Bridges, Part Two – The Disconnected Bridge

 

Author’s note: I had fully intended to write and publish this blog entry a week after my first entry in the series. Unfortunately, life got in the way and I have really been struggling with some things lately. Perhaps I will be able to share those struggles in greater detail in an upcoming blog. – Stephen

 

May 2005

It was a warm summery day in early May 2005. The windows were rolled down in my old blue Dodge sedan, and the faded blue headliner, barely held up by safety pins, flapped noisily as the humid summer wind buffeted through the car. I was a man on a mission. As a teenager growing up in the mid-1990s, I remembered reading (along with the rest of my community) with absolute horror of the story of a young couple in their early 20s. This couple had met an untimely demise while stargazing on a rickety old bridge late one summery evening. This couple had become the victims of an evil family who lived in the woods nearby. All these years later, I do not remember the motive, but I do remember the story quite vividly. I remember reading about how the couple had been abducted at gunpoint and taken from the bridge to another location where they were murdered in a double homicide then buried in the backyard. It was such a horrible tragedy that it shook every community within a 60-mile radius of the bridge and as a teenager, it truly opened my eyes for the first time to the evil that humans were capable of. However, that warm summer day, my goal was not to think about the grisly murders, nor was it to visit the site of a crime so grisly that it should have appeared on the “48 Hours” television show. No, my goal was simply to find the remnant of the beautiful old wrought-iron bridge that I had remembered seeing in the newspapers 11 years prior.

Back in those days, Google maps was not even a blip on the radar; in fact, Google was not even a name in the .com industry. These days, one only must type in a landmark, or a place of interest and Google will lead them right to it. Back in those days, we had “MapQuest” and a LaserJet printer that printed pages. So off I set, printed maps in hand, to find the massive old iron structure. Even though MapQuest claimed that the bridge was located less than an hour’s drive from where I lived, I must confess that I made many wrong turns on that day and spent well over an hour just trying to locate the bridge. Finally, I arrived at the bridge and received the shock of my life.

You must understand, the abduction and subsequent murders had taken place 11 years prior to the day that I visited the bridge. The local community was devastated by the sequence of events and had subsequently done everything possible to erase the bridge from their collective memories. At the time that the murders took place, the bridge was still very much open to the public and the country folk who lived in the sparsely populated rule area used the bridge to cross from one side of the river to the other as they traveled between their communities. Following the homicides in the mid-1990s, the road was barricaded to the public, the bridge was condemned, and all the wooden decking except what for remained in the very center of the bridge had been removed.

As my noisy, ever-clattering old Dodge sedan stopped at the barricaded road, I pulled over and ensured that my car was well off the road in a grassy parking area. As I walked down the barricaded road on foot, camera in hand, I was taken by the fact that I was so incredibly isolated. There was literally nothing on that abandoned road aside from the dense forest that bordered both sides of the road. I was truly alone. In some ways, walking down that road alone was symbolic of the way that much of my life had been up until that point. The deafening silence was broken only by the crunch of my shoes as I walked across the disintegrating asphalt. The occasional bird song emitting from the forest served to somewhat lighten up the melancholy and slightly sinister atmosphere. I remember feeling extremely nervous on that day, but I wanted to capture a photograph of the bridge. I was determined not to leave until I had my photographs. Suddenly the abandoned roadway gave way to a sheer drop off, and there it stood before me. It was a magnificent two-span wrought-iron bridge from the turn of the 20^th century. It truly looked like something out of a Gothic horror novel, as vines and kudzu had taken over everything alongside the bridge and had started to take over the structure itself. I got as close as I could and took quite a few photographs that day using the zoom lens on my newly purchased SLR camera.

Disconnected Bridge

With the decking removed, there was no way to walk to the middle of the bridge, as the approaches from either side were totally inaccessible. From what I understood from reading the reports in the newspaper and talking to local people, this had been done to not only prevent vehicular traffic from crossing the bridge but to also strongly discourage any pedestrians from ever walking out on the bridge. The superstructure of the bridge was intact. The amazing ornate ironwork was there. The decking on the middle span of the bridge directly over the river was there. But there was no way to cross the bridge. You were truly disconnected from one side of the river to the other. Unlike the bridge in my first blog post in this series where only my fear kept me from crossing, a lack of physical flooring would keep me from crossing this bridge. This was a much larger bridge. The bridge of my first blog post was a single span camelback through-truss iron bridge as opposed to the bridge in this blog post which was a magnificent two-span through truss bridge. Although humans may have built the bridge many years ago, their abandonment had caused nature to slowly begin the process of reclaiming the bridge for its very own. Indeed, it was not that hard even back in 2005 for one to imagine that nature would completely obliterate the bridge from view within a few years.

Have you ever felt disconnected in a way that made absolutely no sense to you? I felt that way for so many years. My life was disconnected for many years prior to my discovery of Samson. I would dare say that it was even disconnected for my first few years of Samson, as I was not walking the path as I should have been. I am realizing that trauma is a real thing, and so is PTSD. Even if we have endured a lifetime of being told that we are not to feel any emotion nor show any emotion, that emotion is there – within us – swelling to the point where it will someday boil over like an unwatched pot on the stove. Sometimes we don’t even recognize traumatic things in life as being such, but they nonetheless are. Sometimes we have spent so much of our lives being so disconnected, that we are left with no way to truly understand how to begin to bridge that gap – to rebuild the decking of that disconnected bridge.

I remember vividly having a conversation with another Samson guy several years ago. During the course of that conversation, he point-blank told me that he believed I had missed a critical step in childhood while growing up and until I went back and identified and made attempts to recover that critical step, I would never be able to move forward with my life on this side of heaven. A number of years ago, my wife and I were going down to Florida to visit her family one summer. We had stopped to grab a bite to eat, and upon getting back on the interstate, I took the wrong exit ramp. A few minutes into the trip, I started telling my wife that “I believe we have passed these towns before.” She said, “no, I think you’re going the right way.” Now, at that time, I don’t believe that I owned a cell phone that had navigation capabilities as I do these days. Since we had previously made the trip before, we had not felt the need to use a GPS system. But the further that I went, the greater my unease grew. Finally, I pulled over on the side of the highway and grabbed my Garmin GPS out of the glovebox. I powered it on and programmed it with the destination that we were headed to. Sure enough, the Garmin came up and told me to take the next possible U-turn and start going the opposite direction on the interstate. By that time, we had wasted about 40 minutes of our trip, and I remember driving a little faster at that point to make up for the lost time. My wife and I still laugh about that to this day.

Sadly, the critical step that I missed in my own life while growing up cost me far more than a mere 40 minutes. No, that missed step cost me about 25 or 30 years of my life. These past few years have been years of intense self-examination and exploration with the help of my Silas and trying to figure out exactly where I went wrong and where the disconnect in my own life started. It was hard, but I finally over these past few months, wrapped up that self-examination and had my aha moment. I spent much of the years between 2017 and late 2019 unpacking boxes that I had long packed away in the attic of my brain. This was stuff that I did not want to see and stuff that had not seen the light of day for near 30 years. I was left with all of these pieces that I had unpacked; they were lying in front of me and I was in the process of trying to figure out what I needed to do with them and how to reassemble those broken pieces. Then 2020 hit. I know that 2020 was a rough year for every single person alive. For me, it provided the perfect excuse to pack up those pieces and not have to look at them anymore and isolate and withdraw from all in-person meetings. I cannot tell you how damaging that was to all of the hard work I had accomplished over the past few years or what it did to me mentally. Things recently came to a head towards the end of January and I knew that I had to pull those storage boxes back down and begin the process of going through the pieces once more. This time, I was more familiar with the pieces and could identify them more clearly. That is why I was able to have my aha moment recently. I discovered the missing piece of the puzzle from my past, and I knew exactly what damage this missing piece had caused me.

Both my wife and my Silas claim that I spend way too much time living in the past. And they are probably right. Each day, I must wake up and remind myself to count my blessings and to remember that the past doesn’t exist anymore; I live in the here and now, in this very moment. And then I am reminded of how incredibly blessed I am. My Silas told me a few years back after a particularly rough venting session “Stephen, you know how much I love you and I say this in love, but sometimes I wish I could just beat the snot out of you.” Once I had recovered my initial shock, I asked him why in the world he would want to do that. He said, “for one thing, you would be in so much pain in the present that you would forget to remember the past!” When I later told my wife what he had said, she told me “good, I have often wanted to do the same myself!” I suppose that those two were on to something.

Connections are so important in life. They give us cause to live, and they provide a bridge that allows us to move from one area of life to another. Like a solid bridge, they support us as we go over the murky waters of life, giving us a safe passage and allowing us to have a sense of peace. Nearly 30 years later, after discovering Samson and beginning the self-examination process in my own life, I discovered the missing pieces needed to repair the decking of my own derelict bridge. My bridge is a work in progress. Some days are a lot harder than others, and I feel like I am getting nowhere. But other days, I feel like I am so much closer to the other side of that bridge; that, more than anything, gives me hope to continue moving forward. My wife, my friends, my son, my Silas, and my heavenly father are waiting for me on the other side of that lonely bridge, cheering me on and awaiting that day when I can fully bridge the disconnect in my own life. I would love for anyone who wishes to join me on my journey for a while.

One of the recent joys in my life has been to introduce my son to movies that I loved growing up. Last year, we found Benji, you know, the lovable mutt from the 70's and 80's. One night, we were watching a Benji movie from the 80's, and it was one that I don't remember seeing as a kid. The introduction began with a song that nearly moved me to tears, so I looked it up and found it. It goes like this:

So many yesterdays...

haunting my soul today...

Now time is standing still, 

in the tears and the rain

I'll find another spring,

No doubt the birds will sing,

But will never shine, so very bright again...

I had so many yesterdays that haunted me for many years. Maybe you can relate? In a way, I think that we all can. For years, I thought I had missed my chance to shine so very bright. Perhaps I will never shine in the same way I would have once in another lifetime. But there is another spring, and we can find it on the other side of that bridge once it is rebuilt. Someone recently told me that if I hadn't gone through all that I had, I would not be where I am at today. I have to remember that. Everything I went through prepared me for this moment in time to live in the here and the now and to be there for my family in only the way that I can be.

Having taken all of the photographs that I wanted to on that warm summery day in May, I once again climbed into my old trusty blue steed and made a U-turn on the overgrown road that nature was slowly reclaiming. As I slowly drove away, the warm wind hitting my face, I looked into the rearview mirror and bid the bridge goodbye. I have never returned. Unlike other bridges featured in this blog series, that was a place that I never wanted to return to or experience again. Unlike my own bridge in life, that one would never be repaired.

~ S