Drawbridge Dream

Evergreen Point Bridge, Seattle Washington

I am riding in the back of a car (a taxi, perhaps?) with one other guy and two women. The guy is sitting on my left and the girls are sitting on my right. We are in the right hand lane of a heavily used multi-lane road in an urban area. The road is flat and straight. The sun is shining. Traffic slows because there is some kind of drawbridge up ahead and it is opening, or rather closing. It closes and traffic starts flowing, but then it inexplicably opens a few of inches, which causes a hiccup in traffic.

The bridge mechanism works by sliding two sections apart, nothing goes up or down. The opening in the bridge runs at a 45 degree angle across the roadway. The closer end of the slant is in our lane and it slants forward as it crosses the other three or four (or five) lanes of traffic. There is about a six inch gap between the two sections of roadway. You can see the water through the gap. There are no gates or warning signs of any kind. The bridge stops moving and people start driving across the gap.

I am sitting forward on my seat and I turn to look at the woman sitting next to the passenger side door. I want to see what she looks like. She is an attractive blond, but not beautiful. I am smiling at her, but she doesn’t return my smile. Matter of fact she looks rather cool. I am surprised. I don’t look at the other woman, who has brown hair, presumably because I can see what she looks like well enough because I am sitting next to her.

We pull into an area where there are bunch of (like a hundred) communal sinks. There is no one else there. The sinks are like counter height tables big enough for three people to wash their hands on each side. Each table has one big sink that takes up the whole table top. There is a trellis structure running the length of the table that contains the valves and faucets. It is maybe a foot or two high with a six inch gap or so underneath where the water comes out. There are some legs that hold it up off the bottom of the sink.

The faucet nozzles are hidden inside this structure. They have some kind of clamshell mechanism that allows them to open wide for spraying or close down for a stream. I reach up under the trellis and flip the two nozzles closed and that fixes the problem with the bridge.

Update September 2017 replaced missing picture with something similar.