The Bridge at Gregg’s Crossing

Something from the tackle box:

       God blesses those people who refuse evil advice and won’t follow sinners or join in sneering at God.  Instead, the Law of the Lord makes them happy, and they think about it day and night.  They are like trees growing beside a steam, trees that produce fruit in season and always have leaves.  Those people succeed in everything they do.  That isn’t true of those who are evil, because they are like straw blown by the wind.  (Psalm 1:1-4 CEV)

       A good fishing spot isn’t necessarily one where you always catch fish.  In fact, a good fishing spot can be a place where you hardly ever, or even never, catch any fish at all.  A good fishing spot can be a place where you go with a cane-pole just to watch your bobber float on the surface of beautiful water surrounded by lush green trees sheltering chirping birds and fuzzy critters beneath a clear blue sky with white puffy drifting clouds floating around as a backdrop to that hawk making his ‘lazy circles in the sky!’ – Whew!   

       In short, a good fishing spot is a place to contemplate how wonderful living life in God’s magnificent creation really is, despite all of the other flies you may have in the ointment of your life, as many as those may be.  It’s true.  I’ve know this fact about good fishing spots since I was a kid and had such a spot within bike riding distance from my house. 

       I grew up in very rural Barry County, Michigan, on the corner of Price and Thornapple Lake Roads, a couple miles outside of the nearest town.  If you went one mile south on Price Road, a gravel affair with only one other farmhouse in that whole mile long stretch, you came to the corner of Price and Brumm Roads.  If you then turned west on Brumm Road, another gravel country lane, and went a short half-mile, you would come to a place called Gregg’s Crossing, one of those old one-lane wide iron framed bridges paved with wood planking.  It was the kind of bridge that was built all over rural America around the turn of the last century to accommodate the weight of steam powered tractors, motor trucks, and all the other new heavy metal farm equipment that was rapidly replacing the old wooden stuff of the 19^th century. 

After all, it wouldn’t do to shell out several hundred dollars to purchase a new Frick Eclipse Steam Tractor just to have it collapse the old wooden bridge, designed for your one-horse buckboard, on the way from the freight depot to the farm.  No Sir!  Tax dollars would be spent to provide new iron bridges for the modern farmer, bridges capable of safely bearing five or six tons of weight at one time! – But I digress. 

       By the late 1960s, when I was old enough to bike off on my own for an afternoon’s fishing adventure on the Thornapple River, the old iron bridge at Gregg’s Crossing was obsolete and slated for eventual removal.  It was rusty and ragged, it shook when you drove over it, and some planks were missing here and there, which meant that you wanted to proceed very slowly and carefully when you crossed, whether on foot, a bike, or riding in a truck or car.  When two vehicles approached the narrow bridge from opposite ends at the same time, the local driver would always give the right of way to the out-of-towner - just to see if he made it across!  It was a shambles – and it was beautiful!

       It was a beautiful bridge in a beautiful spot, at least it was to my eleven year-old way of thinking.  While not a huge river, and generally well behaved, the Thornapple has enough of a flood plain to keep farming operations several hundred yards away from it’s banks in most places along it’s meandering route.  This created an immense, if narrow, ribbon of primeval forest winding all the way through the cultivated farmlands of the northern half of our county.  It was, and remains, a treasure. The old iron bridge at Gregg’s Crossing was certainly no more attractive than many a thousand other quiet and scenic fishing spots to be found in rural America, but it was an easy bike ride from my house, which made it magical for me.  Being far enough out of town, that stretch of Brumm Road hardly got any traffic at all, a couple of vehicles a day at most, and to sit in the shade of those silent trees fishing undisturbed beneath that bridge, was to be at one with all that was still good and unspoiled in God’s creation – and to hear His voice in what noise there was. 

       If it sounds wonderful that’s because it was.  The bridge at Gregg’s Crossing was special, and you would think that a kid with a fishing spot like that, within a fifteen minute bike-ride of his house, would spend every free summer hour that he had wetting a line in the water under that bridge. – But I didn’t – for a number of reasons.  I liked to watch cartoons on TV.  I liked to swim in our pool.  I liked to play in the hayloft of our barn.  I had other quiet places I could go to and think, and even fish, that I could get too easier than making the bike ride to that bridge.  All of these factors contributed something to keeping me closer to home on most summer days than the bridge at Gregg’s Crossing, - but one factor played a bigger role than all the other deterrents lumped together, - a dang mean dog!

       As I mentioned earlier, there was only one other place on that mile long stretch of Price Road I would take south from my home to get to Brumm Road, the Spratt farm.  Now, the Spratts were good folk and good neighbors, I have nothing but love in my heart for any and all of them, living or dead, that I’ve ever known.  But, - when I was a kid, - they kept the meanest, nastiest old collie-shepherd mix that was ever left un-tethered in a barnyard, to run loose on their place!  And that dog hated a kid on a bike.  That dog would crouch on the front porch of the Spratt place and watch me coming on my bike all the way from the stop-sign a quarter mile to the north!  You could see him waiting, and all you could do was try and pick up enough speed before you got to their driveway to get past the place without getting nipped.  And it wasn’t that easy to do, let me tell you!

the point of no return!

       That dog would time his launch off the Spratt front porch so that his full-tilt mad dash down their lane would bring him out into the road right as your bike was reaching their mailbox.  From there he would badger, bark, snap and bite at your peddling feet, until you cleared the end of the barnyard a good hundred yards further down the road.  That dog was not fooling, he meant business, and he was good at what he did!  Your only hope of escaping without torn jeans or a bleeding ankle, was to peddle like hell so that he had to run on a line parallel with your flight to keep up with you.  If he couldn’t slow up enough to angle in and bite, then you got away with no more damage than short breath and a sweaty t-shirt.  I did not make that ride south on Price Road without feeling well up to it, for it was not an undertaking to be gambled on when feeling weak or unprepared. 

       To take any other route to the bridge at Gregg’s Crossings added over four miles to the trip.  So, when I did make up my mind to fish that spot under the bridge as a kid, I had to run the gauntlet. I sure did hate the rotten mutt I had to deal with in getting there, but that was just the price one had to pay for the rewards that surely awaited the young fisherman daring enough to make the trip.  Looking back, I have to say that it was always worth far, far more than the trouble it took to go fishing at that spot under the bridge at Gregg’s Crossing, – even though I don’t recall ever catching a single fish there. 

 

Something to take home in your tackle box:

       Once it got too dangerous to cross in a car they closed and took out the bridge at Gregg’s Crossing, and it has never been replaced.  That was a good many years ago now.  Approach the old crossing from either end of Brumm Road today and you’ll have to turn around and go back the way you came.  The few people living down there who had need of the bridge now have to go a couple miles out of their way to get into town.  But they had pretty much been doing that for some time now anyway, as the longer way around had been paved years before the bridge was taken out, so it really didn’t make that much difference to their lives.  Property owners at the Brumm Road dead-ends, on both sides of the river, won’t even let you go down and look at the old crossing anymore.  If you want to see my old fishing hole now, you’d better have a canoe.  So it lives on in my mind as a childhood recollection; a little piece of heaven on earth – that one had to pass through a little piece of hell to get to!