Delayed Response by Jason Farman

Author:Jason Farman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300225679
Publisher: Yale University Press

5 A DELAYED CROSSING

This past winter, I stood on the Fredericksburg side of the Rappahannock River in Virginia, next to the railroad bridge leading into town. In the early 1860s, this bridge was one of the first casualties of the American Civil War, blown up by the Confederate Army to impede easy entry into the city by federal forces. The same bridge, now rebuilt, carries Amtrak trains into the Fredericksburg station and long freight trains north to Washington and Baltimore. A restaurant sits to one side of the bridge, its patio furniture stacked until warmer weather arrives. I walked through the restaurant’s parking lot, past a full Dumpster, to the slope leading down to the river. Standing under one of the supporting arches of the bridge, I looked up and noticed wires and cables attached to the brick-and-concrete structure. The fiber optic cables that bring the internet into cities and towns across the United States are able to cross rivers and bays by following the routes created by Civil War–era bridges. The fiber optic cables attached to the side of this bridge in Fredericksburg are inside a large metal pipe that runs the length of the bridge. Approaching the shore, the pipe bends downward and the cables go underground right where the bridge meets land. It’s easy to spot fiber optic cables like these along the historic bridges in many parts of the United States, but they typically go unnoticed by the people who pass them each day. Our ideas of how the internet gets into our homes rarely include an image of wires clinging to Civil War–era bridges.1

I made the two-hour drive from my home in the Washington, DC, area to Fredericksburg to visit a handful of sites that I hoped would tell me more about how our experiences of delay have changed. As the messages we send each other are delivered faster and more efficiently, how has this shift changed our sense of being connected with one another? How was communication different in December 1862, as soldiers attempted to cross the Rappahannock River during the Battle of Fredericksburg? Soldiers sent letters back home at an unprecedented pace during the Civil War, but they would often wait weeks or months for a response.

Looking at the cables on this bridge, I think about all the data coming into and leaving Fredericksburg: the emails, comments, videos, messages, pictures, and other media we exchange at a seemingly instantaneous pace. Just before parts of this bridge were destroyed by Confederate forces, the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad used this bridge to send mail across the state, along with passengers and supplies. As I explored Fredericksburg, comparing these two different eras of communication, I began to notice striking similarities between our data-driven messages and the letters shuttled across the Rappahannock.

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