The Footbridge That Beat the Toll Gate

Vance Tolliver had a coffee can wired to his gatepost, and he tapped it twice with one finger before he lifted the chain.

“Twenty dollars,” he said. “Per family, per day. Cash. I’m not running a tab.”

It was a Thursday morning in April, bright and cool, the kind of sky that looks scrubbed after a big rain. My son Easton sat in the passenger seat of my pickup with his backpack on his knees.

Behind me in line was Ardith Pyle in her old minivan, with her three kids packed in the back. I could see her in my mirror. She was already digging in her purse.

“Vance,” I said, “these are the same kids who trick or treat at your porch.”

“And it’s the same hay meadow that got ruined the last time that creek came up,” he said. “Twenty dollars, Tamsin. Or go around.”

I paid him. I didn’t argue. I drove through his pasture on the two-track, through his second gate, and out onto the gravel road where the school bus turns around.

Then I parked and watched in my mirror while Ardith handed over her twenty, one bill at a time. I counted with her. A ten, a five, and five ones.

That was the morning I decided to build a bridge.

The Crossing

I should explain where we live, because people from town never quite believe it.

We are nine houses at the end of a dead-end county road in Pottawatomie County, Oklahoma, east of Tecumseh, back where the blackjack oaks get thick and the red dirt turns to soup in a wet spring.

Between us and everything else is a creek. Most of the year you could step across it in your boots. The county put in a low-water crossing years ago, a concrete slab with culverts underneath, and it did fine for a long time.

On Tuesday night it rained close to six inches. By Wednesday at daylight the creek was the color of chocolate milk and running high enough to roll a round bale.

When it went down Wednesday afternoon, the crossing was gone. Not cracked. Gone. The slab had broken in two, and one half was sitting on its edge forty yards downstream like a tombstone.

There was another way out. You could go north on the section line road, across the cattle guard, and loop around by the highway. It was thirty-one miles, and half of it was dirt that had just taken six inches of rain.

The school bus does not come down our road anyway. It never has. It stops on the gravel road on the far side of the creek, by Hub McCready’s mailbox, and turns around in his wide spot.

So for nine years I had walked Easton down our road, across the crossing, and up the bank to the bus. A quarter mile, door to door. Fourteen kids did the same thing every school morning.

Now the only short way out was through Vance Tolliver’s pasture. His land runs along our side of the creek and wraps around the bend, where there is an old pipe bridge he put in for his cattle trailer back in the eighties.

On Wednesday evening he left his gate open, and every family on our road drove through and thanked him.

On Thursday morning there was a coffee can on the gatepost.