Sky Time in Gray's River by Robert Michael Pyle

Author:Robert Michael Pyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

BOBBY LARSON MAINTAINS that the chief function of the siding and roof was to make the bridge suitably dark for sweethearts to share a smooch, and so it does. The practical reason for covering wooden bridges, though, was to protect their beams from the elements. The original tarpaper roof, added in 1908, frequently blew off, so a tin roof replaced it. Cables, guy lines, and a central pier followed in later decades.

In 1971 the covered bridge was designated a National Historic Site. The handsome brass plaque announcing this fact was mounted on a two-legged concrete plinth off the north apron of the bridge approach. Not once but twice this pedestal was taken out by teen drivers speeding through the bridge and losing control, ending up unhurt in the field beside the sign's busted base. Remarkably, the two misdirected drivers—their adventures a year apart—were brother and sister. Even plaqueless, the bridge became famous to the point that it was one of the most visited tourist sites in southwest Washington. Hanging from a string just inside the bridge, an informal register of visitors was kept first by Lenore Sorenson and then by Barbara Chamberlain. Its ruled pages carry pen and pencil signatures and comments by covered-bridge buffs and other visitors from all over the country and the world, amounting to some forty thousand pilgrims per year. Of the likely fakes, "Edmund Hillary" was the best.

The setting remained pastoral, and the only available souvenirs were covered-bridge postcards sometimes carried at Rosburg Store and Redmen Hall. When I moved to Gray's River, the bridge had seen better days, and I worried whether it would last. More than once, as county crews grew weary of making repairs and commissioners tired of paying for them, replacing it with a concrete slab looked easier and cheaper—a dull end that has befallen many a covered bridge in Oregon, and all but this one in Washington. One such casualty was the other Gray's River covered bridge, which few people know about. I didn't, until I heard rumors of its former existence at a Grange meeting. Glenrose Hedlund recently gave me an old photograph of the bridge, which crossed the river just upstream from the head of tidewater at the village. It was boxy and unpainted, with a nearly flat roof and cantilevered sides. According to Merlin Durrah, it was the long, steep, curved approach that led to its demise. When heavy trucks became common in the valley, he told me, the county road department just let them rattle and batter the bridge to bits until it was replaced with a colorless modern span.

In 1982 the same late-winter storm that toppled half of the Broken Oak at our place peeled off the top of the covered bridge like the lid of a sardine can. Then, in the great flood of 1986, the raging river tore out the central pier. Fortunately the bridge did not go with it. The pier, built of rough, stony concrete, shaped like a ship's prow, took the brunt of the river's force.

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