Ish’s death on the Bay Bridge

Ish’s death on the Bay Bridge brings his life to an end in the company of the young people who will carry his community forward. The crossing, once a crowded artery of the Old Times and now a damaged route through a changed landscape, gives his final hours their central image: a human creation that has outlived the civilization that built it, but cannot last forever. As Ish loses the ability to communicate, the hammer passes to Jack; Ish, watching the young men and the bridge, relinquishes the need to direct what comes next.

The Crossing into the Old Times

The journey to the bridge has already unsettled Ish’s sense of human authority. The young men have detoured around a lion without treating the inconvenience as a humiliation. To Ish, their ease suggests that people no longer hold the old dominance over animals or regard them with the same arrogance. The younger generation accepts the altered terms of life as ordinary, just as it would accept a detour around a fallen tree or ruined building. That untroubled adjustment contrasts with Ish’s continuing awareness of what has been lost.

As the group approaches the first span on the East Bay side, the bridge draws his attention back to the world before the disaster. He remembers traffic pouring in both directions across all six lanes, so dense that crossing on foot would have been fatal. The recollection measures not only the bridge’s former use but the distance between Ish’s knowledge and the young men’s experience: he can imagine the old traffic, while they know the structure as a difficult passage through a landscape without its former human order.

The bridge remains intact as a whole, but its condition records years without maintenance. Rust covers the structure; the pavement has broken apart, sections of highway sag, and some towers lean out of line. At one point the travelers have to cross a few feet on a single girder, the only available way through. The route makes the bridge’s survival tangible without suggesting that it has been restored: people can still cross, but only by adapting to damage that the old system would have repaired.

Ish’s Final Crisis

After the difficult passage, Ish’s awareness becomes uncertain. When he next understands his surroundings, he is sitting on the pavement by the railing, with his hammer in front of him and two young men chafing his hands. The other two are nearby, and the group is visibly alarmed. Ish recognizes that this is not one of the lapses of old age he has experienced before. He believes he has suffered a seizure, possibly a stroke or heart attack, and understands that the others fear for him.

His hearing has failed, and he cannot control his speech. He sees Jack moving his lips and then realizes that he cannot hear the young men; when he tries to explain, he discovers that he cannot make himself understood. The loss is at once physical and social. Ish anticipates how difficult it would be to live without speech or hearing when writing cannot serve as a reliable means of communication, yet the silence itself does not distress him. He takes some comfort in no longer having the world press in through sound. The scene marks a final narrowing of his participation: the young people remain beside him, but he can no longer take part in their exchange as he once did.

The Hammer and the Next Generation

Jack picks up Ish’s hammer and lets it hang from his right hand. The other young men draw back, and Ish feels sorrow for Jack, to whom the hammer has descended. The moment gives the object a practical and symbolic force. It has accompanied Ish through a life that began in the Old Times and continued into the new community; now its transfer makes visible the difference between inheritance and control. Jack receives it, but Ish does not use the moment to issue instructions about what the young men must become.

The others appear relieved once the inheritance is settled and leave Ish undisturbed. That response links the hammer’s importance to the group’s shared understanding, while also showing how little Ish can now intervene. His authority has long been bound up with memory and with the things that survived from the former world. Here, at the end, the young men arrange the succession among themselves. Ish’s sorrow for Jack accompanies acceptance that the object, and the future attached to it, are no longer his to manage.

The Bridge, the Earth, and the Ending

Ish rests quietly, aware that he is dying and content that he has made his peace. He remembers that many people died on the bridge, and recognizes the irony of having reached the end of his own life there after surviving the world in which automobile crashes once threatened him. Around him, two dogs lie quietly and four young men sit in a half circle. They belong to a future thousands of years removed, in Ish’s reckoning, from the generation of humanity he represents. He does not know whether they will repeat the old civilization’s course, and he no longer feels that he needs them to do so. His thoughts turn to the slavery, conquest, war, and oppression involved in civilization’s making, complicating any simple wish for its return.

As death approaches, Ish feels more kinship with the bridge than with the young men. It too was part of civilization, and it too has endured beyond the world that gave it meaning. Yet he can see the limits of that endurance. Rust will work deeper into its structure; an earthquake may shake its foundations, and a storm may bring down a span. The bridge’s continued presence is not permanence. Like the person who made it, the human creation will eventually fail, a recognition that sets the old structure beside Ish’s own mortal life without treating either as eternal.

His attention shifts from the bridge to the hills around the bay, whose profile has remained familiar through the destruction of civilization. The pointed peaks recall Em and, further back, his mother; for a moment, the earth and the women he loved seem joined in his thoughts. Ish corrects that comforting association: the hills can receive his body, but they do not love him, and they too are changing. Even in his final reflections, he insists on seeing the world clearly rather than confusing natural permanence with human affection. The hills offer a measure of continuity, not an answer to loss.

At last Ish looks again at the young men and understands their reciprocal place in the natural order: they will return his body to the earth, and he, in turn, commits them to that same earth. The words he remembers, “Men go and come, but earth abides,” gather the ending’s people, generations, and landscape into a single thought. Ish dies without knowing what the new society will become, and without requiring it to reproduce the old one. The Bay Bridge holds him at the close of his life, but the final continuity belongs not to the bridge or to civilization: it belongs to the earth that receives one generation and remains for the next.