Hilo Days: What’s the Buzz?

When you are a little child and experience something for the first time, the memory sticks with you. Such was the case of Hilo’s airplane bridge. The trepidation of crossing it wore off as I grew up, but I thought it important to talk about it in my Hilo Days memories. Here's the little story, as published in my now-defunct "Hilo Days" website:

The Airplane Bridge

There’s a bridge across the mouth of the Wailuku River that we called the “airplane bridge.” After the tidal wave of 1947 devastated the existing bridge, a new one was erected. The difference was the new bridge had a surface like a metal grating so that if there ever were another tidal wave of such magnitude, the water would pass through and not take the bridge down.

It must work because the bridge is still standing today. Of course, no tidal wave has hit the downtown Hilo area near the Wailuku River with the force and destruction of the 1946 wave.

The bridge was always kind of spooky. Whenever the car would cross the bridge, it would kind of shimmy almost imperceptibly from side to side. I always felt we were going to skid right off and into the ocean.

The bad part of the experience was that you knew you had to cross the bridge again when you came back to Hilo town.

And the noise! What a noise! It sounded like … well, like the propellers of an airplane – like the DC-3s that used to fly between the islands.

Bz-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z. I remember slouching down in the car seat, not wanting to look out the window, afraid of the sound, squeezing because of the shimmy, wondering when the traverse was going to end.