Bridging a Braided Brook

When it comes to workflow at Rosslyn we jiggle and juggle — protean projects, evolving priorities, punch list reshuffles, DIA (and born again) deadlines — in a seasonal dance that bridges longterm goal setting and dynamic day-to-day property and project management. Jiggle. Juggle. Jiggle… So the nature of progress at Rosslyn is fluid, and nimble flexibility is always the most valued attribute. Which has WHAT exactly to do with bridging a braided brook?!

Perhaps the photos in today’s post help with that. Perhaps. Perhaps not. Let’s connect a few dots.

One week ago I shared a “Dock-to-Bridge Preview” and a “Bridging v2.0” post as an introduction to an adaptive reuse initiative currently underway. Tony and Glen have been experimenting with the most effective ways to repurpose a half dozen aluminum and lumber docks sections as bridges to provide safe and comfortable access across some of Rosslyn’s waterways. (There’s even a still TBD ambition to recycle a swamp mat — a heavy duty timber device used to provide temporary access to heavy equipment operating in a wet environment — that was left behind from logging on Essex Farm a few years ago into yet another stream crossing.)

Glen and Tony are still experimenting with the most suitable construction plan, iterating, troubleshooting, learning by doing. Soon this project will appear more bridgelike, but right now the first section remembers its last as a dock. No longer lakeside, but protruding from the bank of a stream deep in a forest. A dock becoming a bridge… (Source: Dock-to-Bridge Preview)

As trail maintenance and bridging coalesce in coming weeks I’ll revisit the waterway crossing with an eye to evaluating adaptive reuse success. (Sourcing: Bridging v2.0)

So lots of bridging in the works. And the muse for the team’s ciphering about bridges and bridging is our meandering waterway, Library Brook. (NB: I actually anticipated today’s post being more of a bridge building status update, but Glen’s photographs fill in those gaps just fine.)

I find myself more contemplative of the challenge(s) of bridging a meandering waterway, a braided brook, braiding and unbraiding season-to-season, even rainstorm-to-rainstorm.

Braided streams and rivers have multi-threaded channels that branch and merge to create the characteristic braided pattern. Braided channels are highly dynamic with mid-channel bars which are formed, consumed, and re-formed continuously. (Source: Summerfield, 1991 via “Fluvial Features—Braided Stream“, U.S. National Park Service)

I’m struck with “multi-threaded channels”, a term which might just as accurately describe Rosslyn Redux! I frequently speak of this peculiar enterprise as multimodal storytelling, mixed genre, and now I’ll unabashedly borrow this fluvial feature to help approximate the perennially protean and elusive holy grail I seek.

Bridges offer practical and durable solutions to real problems. This is the equation that Glen and Tony have been solving. And yet, as so often, these problems and solutions drift into metaphor. I consider the foolhardy fun of bridging — attempting to bridge, really — the threaded channels of a restless creek, ill contempt with her bed, curious and exploratory, ever ready to reroute, to divide, and to overrun her banks.

Braided Brook

meandering
waterway
braiding
unbraiding
within
without
clayplain
forest
autumn
maunder
spring
torrent
spanning
straddling
fluvial
follies

For now we finish with double docks bridging a low banked area downstream of the dock above. Suitable in autumn. Perhaps winter and summer as well. But in the spring for a week or so, it will definitely be underwater. Maybe that’s not a problem. In half a year we’ll know.