Bridge Of Childhood Nightmares

Day 188: You know how it starts: "Back when I was a kid..." Well, back when I was a kid, this bridge scared the livin' daylights out of me every time we crossed it. My uncle Gus was a ranger in this corner of the Park in those days, and occasionally, he'd take us on a day excursion to Ipsut. It felt to me as if we were driving through time to an era when miners worked long hours with pick and shovel in the coal mines of the area, when they went to work on horseback and returned home to meals cooked on enormous wood-fired cast-iron stoves. I half-expected to see them, such were my childhood illusions, and that Gus was a part of protecting one corner of nature from their imagined predations upon the land and its animals elevated him to a position worthy of reverence in my young eyes. The fantasy was compounded a hundredfold when we reached the dreaded bridge over Carbon River Canyon, for in those days it did not have a surface of asphalt, and the gaps between the crosswise timbers seemed large enough for Gus' Plymouth to fall between, were it to slip off the lengthwise boards which served as tire tracks. Gus delighted in winding my mother up about crossing the bridge; by the time we reached it, she was thoroughly petrified, and her anxiety transferred to me in the back seat. And then, just to be wicked, he would drive ever so slowly across, explaining that he didn't want to put undue stress on the structure. I don't recall that I was ever fully in tears by the time we again had our wheels on the dirt road, but I do remember that the bridge appeared in my dreams on more than one occasion in a nightmare of the car falling, falling, falling toward the river 250 feet below. Brave Gus travelled across that bridge repeatedly during his years as a backcountry ranger. How could I not worship him? How could I not wish to follow in his footsteps? But by the time I was old enough to continue his mission at Carbon River, the bridge and the dirt road had both been paved, and the ghosts of the miners had retreated to their tunnels in Melmont, Fairfax, Burnett (lower and upper), Wilkeson, Carbonado. And for me, the bridge is now an old friend.