Settles Bridge

Settles Bridge

This is Settles Bridge at its inauguration in 1896.

This is the bridge when I knew it in the early 2000’s. It was abandoned in the 1950’s when the wood rotted away.

I have always been fascinated with bridges. When I was a boy I had this wooden train set that could easily be put together in an unlimited variety of configurations. I would build the bridges up really high and then I would stack books up to lift the wooden pieces up even higher and make bridges over bridges. Sometimes I would pull two tables together over my double decker bridge and run a third bridge over the top to make a three tier marvel. I would call my mother into the room to behold my creation and then with all the spontaneity of an 8 year old, I would throw my body fully into it, sending the pieces all across the family room. My mom would put her hands on her hips and shake her head saying “oh Patrick, what am I going to do with you?”She still says this to me all the time.

When I was a little older my mother would sometimes take my sisters and I to the library, where I would spend an hour staring at the VHS tapes about earthquakes. We would take them home and I would sit directly in front of the television, my face right up next to the screen, and I would watch the parts of the videos where the bridges would collapse onto each other or into rivers. I would stare at them with a reverent fear and awe. I still get a little nervous whenever I cross the Willamette River on one of the many bridge in my current hometown of Portland, OR. I stare over the side and I imagine those tapes, my face inches from the screen, and the bridges twisting and writhing as invisible waves magically tear them to pieces.

There are a few bridges that I have encountered in my life that have had a lasting impact on me. The Steele Bridge in Portland, The Williamsburg Bridge in New York City, The Krog Tunnel Bridge in Atlanta, Georgia with all of its incredible graffiti art. None of these have had the impact on the person I am today as Settles Bridge though.

I discovered Settles Bridge in the summer between 8^th and 9^th grade. That was a strange year for me because I had just switched from a small private school to a large public school, my parents’ divorce was still an impact on the family, and my mother was still recovering from a nearly fatal brain tumor a few years prior. I was at the far end of the transition from boy to teenager and in that time my life had gone from a sheltered, over-protected childhood to having all the freedom I could want due to forces that nobody would have wished for or expected. During those years I felt a lot of pressure to be strong, to not let my anxieties add to the stress of my family, and so I internalized my fears. I was lost, and scared, and felt very alone.

Scottie Miller was a new friend of mine that summer. He had recently dyed his hair blue and it swooped freely across his forehead, while standing spiked in the back. In hind sight he looked like an alien who was a big Flock of Seagulls fan in the 80s and had not quite gotten with the changing of times, but we both thought it was “punk”. Scottie was tall for 15, fair skinned with freckles, and always in cut off shorts with a belt that had spikes on it. I looked more or less the same, minus the freckles. My hair was dyed green, and I kept it short and un-styled.

We lived in the town of Suwanee, Georgia, which is about 30 miles northeast of Atlanta. My family moved to the area in 1990 and at that time it was a small rural community. The town was split by a railroad track and filled with quaint, Victorian era homes and speckled with small cornfields and horse pastures. If you go there today you will find that the old used bookstore is now a Wal-Mart, the narrow roads widened to twice the size they were, and the old shack that once got destroyed by a tornado and sat derelict for years is now an elaborate town square, complete with an amphitheater and surrounded by subdivisions as far as the eye can see.

In July of 2000, when Scottie told me he had heard about this tall bridge where you could jump into the Chattahoochee River, Suwanee was somewhere in the middle of that transition. We were skateboarding at a little gazebo; probably practicing kick flips off the side and trying to stay aboard as we landed on the gray cobblestones.

“Who told you about it?” I asked, somewhat self-conscious about his abundance of friends compared to my lack.

“ I was watching John Addington and Mark Walker have band practice yesterday and they told me they used to jump off of it sometimes. He said it is really scary, like 80 feet high.” Scottie said, emphasizing the fact that he had been hanging out with older and much cooler guys.

“Oh,” I said, ignoring the obvious jab at my pride. “So how do we get there”I asked.

“Well you know that neighborhood way down Suwanee Dam Road? The one where Nick Kreps weird girlfriend lives?”

“Yeah,” I responded, as I kicked my skateboard up and leaned it against the white lattice siding of the gazebo.

“So apparently at the very back of that neighborhood there is a dirt road, about 2 miles long. You have to drive to the end of that and then walk down a trail about another half mile and then you are there.”Scottie said.

It was a hot day. The summers in Georgia often stay in the upper 90s or lower 100s for weeks at a time, on good days the air is more dry and thick with pollen, on bad days it is humid beyond belief and the sweat drips down your arms and legs leaving your skin sticky and your clothes stained. This was one of the bad days. It was still the early afternoon and the sun was close to its pinnacle. We had exhausted ourselves skating and were ready to not only wash ourselves in the cool river, but to a larger extent, go exploring.

We convinced Scottie’s dad to drop us off at the back of the neighborhood. He wanted to come with us down the trail but he could tell from our very facial expressions that it was not going to happen. We insisted that we would be safe and that we would call him to pick us up when we were done. He was hesitant but Scottie’s father has always had a sort of boyish quality about him and I think he knew that he shouldn’t stifle the independence of a 15 year old.

 “Are you sure it is down here? I mean, what if Mark was just messing with you, those guys do that kind of stuff all the time” I said, as we marched down the winding gravel road, the trees casting tall shadows around us on both sides.

“They don’t lie to me,” Scottie sounded offended “they are my friends.”

“No, I am your friend” I said, taking on the tone of an instructor as I often did when I felt threatened “those guys just make you feel good about yourself because they are 20 and know that kids like you and I will look up to them and that makes them feel better about themselves.”

“Or maybe they just like me” Scottie said, defiantly.

“Or maybe they just don’t have any friends their own age.” I said, beginning to feel a mix bag of emotions rising up inside me.

Scottie sat silent for several paces, looking down at his feet, “This is taking forever, lets race to the end, readysetgo!” he said, taking of in a cloud of dust from the loose gravel below his feet. Scottie could never handle conflict very well. He would stand stubborn as a mule leading up to the conflict but the second the argument hit full on, he would run away as fast as he could, sometimes literally.

I sat back in the cloud of dust, never adjusting my speed at all. I wanted to race him, I hated losing, but I knew he was faster. “I don’t want to race,” I said out loud, but he was too far away to hear me. I walked the rest of the way down the road in silence. There was a mockingbird in the trees. A robin would call out “cheep cheep, cheep cheep” and the lower voiced mocking bird would respond “cheep cheep, cheep cheep”. Then from behind me an old swallow would sing “twirlooo twirlooo” and again the mocking bird would reply, the little liar in the woods.

 We reconvened at the end of the dirt road. It opened into a sort of cul-de-sac and there were tire marks from where cars had been, but it was vacant that day. Scottie had already gone ahead of me and scouted the trail. “Its way less than a half mile to the end,” he said as we jogged down the dirt trail over roots and under branches, “it only took me like a minute to get down there, listen you can hear the river from here”.

Once we got to the bottom of the trail, we found a small riverside beach. The sand was soft and the sun shone right onto it, radiating the whole area like a natural oven. We set our bags on a fallen tree to keep them out of the sand and stripped down to just our bathing suits. A few paces upstream from the outlet of the trail was the bridge. I later learned that it was abandoned in the 1950’s and the woods had long since reclaimed any roads leading to it on either side. At one time it was black iron, but the elements had rusted it fully so that it was a rich, dark red that matched the Georgia clay in which it was planted.

To get to the top we had to climb a precarious pillar of interwoven metal rods. Scottie went ahead of me and I followed the handholds and foot grips that he found as he went up. “I heard that a 10^th grader died out here last summer.” Scottie said as he felt his way up the creaking, metal structure “Mark said that a couple of times a day the Buford Dam will let a bunch of water from Lake Lanier out into the river and it comes rushing down really quick. He said that this kid jumped just as the water was rushing in and he was swept downstream.”

It sounded like a myth to me, but I couldn’t help but wonder about it as I pulled myself up to the top, stretching my arms out to gain my balance before proceeding a two foot wide beam for a length of about 20 feet. Scottie skipped across like a gymnast, it wouldn’t have surprised me if he had done a handspring on his way. I was less agile, stopping here and there to readjust my footing, and finally taking the last four feet in a desperate jump to the safety of the much wider stone pillar that Scottie now stood on.

“Do you think that is true?” I asked as we sidled along the two thin beams that made up the bottom of the bridge. Our hands were behind our backs, holding on to thick cables that ran parallel to the beams our feet were on.

“Do I think what is true?” Scottie asked

“The thing about that guy drowning out here. I mean, do you think that the dam really lets out sometimes and floods the river like that?” I said, as the realization of what I was about to do crept up in my mind.

“It is probably true,” Scottie said “but I think there is a sound when it happens. Like a horn blows or something. I am pretty sure we would know if it was happening.”

I wasn’t sure if I believed him or not but I knew that if I was going to jump, I had to do it quickly or else I would never do it at all. Scottie and I were fearless back then, though perhaps it was our youth that made us unaware of our mortality, or perhaps it was just our way of spitting in the face of a universe that at the time seemed to be out to get us. I stared down at the flowing river thirty-five feet below me; I felt a soft breeze rustle through the trees. I looked at Scottie and he looked back at me, and without warning I jumped. I clenched my teeth and as my feet left the platform I felt suspended in time for just a moment. Somehow my life was a snapshot and I knew that I needed to remember that picture. There was no ground beneath my feet and the chaos felt like the only thing that made sense. It felt like freedom. Then my body splashed into the icy cold water and I began instinctually swimming against the current toward the shore. Simultaneously laughing and shivering and nearly drowning I crawled onto the sandy shore and let beads of water sizzle off my body in the 100 degree summer heat.

Once I regained my composure, I noticed that Scottie’s hooting and hollering had stopped. For a second I thought he had jumped too but then I noticed he was climbing up the poles that led to the very top of the bridge. Scottie was never one to be outdone by me. Before long he was standing at the top, with nothing to hold on to. He was staring down at almost 60 feet of open space between him and the water. He was too far away for me to see his face but I could imagine he was giving me a mischievous grin and then he was off. Arms flailing in the air, silent until the last second when he allowed a single “uuggh!” just as his body submerged into the flowing Chattahoochee.

Word spread quickly among our friends about the bridge. I am sure that people have been jumping off of it pretty much since it was built but for Scottie and I we were pioneers of our generation. Before long, it seemed, Settles Bridge became a crowded place where the after school politics of teenage life were played out. We would find our friends there as well as our enemies. We would bring girls there so we could look brave in front of them as we jumped off. One time in the 11^th grade we went down to the bridge on a foggy night after sneaking out of our house and we brought our friend’s younger brother, Mike with us. He was in 8^th grade and the same age as we were when we discovered the place. We enjoyed, it must be said, the respect and gratitude we got from hanging out with someone much younger than ourselves. Mike climbed up into fog that was so thick that we could not see him on the bridge, nor could he see the water below him from where he was standing. All we heard was a splash. It is hard for an 8^th grader to impress an 11^th grader but I will always consider that one of the bravest things I have ever witnessed somebody do.

Life was hard in high school. Being a teenager is complicated and overwhelming. I haven’t been a teenager for almost 10 years but the memories of the anxiety and depression that I felt for much of those years is still palpable. I am not sure anybody even knew how messed up I felt back then because I always did my best to hide it and stay as stoic as possible. Things were always different when I was on the bridge though. I felt like I belonged up there. Climbing up the poles and balancing across the beams, my life literally in the balance, never bothered me. All day at school, during the warm months, I would daydream about when I would be out there on the river and I could feel my toes on that rusty iron again. The only thing that seemed to make sense and make me feel like I belonged in the universe was when I was floating in midair, arms stretched out to grasp at nothing.