Travel
A bridge that grows
A bridge is an easy thing for an engineer to become interested in. A bridge made from living roots is rather more difficult to stop thinking about. I went towards Nongriat with the double-decker crossing already in my curiosity. What held me was the thought of a structure that had to be grown into its usefulness, with people continuing the work over generations.
In much of the work I understand, completion is an important word. We design, build, inspect and hand over. Maintenance follows. A living-root bridge makes those stages harder to separate. The material is still growing. The people tending it are part of how the crossing continues to work. I find that technically interesting, but also rather demanding: what does a design ask of the people who inherit it?
The pools and the waterfall gave my engineering thoughts some competition. There is a particular pleasure in finding that the place you came to examine also has somewhere to get into the water. The rocks, the people below the roots, the white fall between darker stone: these belong to my Meghalaya journey too. I would be doing the trip an injustice if I remembered only the clever bridge.
Still, I keep coming back to the crossing. Khasi communities have made something useful through knowledge of living material and continued care. I admire the intelligence in that relationship. It asks for an understanding of what the roots can do, and a willingness to work on a timescale longer than one's own immediate satisfaction. As an engineer, I am accustomed to asking whether a solution works. This one makes me ask how it keeps working, and who makes that possible.
That question has travelled home with me. We like beginnings: the idea, the drawing, the first convincing result. I am increasingly interested in what happens afterwards, when novelty has worn off and somebody still has to care for the thing. At Nongriat, that continuing work belongs to the structure itself. It is a lovely challenge to carry back into a world rather fond of announcing that something is finished.