This metal pedestrian bridge, built around ten years ago, with its wooden slats for hiking feet, its orange patina of rusting steel, it's commanding view above the Reedy River ... this bridge has seen a lot of nature's transformations.
The weeds and bushes along the banks come and go with the seasons. The trees on either side go stark and bare in winter, bright and green in spring and summer, and spectacularly colorful in early fall. The river is sometimes calm, sometimes clear, sometimes muddy, sometimes high, sometimes low, and sometimes raging, flooding, destructive.
Over the years, while standing on that bridge, I have observed bits of it all, a river peaceful and serene or wild and dangerous. I have seen the water so low that only the deepest part of the river remained, dark and mysterious, barely moving. And I have seen flooding from heavy rains that raced with tremendous force under that bridge, covering the foreground bank and all the dried weeds in this photograph, along with the first few feet of the trunks of trees, further down where the river bends. At times, chunks of the bank have been torn away, and the occasional bank-side tree has been sucked into the torrent.
From the bridge you can see several hundred feet, both up and downstream. Deer ford the river from time to time, usually too far away to photograph. Ducks and geese forage in the water and have occasionally flown under the bridge as I stood there, trying to capture that interesting perspective but never fast enough to get the photo.
Once, on that bridge, I sneaked up to within just a few feet of a magnificent hawk that was perched on the top rail; it was distracted by movement on the ground below. You may have seen the photograph I got or remember me complaining about being caught unprepared and missing what would have been a far better photograph of the hawk lifting off with those mighty wings right in front of me.
This bridge is a gateway to the main part of the park. You leave your car, walk down the paved path toward the river, start across the bridge, move to either side, lean against the railing, and there it is: the Reedy River, transporting waters of untold history, eons old and replete with stories of which no one person knows the sum, stories that have filled many newspaper and magazine articles and other writings, and stories that have blessed the private memories of those folks lucky enough to spend time along the Reedy River.