Bridge Ices Before Road

Moving westward Selma, I needed to find that wooden bridge again. The one I crossed over the creek feeding the Alabama River. Though a bit unsure, I felt it was the back way that would head me in the right direction toward Birmingham.

Wetumpka, a little speck on the map just outside of Montgomery, was not particularly familiar to me. I recall passing the exits for Wetumpka on I 65 on numerous occasions, never taking. My lack of familiarity with this town created an uneasy, borderline panic. A behavior I developed as a toddler when I was separated from my mother at the mall. My throat tightened, my heart beat faster and my ability to think clearly vanished. I could hear my father's voice in my head, exasperated: 'WHAT WERE YOU THINKING???', knowing full well that I was in fact NOT thinking. Dread and regret can be a bad combination, especially when the sun is disappearing and it is cold outside, and you have a long way to go.

I had on a down jacket but no gloves. My hands were cold and so were my feet: the canvas tennis shoes did nothing to keep my feet warm.

Maybe a recitation of a geography lesson would help. I recalled what I learned in third grade geography. The Alabama River is the product of the Tallapoosa and Coosa Rivers merging, and eventually flowing for many hours south to Mobile, and empties into Mobile Bay. Lovely Mobile. Many miles and leagues away from Wetumpka.

I tried to justify in my mind, as usual, how exactly I got here on my ten-speed bike. I was unable to reconcile anything beyond the obvious. I sometimes had a tendency towards just plain foolishness. A habit of just riding -whether in my car or on my bicycle – exploring and taking in landscapes, lost in my thoughts. I found myself in tight situations simply because curiosity drove me to find where a road or pathway goes. Once in a while, not fully positive.

Snow flurries began just as I found the foot path taking me to the wooden bridge. The temperature was dropping- with no more sun rays to provide warmth. I was not riding the bike - I was walking it to the beginning of the bridge. The frost forming on the grass and dirt crunched under my feet, taking in the cadence of my walk. My earlier panic eased. My toddler separation memory had retreated. Perhaps the effects of the pot I smoked earlier were just wearing off.

I was here! It was a good thing that I was walking the bike instead of riding it: I was too clumsy to actually ride it without falling off and hurting myself. For a moment I hesitated: the snow flurries were accumulating. I recalled with a nervous giggle, the friend from New Jersey who held the false belief that it never snowed in Alabama.

I sighed. "Get along, little doggie," I huffed to myself as a form of self-motivation.

I approached the halfway point of the bridge before I realized I could hear footsteps behind me: the same crunching sound my own feet produced. The sound followed, stepping onto the bridge, as the wooden planks creaked.

Don't turn around, I told myself.

Get on the bike!

Hurry up and pedal!!!

It can be a funny thing: fear and adrenaline. They always tend to cause the natural born clumsiness in me to disappear. Suddenly, I was no longer worried about flailing around.

This was no four-legged creature coming behind me. This was a biped. I sensed confrontation. The footsteps were fast and heavy - the person behind me was breathing with the same rapid fire of a machine gun - not from being out of breath, but from a place of anger.

My great grandfather, as a young man, danced across my mind's eye: he had a frightening experience while in the army during the late 19th century. Not only had he fought in Cuba during the Glorious Little War, but he had also been stationed in the Pacific Northwest. While in the Washington State area, he had been out drinking until the small hours of the morning. As he crossed a wooden bridge on his way back to the encampment, he encountered an elderly woman halfway across. Being a true Southern gentleman, albeit drunk at that moment, he stopped to offer any assistance. She slowly turned to face him and pointed a bone thin finger at him while hurling curse words. As she shuffled away from him, step by step, she faded away and fully disappeared. I spent my life laughing at his ghost story until now. Here was I... on a bridge, meeting a stranger, in the middle of the night....

The footsteps were moving faster. I felt the vibrations from the wood beneath me as my legs wobbled with failure. I tried to move forward on the bridge. Stubborn curiosity overwhelmed me. I looked over my shoulder. There was an old woman dressed in typical clothes for a woman in 1898 and wearing a bonnet. My mouth opened to address her as she approached me, but I could not produce a sound as I watched her pull out a long, sharp kitchen knife from the folds of her long skirt, her bone white fingers curled around the blade. I wondered how she was not bleeding. How was she not slicing her own fingers up? It finally occurred to me that this was The Apparition encountered by my great grandfather all those years ago. A look of dissatisfaction on her ghostly face enlightened me to the fact that she was unhappy with letting my ancestor cross that far away bridge without repercussion.

“SINS OF THE FATHER!!!”, she spat, as she raised the long, sharp blade over her head while moving her grip to the old, wooden handle. Before any reflexes took over, I felt the blade stabbing into my torso and arms and chest, through my blue down jacket. She seemed to plunge the knife into me with the strength of ten young men. Even with the insulation of down, I felt the sharp blade entering my arm, my back, my torso. The initial pain passed through my whole body: but every subsequent assault of the blade felt more and more like bee stings.

I dropped the ten speed and it tumbled into the Alabama River. The currents carried it away. The old woman finally pushed me into those same currents. I felt myself go under the cold surface of the water. Inside of seconds, all went black. Whatever debt owed by my ancestor was surely now paid.