CAMBRIDGE AND BOSTON
It stretches across the Charles River, between the MIT section of Memorial Drive and Beacon Street in Back Bay. A steel haunched girder bridge, its design is less ostentatious than the Zakim and less stately than the Longfellow. Still, it is sleek and purposeful as it crosses the longest distance of any Charles River bridge. It is 659.82 meters, or 2,164.8 feet, or 364.4 smoots long. Plus or minus one ear.
The non-standard unit of measure known as “the smoot” is equal to five feet and seven inches, or about 1.70 meters. This was the length — or, I should say, height — of one Oliver Smoot in October, 1958. This Smoot was a pledge that year for the MIT chapter of Lambda Chi Alpha. Having become frustrated with the seemingly endless trek across the bridge, his pledgemaster declared that the bridge should be measured and demarcated in pledge-lengths. Oliver Smoot was chosen both for his diminutive stature and for the sound of his name: “the name sounded ‘scientific,’ like ‘meter’ or ‘watt,'” reports MIT Newsoffice Editor, Susan Curran in her salute to Smoot.
And lo, Oliver Smoot was laid down “end over end,” and the long walk from Boston to MIT was measured. Ever since, for over fifty years, the pledges of MIT’s Lambda Chi Alpha chapter repaint. Over the years, the smoots became such a fixture in the culture of Boston and Cambridge that when the superstructure of the bridge was renovated in the 1980s, the Cambridge Police department asked the fraternity to come and repaint the markers. You see, smoots had become useful in reporting the precise location of accidents. During renovations, officials even agreed to “score the sidewalk at 5-foot-7 Smoot intervals instead of the usual six-foot ones.” I have to look for that, next time I walk across.
Plus or minus an ear. If you look at the total-distance marker now, it only says “+ 1 EAR,” but according to Robert Tavener, in his Smoot’s Ear: The Measure of Humanity (Yale University Press, 2007), the original measure of “plus or minus” signifies the MIT frat’s choice to build-in error, to express the uncertainty of measurement, and to recognize the fallibility “ever-present in human affairs” (xvi). This care for precision through recognition of uncertainty embodies something so important about science — the findings of each new study don’t increase certainty, but rather they open up new questions, new avenues in the pursuit of truth.
I’m no scientist, but I’ve dedicated the better part of my life to asking questions and looking for the many forms truth. Multiplicity, uncertainty and the slipperiness of meaning are some of my favorite things to think about. But a head full of things like that can soon feel far too full. Over the last 10 years, I’ve found respite from thinking and feeling too much on the long, straight stretch of bridge across the Charles.
For five years, when I lived near the Somerville-Cambridge line, I’d ride my blue-green Raleigh to work. I’d ride down the bike lane on Hampshire Street, along the Vassar Street path (past Frank Gehry’s Stata Center), down Mass Ave, across the Smoot Bridge, into the rush of Back Bay traffic, and over to Northeastern University to teach writing and work on my Ph.D. In graduate school, a lot feels uncertain, a lot of the time. On top of that, I was settling into a new marriage and trying to forgive my parents for being fallible human beings. When describing the dark brown muck of my worldview to my therapist one day, I realized that the only relief I felt from an otherwise constant state of anxious depression came to me as I rode my bike across the Smoot Bridge. I have since expanded my Smoot Bridge feeling; the dark brown muck has receded.
Over the river, the world opens up; the blue of the sky, the smell of the water, the sun, the sailboats, the quiet. Riding or walking, I often shift into automaticity, fading into and out of awareness of my movements. Nice and long, on the bridge you can forget yourself, then remember again, and maybe, once across, see things a little differently than you did on the other side.
–Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze
PS: In 2011, “smoot” was added to the fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary.
Also, check out this Panorama from the bridge in winter, at Wikimedia Commons.
Inhabit Your Town 
