Jim Romano, above, walks the cables of the Claiborne Pell Bridge for various maintenance duties, such as changing light bulbs. Top, engineer Debra L. Moolin-Taylor enjoys the view from the top of the bridge.

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The Providence Journal / John Freidah

On a clear day, you can see Block Island from atop the east tower of the Newport bridge. You can look deep into Rhode Island and, facing east, Massachusetts. You are 401 feet, 10 inches, above the water. The sky and ocean are dreamy shades of blue. Carried on the summer breeze, the salt air can be tasted. It tastes delicious.

An airplane provides comparable views of Narragansett Bay. But an airplane moves too fast, is too enclosed and mechanical, to fully indulge the senses.

Up here, you experience tranquility.

If you don’t fear heights, that is. Debra Moolin-Taylor does not. She is a structural engineer for the company that designed the bridge and still tends it, as lovingly as one would a dear friend requiring attention with advancing age. That is how she considers the 39-year-old bridge: with affection, and as almost alive.

“It moves in temperature,” she says. “It moves under live load, it moves under wind.” Listen carefully, and you hear it speak: in a distinctive squeal, the bridge keepers’ word for it, caused by traffic on the deck flexing the expansion joints, which have interlocking metal fingers that are longer than a human arm.

“One of the things we talk about is life-cycle costing,” Moolin-Taylor says. “It goes through stages of its life where you have to spend more money on it: when it needs a facelift, when it needs some reconstructive surgery. And then a little bit less when you’re in a maintenance mode. It is a living thing, I can imagine.”

Moolin-Taylor works for Parsons Brinckerhoff, a New York-based firm that designed this bridge and many others. In her role as project manager and engineer under contract to the Rhode Island Turnpike and Bridge Authority, which owns the bridge, she oversees inspections and coordinates repairs. In her 14 years on the job, she has walked over and under (on catwalks) nearly all of the bridge. She has beheld it from land and sea. She has reviewed videotapes divers made of underwater piers, on which rest the twin towers that support the cables that hold the deck.

“Everything has to be protected from the elements,” she says. “And not only the elements, but the beating it takes from vehicles and trucks.”

Joining her on this summer day is Jim Romano, a bridge authority maintenance worker who counts among his duties the changing of light bulbs on the bridge, which is formally known as the Claiborne Pell Bridge, after the retired senator. The bridge has hundreds of bulbs, some for decoration, some for interior illumination, and others for navigational safety, including the flashing beacon on the highest point of the east tower that he is inspecting today. The beacon has two bulbs, an intentional redundancy in the event one fails. Bridge towers and flying machines should never meet.

Like Moolin-Taylor, Romano began his upward journey when he parked his truck in a closed lane where workers were replacing patches of worn concrete deck, the place where rubber literally meets the road. He stepped into the tower through a hatch that looks stolen from an old submarine, then rose most of the way in a creaky elevator with room for just two people of no more than average size. The last leg was up narrow metal ladders that provide passage from where the elevator stops to the very top. The atmosphere was hot and stale, crypt-like, and the light was depressingly gloomy. He climbed a section at a time, pausing to connect and reconnect the safety clips attached to his harness as he advanced. With two clips, he was never unsecured.

“In case something happens –– you passed out –– at least that’ll stop you from falling,” he said, his voice a tinny echo.

You step out of the shaft into a burst of sunlight and good air. You connect your clips to a thin railing, all that’s between you and the water, almost 402 feet below, and your senses are overwhelmed. At this moment, it feels good to be alive; you understand more fully why the keepers love this structure, two miles long. With a main span of 1,600 feet, it is the 70th longest suspension bridge in the world, the 20th longest in America.

Bridges come in many varieties: beam, cantilever, arch, cable-stayed, draw, pontoon, truss and trestle. Some are pretty. Some make artistic statements. But none rivals the classic beauty of a suspension bridge, Newport’s keepers say. When you think grandeur, bridges such as San Francisco’s Golden Gate and New York’s Brooklyn, both of suspension design, come to mind, not something constructed entirely of stone or girder whose spirit is more function than form.

“From an engineering point of view,” Moolin-Taylor says, “we see it as using all of its materials very efficiently. I think ‘elegant’ is the word we would use to describe it aesthetically.” She admires the clean lines of the Jamestown Bridge, a post-tensioned segmental box girder bridge sitting off there in the distance, but she would not describe it as elegant.

“A lot of people would pay big dollars to come up here,” Romano says.

He himself does not as frequently as he desires.

“You try to find things wrong to come up, especially on a day like today,” he says. “You can see everything. It’s a beautiful thing.”

gwmiller@projo.com