THINGS I KNOW FOR SURE, NO MATTER WHO SAYS OTHERWISE

I lived in San Francisco for seven often wonderful, intensely melodramatic years, and I wouldn't exchange them for anything. When I saw this morning's prompt from NaPoWriMo, to "write a poem about bridges," I briefly considered a number of other bridges - the narrow one over the Snake River between Ontario, Oregon and Fruitland, Idaho where a couple of my ex-husband's trucker buddies used to run side-by-side, so close that one's left sideview mirror would be inside the other's righthand window, just to see if they could do it; the lovely covered bridges of New Hampshire and Vermont; the high trestle railroad bridges that look so beautiful and deadly - but I knew all along I could only write about the Golden Gate Bridge, so familiar even to those who have never been within a thousand miles of it, that bridge I crossed and recrossed so many times, the source of so many urban legends that, as far as I've found, aren't even acknowledged on Wikipedia or elsewhere. So they must be true, right?

THINGS I KNOW FOR SURE, NO MATTER WHO SAYS OTHERWISE

There are rattlesnakes on the Golden Gate Bridge.
Crotalus viridis, the Western rattlesnake.
Even the San Francisco Bay Area National Park Science and Learning
website acknowledges their presence in the area, but they downplay it
and sure as hell won't say you'll find them on the bridge.

Crotalus viridis, the Western rattlesnake,
likes to sun itself on the cables and pylons
of the Golden Gate Bridge, much to the consternation
of the painters who work up there every day,
since they never finish painting the Bridge.

If you can get a job painting the Bridge,
you've got a lifetime gig. It takes seven years,
they say, from end to end, and then you just start over.
Those guys can tell some stories, you bet,
and not just about rattlesnakes. Consider the jumpers.

Two thousand plus people so far. You pay your toll
and walk across, and maybe on the way out,
maybe on the way back, when no one's watching,
you just slip over the rail. That water's cold.
You'd better hope the fall kills you.

Only the ones who aren't really serious, who just want
attention, make sure they're seen by someone
willing to interrupt their tourist photo opportunity,
who'll go back to Colorado or Vermont
to tell the story wide-eyed over martinis or beer.

Those tourists never see the rattlesnakes, of course.
It would scare the piss out of them.
They'd never pay the toll to walk the bridge.
But you can believe me, those snakes are there.