Building (Metaphorical) Bridges

If you imagine West Virginia, one of the first images that might come to mind is the New River Gorge Bridge. After all, its iconic steel arch appears on the state commemorative quarter and is one of the state’s most photographed places. The New River Gorge Bridge is the longest steel span in the western hemisphere and the third-highest bridge in the United States.

Completed in 1977, the Bridge transformed this corner of West Virginia. As my father said (and the National Park Service confirmed), a forty-minute drive now took less than one minute.

In October, my family would drive south for Bridge Day: the one day, all year, the Bridge closes to cars and opens to thousands of pedestrians, musicians, vendors, and, yes, BASE jumpers. I still have our poster of the Bridge, showing the arch in autumn, with red and gold leaves parading down the hills and the New River running a soft blue-brown underneath.

Think about the New River Gorge Bridge, and imagine its metaphors. A bridge between generations. A bridge across time. A bridge, in my family, between our rural kin and my parents’ migration.

Add interpretation to the metaphor, and it blooms. What is interpretation but a bridge? Drawing from our tools and knowledges, we reach across distances to those we serve. Through interpretation, we build bridges between audiences and resources.

And when we build bridges across this gap, what possibilities… but also, what challenges! In the landmark book Interpreting Our Heritage, Freeman Tilden writes:

"[H]ere lies the greatest challenge to the interpreter who works in this field: what to do; what to say; how to point the way; how to connect the visitor’s own life with something, even one thing, among all the custodial treasures; how finally to elicit from the aimless visitor the specific thought: ‘‘This is something I believe I could get interested in.’’

Such important work, but not always (or often) easy.

In the following pages, interpreters—in parks, classrooms, museums, farmlands, and more—show how they use interpretation to build these metaphorical bridges. As Minnijean Brown-Trickey, activist, inspiration, and 2023 NAI National Conference keynote speaker shares in an exclusive interview, “All I do is try to build bridges.”

So, for the first time in Legacy’s history, let's turn the all-digital page of our magazine. Let’s build bridges.