The Bridge

THE BRIDGE





“M t-t-truck fell through the b-b-bridge!” I was seated atop the community new center – the ice cream cooler at Paris’ garage in Centerville, Pennsylvania. It was the late nineteen sixties, this news worthy event was one of many indicating change was on the horizon for our culture. The stuttering speaker’s cement truck had been swallowed by the steel bridge. The community centerpiece was ruined. We talked for weeks, wondering why he ignored the weight warning signs. Although it was suspected the school buses with their cargo of squirmy noisemakers exceeded the new restrictions, everybody knew better than overtax the only alternative to a long detour. The accumulated toll of high water and rusty rivets had made a temporary gravel roadway through the creek necessary before. Yet another sluice pipe and gravel “bridge” was installed, this one with a longer life span than others whole the wheels of politics ground ever so much slower than ours.

I ran to see what a cement truck partially swallowed by a bridge looked like. It was awesome. I can’t imagine what the plunge must have felt like. Was it a slow descent accompanied by the screech of rending metal, like our high school band? Or was it more like the sudden bang of a neighbor’s silo falling into the state road, a canon ball plunge from a piling into the swimming hole? The view was comic. The truck stood on the rear discharge chute in the creek, its radiator in the air. With the front wheels clinging to the torn floor grating, its posture looked for all the world like a seated dog begging for a biscuit.

The concrete company offered to repair the bridge. The state preferred to spend tax dollars, knowing people had made sacrifices to fill the coffers and would be disappointed to think they had been overlooked. With the expediency of a moving glacier, progress provided us with a new bridge.

The steel bridge did more than cross Bentley Creek. Mileage was measures from the bridge in each set of directions given to visitors. We discovered who was dating as they sat on the railing. It was a Halloween refuge for window soapers when dogs gave chase. It was our “dock” for fishing and swimming, the first comers each day deciding if it was a fishing hole or swimming hole. Fishing was better in dry years as trapped fish retreated to the few wet spots in the creek bed.

The creek once lifted the bridge as it stuffed a house underneath. The abutments eroded every time the water rose. Township trucks would pour gravel dredged from the creek over the guard rails to fill the washout. The bridge eventually bowed itself in final surrender to the creek. I returned from college and introduced my bride from the city to country living in time to witness this emotional moment. In fact, we were the last Centerville folk to cross the bridge during the flood that won.

Things change. At a time when our national culture was being re-sculpted by protests, moral revolutions, and war, our local culture was under attack. As the railroads, hydroelectric projects, super markets, and super highways had done in other localities, progress employed a ribbon of concrete to help us cross over into a new era. They replaced the steel bridge. Window soapers have no refuge. Dating couples no longer sit on the railing. Inner-tubed swimmers and fishing poles are gone; the water runs shallow under the new bridge.

Bridges span time as well as creeks and rivers. We find something on the other side; sometimes it is thought to be better, but not always. Bridges get crossed, burned, over-burdened and replaced. When they do, it so often happens that more than a landmark is left in the past.