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Early morning of Thursday, Sept. 3, 2009, five adolescents were arrested for underage
drinking and alcohol possession. Police were responding to a complaint about a gathering
of teenagers painting the train trestle in Sydney River, a suburb of the Cape Breton
Regional Municipality in Nova Scotia. Almost immediately the on again off again debate
about whether the practice of painting the trestle should be outlawed flared up once
more. Opponents of the practice cited both safety concerns and that it made the trestle
an eyesore. Supporters, more than anything, cited tradition, that the painting of the
trestle was a positive expressive practice. Indeed, by the end of that week the bridge
was painted once more, with the term TRADITION (full-stop) painted in the ten squares that
make up the trestle. In the red and white colours of Riverview High School, the walls
were covered with hand-prints (eschewing the signatures of the past), along with symbols
expressing how paint plus peace equals happiness. But the argument of tradition did not settle
the debate. Representatives from the student councils met with city officials and agreed
to put an end to the practice. Ironically, one of the main arguments against trestle-painting
- that it was an eyesore amounting to little more than graffiti and defacement - was found
to be built on feet of clay when the bridge went painted by neither students nor the municipality
nor the railway. The distinction between decoration and graffiti may be diffuse and hard to articulate,
yet the community seemed prepared to make one, and grew restless with the state of the
bridge left fallow. The following April, at about the time I first received some research
funding for studying the practice and appeared on local radio, the bridge was painted again,
this time in the blue and white of Sydney Academy, the older downtown Sydney school
that is Riverview's chief rival. Six months of compliance with the interdiction is perhaps
as attributable to a nasty winter as it is to a respect for authority. In a fit of school
pride, a group of Tenth Grade Riverview students painted the bridge the following month. This
revealed one of the further meanings of trestle-painting. As much as the bridge is a marker of territory
between the two schools, it is also a ritual for the graduating class. Students have said
that upon enrolling at Riverview they could barely wait to paint it in Grade 12. By jumping
the established order these students had transgressed. In a show of contrition, the painters apologised
on their hands and knees in the middle of the school cafeteria. Accounts vary between
this being a playful performance to this being hazing. The trestle was constructed between
1957 and 1958 in an infrastructure spree that also saw the completion of the Canso Causeway,
connecting Cape Breton to mainland Nova Scotia, and the Seal Island Bridge spanning the Great
Bras d'Or Channel of the Bras d'Or Lakes. It was built with the realignment of Trunk
5, the main road between Sydney and North Sydney, and the construction of the new Sydney
River Bridge. The old bridge had been a single lane which connected to King's Road - the
main road to Sydney - via a steeply curving road that crossed the rail tracks at grade.
Accidents, trains, and the one-way bridge made for intense congestion, which the newer
bridge and elevated rail line aimed to alleviate. But planners were unprepared for the high
demand placed upon the bridge. Traffic was bumper to bumper along the road despite no
longer having to stop for trains. The bridge opened on December 1, 1958: by February of
1959, the Municipal Council of the County of Cape Breton indicated that the bridge had
caused a serious traffic problem along the new road. Riverview Rural High School opened
in 1950, following the Nova Scotia Rural High School Act of 1945. Just like the bridge,
its use was underestimated: even before opening the population survey for the school was twice
the initial estimate. The cause of the confusion was not anticipating post-war growth of the
suburb in Cape Breton, which had previously only experienced the intensely industrial
and the intensely rural. I am dwelling on traffic patterns because the trestle, for
all its utilitarian and un-aesthetic design, forms a conspicuous part of the landscape
for a broad swathe of people in the municipality. What one sees everyday becomes a meaningful
landmark. And one need not be a dyed-in-the-wool Turnerian to recognise the liminal aspects
of the trestle. Irrespective of actual catchment area for the schools, or for the natural or
political boundaries between communities, the trestle bridge marks the entry into _Redman
Country_: hence its back and forth painting by Riverview and Sydney Academy. This legacy
from an industrial past supersedes the river and the bridge: no different from many traditions
it derives this meaning by virtue of it having been imbued with it once and the process simply
continuing. On Prom Night 1981, Tom Davis, snuck out and, using an orange spray paint
his father had taken from the steel plant, sprayed _Class of 81_ onto the ten squares
of the trestle. He had practiced painting upside down in his basement, and he was happy
to have paid the extra dollar for tuxedo rental insurance. It was, in his retrospect, simultaneously
a personal legacy and a collective legacy for his graduating class. In his words:
>> It was probably early June of the next year when the kids from Class of 82 just wrote
over the 1 made it into a 2. But that kind of started off the kids from Riverview saying
we _have_ to paint this bridge for prom. And then it became well we gotta paint it for
prom, and we gotta paint it for Red Cup, Pretty much any excuse we could think of is a good
excuse to go down and paint the bridge, paint the trestle. And the kids of Riverview took
it upon themselves that that's their trestle. And then we gotta paint it for prom and Red
Cup and Winter Carnival, and going back to school and Christmas break and Easter Break
and Valentine's Day.
>> In addition to the cycle of school life and matters more esoteric, the bridge has
been used to promote causes. There is frequently a bridge for Remembrance Day, and one promoting
the Riverview team for the annual Run for the Cure breast cancer fundraiser. In 2004
students painted it to protest a proposed quarry in Coxheath. Over the years, the bridge
has also been used for memorialisation. Like roadside crosses, painting is used to mark
a death that falls outside of the flow of expectations, principally road accidents.
But unlike roadside crosses, which tend to mark the place of the accident, the bridge
is understood as the appropriate public marker for grief because of its centrality to the
cultural geography of adolescent Cape Breton. Most of the time these painters are no longer
high school students, but return to their painting ways. They will coordinate a memorial
bridge paint, often wearing the same clothes and experiencing the same sense of event and
performance as they would have in their painting years. There is also a shared understanding
that a memorial bridge will go without repainting until an appropriate time has passed, usually
about a month. To quote one of my interviews: >> I witnessed them painting the bridge for
that young fella that died on the motorcycle (Johnny, Carabin, whose bridge you see here),
and I remember sitting back and when they had all finished ... And they all kind of
stepped back in a line and they all looked and then they just bowed their heads. And
I thought wow, that's profound.
>> Like many folklorists I have been asked whether I support the practice I study. I
have also been attacked in local papers for paying any attention to trestle-painting at
all, for essentially wasting taxpayer's money. Particularly from speaking with my students,
many of whom come from the area and are former painters, I am drawn to this effort at expression
in a post-industrial, dying city, as an ongoing example of the processes of folklore.