By Richard Stern "We all come down and drown in the Mississippi River."
--Hold Steady (Craig Finn), "Stuck Between Stations" The song is about the poet John Berryman walking with the Devil down Washington Avenue before throwing himself over the bridge connecting the east and west campuses of the U. of Minnesota where he taught. Berryman missed the water but succeeded in the suicide which is said to have been on his agenda since as a boy he heard the shot which his father fired into his own head decades earlier. This scheduled self-destruction on one Minneapolis bridge was very different from the unscheduled, unplanned, unwanted deaths of the drivers and passengers whose cars followed the downward plunge of "fatigued" steel into the Mississippi 35 years later. There was, though, as there almost always is, a treasury of human poetry springing from the words and actions of those who survived and those who suffered from those who didn't. One almost wordless poet was a 20 year old gym coordinator, Jeremy Hernandez, who'd taken his job because he couldn't afford the tuition in the auto mechanics course he'd started. In tank top, slender, slightly mustached, mild and weary, Jeremy stood beside the small, lovely Natalie Morales of NBC as she coaxed a few words from him about what he'd done, which was to "follow his feet," leap over seats, kicking aside water coolers in the yellow school bus, kicking open the back door and then passing child after child out to those who brought them to safety. "They were like my brothers and sisters," he said in explanation. "I loved them. They would have done the same for me." As what Natalie and her NBC contacts, Matt Lauer and Meredith Viera, felt would be a sort of crowning acknowledgement of his "heroism," they bade Jeremy look at the monitor where was displayed his picture "on the front page of the New York Times." What to them would have been the fulfillment of a life's ambition was not part of Jeremy's world. Perhaps he'd heard of the newspaper, he surely had never read it or perhaps even seen it in his neighborhood. His neighborhood was filled with the little Hispanic, Afro-American and Whatever boys and girls, one of whom, age five, was already a wiser commentator and more fluent orator than the not unsympathetic Morales and company. Two days later, appeared on the same network a truck driver whose truck just managed to keep from hitting the school bus before crashing 35 feet below. Its burly, bald, fifty-ish driver turned out to be another poet who slowly and perfectly described waving at the children in the bus and sounding his horn for them, then plunging into a nothing where he first smelled the diesel from his fuel tank. "I knew it was slow to burn," but burn it would and as he went on describing what he did, he was cut off by the NBC male anchor bowing to the anti-poetic, anti-human network schedule. (This elicited sympathetic praise of the driver by the most human and charming of all today's anchors, the beautiful Amy Robach, before she yielded to the network's moronic scissors.) These were but two of the vignettes which like waves fixed on canvas by Hiroshige or Monet were taken out of the flux of life by the terrible event and turned into embodiments of mourning and redemption by the memorializing shears of television and the more generously detailed and artistic words of newspaper and magazine reporters. John Berryman whom I knew and cared for and whose amazing, idiosyncratic poems and brilliant biographical treatments of Stephen Crane and Shakespeare I admire and reread, would, I think, have been stirred, perhaps to verse, by this terrible accident so close to the non-accident which ended his life.