The plan was Four Corners. You stand on a painted circle and put a hand in Arizona, a hand in New Mexico, a foot in Utah, a foot in Colorado, and for one silly minute you are in four states at once. That was the reason we pointed the rental car east out of Las Vegas. Somewhere on the map, a little to the south of the route, was a dot marked Lake Havasu City, and next to it two words that stopped me: London Bridge. I remember thinking that had to be a mistake, or a joke, or a strip mall with an ambitious name. We did not turn off. We kept driving toward the four states and the painted circle. I have thought about that missed exit ever since.
Because the bridge is real, and the story is stranger than any joke I could have invented at seventy miles an hour. In the 1960s the London Bridge that crossed the Thames, the one built in 1831, was sinking under the weight of modern traffic. It was not the pretty one with the towers. That is Tower Bridge, and a great many people have confused the two, including, the rumor goes, some of the men who bought this one. London put the old bridge up for sale. The winning bid, a little over two million dollars, came from an American oil man named Robert McCulloch, who was trying to sell desert land in Arizona to people who had no reason yet to want it.
His real estate agent, a man named Robert Plumer, had heard the bridge was for sale and talked him into it. McCulloch's first reaction was that it was the craziest idea he had ever heard. Then he did it anyway. They numbered every facing stone, catalogued its exact position, shaved a few inches off many of the blocks at a quarry in Devon, and shipped ten thousand tons of granite through the Panama Canal to Long Beach. The first load reached the California coast on July 4, 1968. From there the stone went three hundred miles inland by truck, to a place that had started life as an Army Air Corps rest camp during the war, a spot on the lake once called Site Six.
Here is the part that stayed with me longest, the part I did not know until I went looking. When the stone arrived, the U.S. Customs Service had to decide what it was. If they called it imported construction granite, McCulloch would have owed an eleven percent tariff, another quarter of a million dollars on top of everything he had already spent. Instead they looked at the bridge, all one hundred and thirty-seven years of it, and declared it an antique. Anything over a hundred years old is an antique, and antiques cross the border free. And so the largest antique ever sold went into the record books, not as a bridge, but as a very old object that happened to weigh ten thousand tons.
I love that a customs clerk, following a rule about old things, gave this story its punchline. There is something very human in it. A category made for grandmother's clock and a locket got stretched to cover a bridge, and the stretch held, because the rule was written cleanly enough to bend around a thing nobody who wrote it could have pictured. Joseph Farrar was the import specialist who handled the first shipment. I like knowing his name. Somewhere in a file there is a form where a working man signed off on the world's largest antique and then, I imagine, went to lunch.
The bridge they rebuilt in Arizona is not quite the bridge that crossed the Thames. The inside is new concrete. Only the outer skin, the numbered stones, came across the ocean. Then they dug a canal underneath it, because a bridge needs water to be a bridge, and the water followed the stone the way everything in that town followed McCulloch's strange conviction. The land sold. The gamble paid off. The bridge is still one of the most visited places in Arizona, which means that a great many people have now stood on it, and I still have not.
We made it to Four Corners. I stood on the circle and touched four states, and it was exactly as satisfying and as brief as I had hoped. But the memory that has grown, the one that keeps sending me back to old customs records and photographs of labeled stones, is the exit I did not take. A bridge that came apart in England and put itself back together in the desert, saved a fortune because a clerk decided it was old enough to be precious. There is a whole road trip's worth of thinking in that. Next time I am anywhere near Las Vegas, I am turning off.
