Rift Bridged

Eons before Franklin Roosevelt strewed Canada's broad Laurentian slope with fistfuls of international amity (see p. 9), Ice Age glaciers had been over the place, scupping out the wide St. Lawrence river bed and garnishing it, like a great dish of trifle, with thousands of inviting islands. Since then many men have visited the Thousand Islands--legendary tribes of gravel-knoll dwellers, red-paint people; then Indians and white men--but until one day last week no summer sightseer could drive through them in his automobile.

On that day. President Roosevelt and Prime Minister W. L. Mackenzie King motored over a series of bridge spans, viaducts and curving highways, came to a stop on a go-foot span. Below them rippled a narrow streamer of the St. Lawrence known as the International Rift, through which runs the U. S.-Canada boundary line. Each with his right hand clutching one grip of an enormous pair of shears, they snipped a gaily fluttering ribbon. The first Thousand Islands International Bridge, from Collins Landing, N. Y. to Ivy Lea, Ont., was officially open.

Undertaken last year by New York's Thousand Islands Bridge Authority, the crossing cost $3.050.000, is expected to pay for itself in 15 years with automobile tolls of $1.25. A series of five two-lane bridges connected by a viaduct and about five miles of highway, it traverses four islands, brings 200 others into view, will be cheaper by more than half, quicker by many times than the ride on the nearby Clayton (N. Y.)-Gananoque ferry.

Within a 300-mile radius of the new bridge, a comfortable day's drive, live 35,000,000 people, a fourth of the U. S. population, a third of Canada's. To many of these the link meant an international short cut to a neighbor's dooryard; to others, weekends in the bass and muskellunge waters, easier access to a prime vacation land. But to a "whimsical few the route had still another charm. Nearer the U. S. than ever were Ontario's Dionne quintuplets.

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