THE HAMILTON ROAD BRIDGE

 

My hometown of Wapakoneta, Ohio is stitched together by three main bridges, the Blackhoof Street Bridge, the Harrison Street Bridge and the Hamilton Road Bridge. That’s because although the town itself grew up along the high south bank of the Auglaize River, its surrounding neighborhoods expanded both north and south of that river.

Hamilton Road Bridge
Courtesy of Auglaize County Historical Society

The town was built more or less in the same area where several Native American tribes, headed up by the Shawnees, had a major settlement. It was, in fact, the Council House of the Shawnee Nation. That is, before white settlers reneged on a treaty resulting from the Battle of Fallen Timbers and had them unceremoniously packed off on a grueling exodus that eventually ended in Kansas and Oklahoma, where the now much reduced population of Shawnees is today headquartered under the leadership of Chief Ben Barnes.

I doubt the Shawnees, who considered Wapakoneta a sacred venue, were unaware of the fact that the Auglaize was special. I once read that it and the nearby St. Marys are two of only a few rivers in Ohio that flow north instead of south. And Wapakoneta is where the impetus for this rare phenomenon takes place.

The Auglaize indeed starts out flowing south from its source near Harrod in the next county over. But just as it flows into Wapak—as the name is familiarly abbreviated—the Auglaize bends sharply and runs east to west, smack through the middle of town. After that, it meanders west by northwest, makes a couple of snaking turns through a deep ravine at Horseshoe Bend and takes a long loop through the countryside to the site of the War of 1812 outpost known as Fort Amanda about eight miles from Wapakoneta, before turning more or less straight north to eventually join the course of the Maumee River, that carries its waters into Lake Erie.

Courtesy Auglaize County Historical Society

By the time I was growing up in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, the Native Americans who had lived and thrived on the banks of the Auglaize just a little more than a century before seemed mythical to us. The only signs to attest to their passing were our town and street names—Blackhoof, Logan, Willipie, historic chiefs all—and the arrowheads and stone tools that even today are not infrequently discovered in plowed fields and along the banks of the river. Little did we know that they weren’t legends at all but still a living, breathing people, descendants of Chief Blackhoof, among others, who had remained where the Shawnee diaspora ended up after being driven from this, there sacred land.

Still, for me there was always a mystique about the Auglaize, something that attracted me to its banks and bridges and encouraged introspection. Although the Blackhoof Street Bridge was the unavoidable corridor from practically anywhere to anywhere in our town, the one that I considered “my bridge” was always the one on Hamilton Road.

Like the others, back then the bridge on Hamilton Road was a riveted iron-girder bridge—in more modern times replaced by a far less impressive and less romantic concrete abutment bridge. The old bridge with its iron super-structure seemed so much more of a landmark, more of a venue, a “place to go”, not just to cross. I will sometimes still dream about it, standing on the old wood-plank walkway above the dam, hands folded on the iron railing, gazing up-river toward town, a full moon shimmering on the surface of the pitch-black nocturnal water.

Courtesy Linda Knerr Collection

The Hamilton Road Bridge was also unique in that it was where the dam was (and is), a kind of definitive man-made dividing line between the up-river and down-river segments of the Auglaize—a name sometimes said to be a bastardization of eau glaise (muddy water) which is what French fur trappers down from Canada may have called it, back when they were the only white men sharing the surrounding hunting grounds with the Indians. And indeed in the spring, when it runs high and fast and is fed by clay-laden snow-melt, it does become a rich coffee and cream color. But in the winter-time, when the river freezes solid, the surface often resembles nothing as much as dark green marble under the grey leaden winter sky.

When we lived in a stately old house on the western end of historical Auglaize Street, Wapakoneta’s main thoroughfare, this was the bridge I crossed on foot or on my bike to go to the public swimming pool or to surrounding Harmon Field, the town’s main park, where I would often meet my friends. But the bridge itself was often my destination even then. I fished from it and under it and along the nearby lower banks of the Auglaize beneath the dam.

Flood of 1913
Courtesy Linda Knerr Collection

In flood season it was a scary place to stand in the rain and look down at the roiling water that grew higher by the day, so that the dam was engulfed and the water flowed almost level past it, swamping the banks below it and spilling into fields and backyards. In Ohio’s violent spring-time thaw, the river fairly roared and threatened to wash one or all of the town’s bridges out, sometimes skimming their undersides, but their soundly engineered infrastructure always prevailed—even as it had back in the town’s historic flood of 1913.

When we moved to the other bank of the river, the house on Kelley Drive where my parents lived for the next forty-two years, the Hamilton Street Bridge became my link to the other side of town. In other words, to town proper, the shops downtown, the Wapa movie theater, the soft ice cream dairy bars and the homes of many of my friends. It also connected me with school and with my jobs selling papers, cutting lawns, raking leaves and shoveling snow.

In summer, when the flow of water over the dam waned to where it just remained interesting, my new neighbor Joe, who was my same age, and I would dare each other to walk across the green slime-slippery dam under the bridge from one bank of the river to the other with the water flowing over our bare feet and carrying our shoes and socks in our hands. Joe was more agile than I was—just about everybody was—and as an earlier resident in the new addition known as Oakwood Hills, had had more practice. He would hurry swiftly across with mincing step, arms out for balance, his sneakers hanging from one hand, and then taunt me from the other side as I moved across sideways, shuffling with agonizing prudence from one end to the other.

Harrison St. Bridge
Courtesy Linda Knerr Collection

Falling east would most likely have deposited us unhurt, except for our pride, in the deeper water above the dam—although, truth be told, even that side of the dam was often filled with branches and twisted debris carried there by the spring thaw and hung up against the wall. Falling the other way, however, would almost surely involve injury, perhaps smacking your head on one of the concrete supports of the spillway and falling unconscious into the water to drown. But the consequences were clearly not something we were thinking about—merely enjoying the vertigo of the dare and the accomplishment of completing the entire trajectory without slipping into the drink.

I did fall in once. It wasn’t in summer however, but in winter. Again, for that event, I was with Joe. We must have been about twelve at the time. It was a particularly cold winter and the river was frozen solid enough to drive a truck onto it. But near the dam the ice was never safe. Joe and I were taking a shortcut back to our bicycles over a part of the dam that was merely a floodwall with no spillway. We were both bundled up against the cold and were wearing rubber boots over our street shoes, so I was moving even more gingerly than usual. Joe had climbed up onto the dam wall behind me so was having to follow the indecisive pace that I set.

At some point, he was like last-one-to-the-bikes-sucks-eggs sort of thing, and tried to rush past me on the narrow wall. His shoulder accidentally clipped the side of my head and knocked my horn-rimmed glasses off my face. I kept my balance for a second, but when I tried to catch the glasses in the air, I lost it and went over the wall, breaking the ice and falling through.

The shock of sliding into the freezing water and trying not to be pulled under completely by my soaked winter clothes delayed any panic that might have gripped me. There had been an almost historic dredging operation on the upper segment of the river the summer before and the water was unusually deep. But I was a strong swimmer, and keeping my head, I was able to find my way back out through the same hole I’d fallen through. I struggled back up onto the dam wall, dragging with me what felt like gallons of water that had filled my boots and soaked into my heavy wool coat.

I had lost my glasses and all I was thinking about was punching Joe in the nose, but by the time I regained my composure and sat panting on the flood wall, he was nowhere to be seen and his bike was gone. He had evidently panicked and taken off, maybe, I thought, to find help. I couldn’t blame him.

Heavy with freezing water, my coat was rendered useless. It felt warmer without it, so I threw it over my handlebars and pedaled home with water squishing out of the tops of my boots. By the time I arrived, I felt like I was freezing. In fact, my shirt was stiff with ice crystals.

I was grateful that my mother, Reba Mae, wasn’t home. She couldn’t swim and was deathly afraid of the water. She was always warning me, when I said that whatever body of water I was swimming in “wasn’t deep” that “a person can drown in six inches of water.” I was alone in the house, with my father working and both my sister and brother off who-knew-where. I hid my clothes to let them dry in a corner of the basement that my mother wasn’t likely to visit.

I told Reba Mae later that my missing glasses had fallen out of my pocket. She said that they should have been on my face and reminded me that eyeglasses “didn’t grow on trees.”  I never mentioned the incident to her or anyone again. Nor did Joe and I ever talk about it. We just avoided each other for a week or so and then took up our friendship where it had left off before we climbed onto the wall of the dam.

In my early teens, the bridge on Hamilton Road became the place I went at night when I wanted solitude. It started out just being the place I went to smoke. I’d taken up the habit tentatively at twelve, when I would pilfer cigarettes from my father Whitie’s pack. Shortly, however, I started buying them myself, telling the local grocery store owner that they were “for my dad.” I eventually figured out that I needn’t make up a cover story, because just about any gas station or grocery in town would sell them to me no questions asked whether I said they were for Whitie or not, so I no longer had to smoke the filterless Pall Malls that he favored. But I needed a place to smoke them so my mother wouldn’t find out.

The bridge after dark was the perfect place. Stand by the rail and smoke, then toss the butt into the water when you were done, or if somebody came along whom you were afraid would squeal. The town had no police curfew back then and after I started working part-time at age twelve, my parents didn’t impose one on me either, as long as I was back before eleven.

That interval there between ages twelve and fifteen was not a good one for me at home. There were all the normal pitfalls of early adolescence combined with an extremely stormy relationship with my father. Whitie was sick and I couldn’t understand it. We were constantly either at each other’s throats or not speaking at all.

If he’d had heart disease or diabetes it would have been easier to comprehend. But he suffered from mental illness. And in the mindset of those years, being mentally ill was seen as somehow phony, an excuse for not manning up and doing what you had to do. But poor Whitie had done more than should be expected of anyone, spent the last three years of World War II in front-line combat zones, then came home, started a business and provided for a family from the outset. At some point, something had broken inside of him. If he had externalized it, it would surely have been manifested as a large and gaping wound, a horrific running sore that never closed. But since he carried it on the inside, I, for one, couldn’t see it. And being a typically self-centered teen, I figured it was just that he didn’t love me and clearly didn’t approve of me.

So I rebelled and spent a good deal of time feeling sorry for myself. The bridge was a great place for it. I would stand there smoking cigarettes and watching the black water slide over the dam. I’d gaze at the night sky or watch the lights of Wapakoneta and the moon play on the breeze-riffled surface of the Auglaize. I’d stand in the rain and enjoy getting drenched, or in the snow and turn my face up to try and track the course of snowflakes as they fell. A few times, when I was feeling reckless, I even scaled the girders and used the upper part of the bridge as my observation point.

I thought about the books I was reading—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Steinbeck and Salinger—and wonder what their protagonists would do. I wondered how old I needed to be to join the merchant marines. I wondered whom you had to know to become a drummer in a traveling circus band. I thought about the stories I would write, and the jazz clubs in New York and Chicago where I was sure I would play, sooner than later. I thought about traveling the States and traveling the world. About going away, far away. The further the better. And the sooner the better.

And then I thought about Whitie, and wondered why I wasn’t enough. Why he didn’t love me. Why he couldn’t be supportive of what I wanted to do even though it wasn’t what he would have preferred I did. I wondered, mostly, why he couldn’t just be happy. Was I so awful that I was ruining his life, that he could never seem to be proud of his son?

It would take decades for me to comprehend that what I did or didn’t do had little or nothing to do with Whitie’s state of mind. He was off on his own road. He was just coping as best he could with his own tortured mind and no amount of striving on my part was ever going to make him happy. The bridge was the confidant I talked to about all this, the holder of my doubts and secrets, the place I went to feel solid and grounded beneath its girders.      

Now, when I periodically return for a visit to my home town, the journey is never complete without a walk to the Hamilton Road Bridge. I like to stand there a while, hands folded on the railing, and remember all the people I knew, and the ones I still know. I remember both the joys I celebrated and the heartbreaks I sought to quash there. I remember the dreams I entertained so long ago and think with satisfaction about the ones that, one way or another, have come true, and try to contemplate without regret the ones that haven’t. Often I think of Whitie, and hope he’s having a much happier life wherever he is now.

Even now, that bridge remains, in my mind, much more than a practical piece of engineering over which to travel from point A to point B. But it is indeed a bridge, a unifying link between my past and my present, between one world and another.