Bridge Over Sand

The nation was a vast cultural transplant to begin with. All along, Americans have sought to import something of their heritage more solid than themselves--the literature, theater and music of Europe and now, for black Americans, the culture of Africa.

In 1968, Oilman and Industrialist Robert McCulloch, 59, arranged the improbable purchase of the London Bridge, which was not exactly falling down into the Thames but was badly in need of replacement. The granite balustrades, corbels, facings, cutwaters and retaining walls--10,000 tons in all--were shipped block by block across ocean and desert to be reconstructed in Lake Havasu City, an Arizona town developed from scratch by McCulloch Oil. Buying a bridge, then building a canal to divert water from the Colorado River for the bridge to cross, was an act of commercial savvy as well as historical piety.

There is something touching in the process by which purely utilitarian things, such as bridges, Model Ts and old penny bubble-gum machines, become vaguely mythical collectors' items. Last week in Britain, the new London Bridge, an unprepossessing rig of steel and concrete, was partially opened, but it was merely a means of getting from one side of the Thames to the other. However authentic the reconstruction in Arizona, the old bridge has vanished; monuments cannot be transplanted. London Bridge without London is, after all, not London Bridge. How does Cochise greet Charles Dickens?

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