroad crossing came first, a Strauss trunnion bascule with a 160-foot movable span thrown over the unfinished canal in 1910 for the New York, New Haven & Hartford. It was obsolete the moment the Corps settled on a 480-foot channel. What replaced it is a vertical lift begun in December 1933 under the Public Works Administration and opened December 29, 1935, the longest of its kind in the world when it was new. Its 544-foot span rides between towers standing 271 feet over the water, and it still earns its keep hauling freight, seasonal excursion trains, and the CapeFLYER.

The two highway bridges are twins, built at the same time by the same hands and dedicated together on June 22, 1935. Fay, Spofford & Thorndike did the engineering, Cram & Ferguson kept an eye on how it would all look, and both came out as steel through arches with 616-foot main spans and 135 feet of air beneath them. The Bourne carries State Route 28 across 2,684 feet, its approaches drawn long by the land around it, and in 1934 the American Institute of Steel Construction called it the most beautiful steel bridge in its class.

The Sagamore carries U.S. Route 6 over a tighter 1,408 feet, on ground that had already worn out two crossings before it, a rolling lift span around 1910 and a steel bascule in 1911. Both are living on borrowed time. The Cape Cod Bridges Program will replace each of them with twin arches, built off-site, floated in, and lifted into place.

I flew all of it in Class G airspace, taking off and landing from private ground. The rest was luck. There was no wind to speak of at any height I went, and the canal, which is not a still water by nature, lay down flat and held the entire sky. Orange along the western edge first. Then a long purple wash as the sun went. Then blue hour, quiet as anything, the arches still hanging onto the last of the light. I’ve driven six hours for a great deal less.