Down the Road a Piece: A New Bridge

Since 2001 a thousand times on walks I crossed that crumbling concrete asphalt-topped Doc Sargent Road bridge across the creek, maybe 15 feet wide and 18 inches deep at that point, and maybe 50 times I waded beneath the bridge to hunt fossils, once scooping up a crawfish that bit me, a couple of times treading quicksand, and then after a storm one of the two ducts under the bridge got clogged with sand, and at the next serious rainstorm the mild-mannered LaBarque Creek began flooding in a foaming hurricane rush like I'd never seen, tore up stuff, then two years later did it again.

They're replacing that bridge. (Here's my 2018 post with a photo of the old bridge.) Work began in August. At 7 a.m. weekdays they're backhoeing and scooping and whatnot. Naturally I wanted to see, went over and asked a construction worker when they'd finish. He said, "Round Christmas." Here are some pictures. Where the bridge was is a tangle of naked, rusted rebar.

Considering that those toothpick-and-tar-paper new McMansions are built in two weeks from start to finish, they must be building a very good bridge here. Notice the pure-white sand. That's the sought-after St. Peters vein of sandstone than runs in a strip from Minnesota to here, and is still mined today in Pacific.

The Many Moods of LaBarque Creek

A one-lane bridge crosses a one-lane LaBarque Creek up the road just a bit, and I sat on the railing and looked at the dreamlike water, usually crystal-clear but chocolate-gelato-colored because an inch of rain fell the day before, and watched it sparkle in a setting of ultra-rain-soaked greenery, and I sighed because I am so in love with it and it is all I have ever wanted, and because it looked almost like a Japanese painting. I wanted to capture that and show you. Here's also a photo of the little bridge's warning. I sometimes crawl down the bank and when it's passable go hunchback beneath the bridge seeking fossils and crayfish, which survive only in very healthy streams. And I did once scoop up a glassy little crayfish hoping to show it to a friend. With its little toothpick arms it defended itself, pinching the palm of my hand (ow!), making me drop it back into the water.

You can't imagine how as a kid of about eight or nine I pined to sit by streams, to study their creatures, to watch the light on them, to listen to them. Instead I visited a vacant lot and after rains watched a rill that ran into a culvert, and listened to its trickling, and hoped that someday I could have what I have now.