Little Amal had already covered a lot of ground and water before she reached the midpoint of the John A. Roebling Bridge on Friday afternoon. The twelve-foot-tall puppet representing a ten-year-old Syrian refugee began her trek in Turkey in July 2021. Much of her travels have been in Europe where she walked in Germany, Italy, France, Ukraine, Poland, and many other countries. She has also walked in Canada and this is not her first time in the U.S. She was in New York City for seventeen days in 2022.
This time though, she will be walking across the entire country. The picture at left is a capture from a live feed of her first night in Boston where a pre-recorded message and lullaby from Yo-Yo Ma offered some comfort. That was on September 7. Cincinnati is just one of the forty cities she will stop in as she travels some 6,000 miles through the country before wrapping up the visit in San Diego on November 5. Check out her plans here.
Friday’s walk started on the south side of the Ohio River in Covington, Kentucky. A bit of rustling in the crowd gathered at the entrance to the Roebling Bridge alerted me to Amal’s arrival, and I caught my first glimpse of her just a few minutes past 3:00. The Ciara Harper Trio and Revolution Dance Theatre began a wonderful performance of Wade in the Water (great harmonies!) as Amal worked her way forward. By the time the song ended, she had joined the singers.
The two puppeteers handling Amal’s arms can be seen in this picture of her starting across the bridge. Some zooming, tweaking, and general mucking about allows the person responsible for Amal’s walking to be seen vaguely here. Most puppeteers are not athletes by any stretch of the imagination but this one is. For sure. Indubitably.
As she made her way over the bridge, Amal frequently paused to interact with the people greeting her. Near the Ohio side of the river, she pets one of Cincinnati’s flying — or maybe just dancing — pigs.
Keeping her pathway clear was at least partially successful and Amal does make it over the river. She takes another whiff of the giant flowers that have followed her from Kentucky as she exits the bridge and heads toward her designated spot.
Reaching that spot, where the mayors of both Covington and Cincinnati awaited, took a while and when she got there all I could see was her head above the crowd. I couldn’t actually hear everything either but I did hear most of what Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval had to say. This was not his first time meeting Amal. They had met last October when Pureval was in Amsterdam for a Mayor’s Conference and Amal was doing a walk in the city that included Anne Frank’s house.
Pureval has some very personal reasons for caring about the world’s refugees that Amal is walking on behalf of. He was born in Ohio but his parents were immigrants. His father was born in India. His mother was born in Tibet. Her parents had been forced to flee Tibet with her and she grew up in India — as a refugee.
Donate to the Amal Fund here.
Cyndie’s done it again. As I began to write this review of Cyndie L. Gerken’s fourth book on the National Road in Ohio, I revisited my reviews of the previous three thinking I might come up with a better opening line but everything I saw just reinforced my initial thought. Cyndie has indeed done it again.
Although I certainly know better, I tend to instinctively think of big stone arches when I hear the phrase “National Road bridges”. One reason is that many of those stone bridges, some of them S-shaped, are still in existence. There were also many wooden bridges along the road but all were much shorter-lived. Building the Bridges… includes both. It identifies twenty-one covered wooden bridges built for the National Road in Ohio in addition to probably forty-some stone bridges. There were also well over a thousand stone culverts and one reason an accurate count of stone bridges is difficult to produce is that not everyone followed the same rules when distinguishing culverts and bridges. Span length was and is the distinguishing characteristic. Twelve feet, twenty feet, and no doubt some other numbers of feet were used to make the distinction and some reports did not distinguish the two at all.
After telling us about as many of the bridge builders as she could identify, Gerken touches on some of the iconic National Road bridges east of Ohio, including the Wheeling Suspension Bridge, before beginning a county-by-county trek across the state. Each county chapter begins with a thumbnail of the county and the National Road through it. A map locating the National Road bridges in the county appears very early in each chapter. Sections on each of the bridges and some of the culverts in the county appear also in east-to-west sequence. Just as some bridges east of Ohio were touched upon preceding the border-to-border coverage, a few in Indiana follow it. 
At a minimum, the location of each structure and what it crossed is given. The builder or builders are identified if known and, thanks to some pretty good sleuthing, many of them are. Beyond that, the information given for each bridge or culvert varies widely but it is a natural variation. For unnamed culverts over unnamed intermittent streams, location might be just about the only thing known. For major structures, lots of additional information might be included and usually supported by various graphics. Topographic maps are fairly common and there are lots of historic photographs and drawings. Plenty of modern photos also appear and if a structure is still standing there’s a good chance that the book contains a very modern picture of it taken by the author herself. Stories about events associated with happenings at or near a particular bridge can pop up anytime and are often fleshed out by reproducing contemporary reports.
