I was pretty sure transportation planners were nuts when they hatched the idea of signature arched bridges over the freeway. I kept thinking about McDonald’s, whose golden arches have lured millions of Americans to obesity. I wondered: Why draw attention to the fact that we Iowans are some of the fattest people in the nation?

But the arches are blue, not yellow. Unfortunately, that fact did not spare my imagination of the sight of Mayor Frank Cownie or Councilwoman Christine Hensley dressed in Ronald McDonald clown garb as they cut the ribbons opening the basket-handle pedestrian bridges. It’s still etched somewhere in the recesses of my mind, stuck in there along with the lyrics of songs I really didn’t like but remember anyway. Brandy is, I’m sure, a fine girl. What I’m not sure of is why a song with words like “I fell out of bed, hurting my head from things that I said” so gripped bubbly teenagers that it sold millions of copies, and I want the lyrics to be gone from my head. Rhyme isn’t everything.

As it turns out, the people who insisted on these signature bridges weren’t so goofy after all. I like ‘em. I thought Des Moines would look foolish, trying to mimic St. Louis’s Gateway Arch if not McDonald’s regrettably more recognizable golden arches, or that trying to make a connection with the arches cut into the decks of the city’s river bridges was too subtle to create much of a wow factor. But I find myself looking forward to driving under them, and going out of my way drive over the George Washington Carver Bridge on the new Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway extension.

George Washington Carver’s Iowa connection was important. At age 30 in 1890, he was Simpson College’s first black student. He later transferred to Iowa Agricultural College, now Iowa State University, and after his graduation in 1894 became the college’s first black faculty member. There, he continued plant research that eventually led to the discovery of some 300 uses for peanuts, hundreds more for soybeans, pecans and sweet potatoes, and industrial applications for agricultural plants. That work makes him a big hit with the folks at the World Food Prize Foundation, accessible in a sort of roundabout way by MLK Jr. Parkway and the George Washington Carver Bridge, who list him with Norman Borlaug, Henry A. Wallace and Herbert Hoover as four Iowans who helped feed the world.

How’s that for subtlety?

Naming a bridge after him just makes sense. And then there’s the Edna M. Griffin Memorial Bridge near East Sixth Street, named after the Des Moines civil rights pioneer who organized sit-in demonstrations and picket lines to protest discriminatory practices at whites-only eating establishments. Naming a bridge after a woman who helped bridge the racial divide makes sense, too. It’s a symbol that Des Moines views the contributions of these two African-Americans as important and crucial.

Not just structures with arches reaching to the sky, these bridges stand for something. I’m a sucker for stuff like that. I can while hours away thinking of statements, obvious and obscure, made by the signature structures in our community. And that more worthwhile endeavor crowds out that ridiculous caricature of Frank Cownie and Christine Hensley hawking Quarter Pounders and french fries that keeps invading my imagination.

Beth Dalbey is editorial director for Business Publications Corp. E-mail her at bethdalbey@bpcdm.com.