The New Republic

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.

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