The Footbridge That Beat the Toll Gate

The Pipe

I called the pusher at the yard in Seminole that night. I did not name the job I wanted it for. I just asked what he’d take for six junk joints of four-and-a-half and whatever broken rig mats he had out back.

“What are you building?” he said.

I told him.

There was a long pause. Then he said, “Give me the address.”

At seven o’clock Saturday morning a winch truck came down the section line road the long way, mud to the axles, with six joints of drill pipe chained on the bed and two laminated oak rig mats stacked on top. A second truck was behind it with two more mats, one of them busted.

The driver of the first truck climbed down and shook my hand. He had driven forty minutes on his day off.

“Pusher says no charge,” he said. “Pusher says his grandkids ride a bus too.”

Behind him, the second driver was already unchaining the mats. He was a big quiet man with a gray beard, and he never told me his name all weekend. I never asked. He just worked.

Saturday

If you have never seen a rig mat, picture a giant oak raft. Ours were laminated, three layers of hardwood bolted together, eight feet wide and fourteen long. Each one weighed close to two tons.

They are made to hold up a drilling rig on soft ground. They would hold up a footbridge without even noticing it was there.

The winch truck backed down to the bank on our side, and the driver set the first mat on the flat rock above the high-water line. He did it so gently it barely made a sound.

Then he took the long way around, all thirty-one miles, and set the second mat on Hub’s ledge on the far bank. Hub stood beside it with his hands in his pockets and nodded once.

By then word had gotten around, the way it does at the end of a dead-end road.

Ardith came down with a thermos of coffee and a sack of sausage biscuits. Two of the dads from up the road came down with a generator and a cutting torch. The grandmother who is raising her grandson came down with a lawn chair and sat in it and supervised.

The kids came down too. They sat in a row on the bank like birds on a wire and watched.

The Stringers

We laid four joints of pipe across the creek, side by side, about sixteen inches apart. They reached from mat to mat with room to spare.

Getting them across was the hard part. A joint of four-and-a-half drill pipe weighs a little over five hundred pounds. You do not carry it. You float it.

The winch truck held one end on our bank, and two of the men waded in up to their thighs in that cold brown water and walked the other end over to Hub’s side, where his tractor and a chain took it the rest of the way.

Four times. It took all morning.

Easton stood at the edge of the water the whole time with his hands balled up at his sides. Every time a joint swung, he flinched.

“Mom,” he said, when the fourth one was set, “is it going to hold?”

“Ask Hub,” I said.

Easton yelled it across the creek. Hub cupped his hand to his ear and yelled back, “It’ll hold a cow, son. It’ll hold a cow standing on another cow.”

All the kids on the bank laughed so hard one of Ardith’s boys fell off the log he was sitting on.