Build Bridges Not Bombs

A handmade footbridge once crossed the southern lobe of the pond at Ridges – Hike & Ski Tours.  Otto Hoermann built it from some standing dead elm trunks and pine boards to cross to an isolated, boggy peninsula that looked upon his pondside guest house. He back filled a strip of shoreline to raise it above the muck and placed a bench there for two to sit and enjoy the morning. 

Long since lost to the ooze, the absent bridge cut off access to that view. Eventually mildew, must, and moss swallowed the guest house before we burned the wreckage. During a decade’s disuse, nature’s thicket closed around Otto’s hand-masoned stone wall left standing after the fire. 

Otto, a German World War I veteran, survived unknowable horrors, lost an entire family and engineering career, escaped a spiraling Germany, worked and saved through the Great Depression, faced deep suspicion and distrust from his American neighbors during a second world war. 

His plight reminds me of the first stanza of William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming.”

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

The words of poets past and Otto still speak to me through the vestiges of his West Michigan homestead.  From war, Otto found the strength to emigrate, remarry, to build: this pond, that guest house, a bridge.

Last week, inspired, I decided to fill with conviction to put something good into a worsening world.  I carted retired electrical poles to the concrete block landings still sitting below the moss of that southern lobe of the pond. I set the spans. I felled the ash tree choked to death from the emerald ash borer and split the logs into rough, two foot planks.  I zipped a dozen oak saplings from their stems and cut them into six inch pegs. I drilled and pounded all together without a cent of steel. My hands are rough and my knees ache. I built a bridge.

My bridge creaks and rocks when I walk across it, sounding like the mast of a ship on a turbulent sea letting the voyager know he’s atop the living-killing water, the stretching-disintegrating timber. But my bridge provides innocence temporary respite, I will not drown if I cross it.  I must not be victim to the “blood-dimmed tide” nor a waiter for the Second Coming...