Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [121]
The sun came up bright and piercing over Cabbage Bend. The glare was painful. By mid-morning, we had reached the railroad trestle at Highway 17. Fortunately, the river had flooded the banks and now flowed across the road. The water covered the concrete columns of both the trestle and the bridge and was washing through the huge gears that turned the trestle. An orange light was flashing quietly at the top. Beyond the trestle was an old fish house. It sat up on stilts and two old cars had always been parked beneath. Draped in fishnet and made mostly from cedar logs, the house was octagonal and shot full of holes. If the cars were still there, I couldn’t see them, because the water had reached the underside of the floor. Every few seconds a wave would reach the house, rise up through it and send water streaming out the bullet holes. A deer carcass had become wedged in the rafters beneath the house, its head bobbing with the water. An alligator was locked onto the hind quarter of the carcass, spinning and ripping off large chunks.
Above us, wedged into the gears of the trestle, was a black pig carcass. Its legs had been crushed or cut off, eyes gouged out, one tusk had been broken off, its stomach was bloated and ten trillion flies were swarming the air around it. The air beneath the bridge was thick with dirt daubbers by the thousands, pigeons, purple martins, and the sound of chimney sweeps—though I didn’t see any.
I paddled slowly, watching the water around me as much as in front of me. A dragonfly sputtered next to us. A second later, a fish popped it from beneath, flipping it over where it lay motionless—belly up.
We slipped by Scrubby Bluff, where the water had flooded the marsh and spread around us for miles. The old homes built on the bank—those built before code required stilts—sat flooded with water flowing in the kitchen windows and out the front doors.
Before us, the river wound south, then turned back hard north and ran due east under the bridge at the interstate. I hugged the Florida bank for almost four miles and cut into Miller’s Creek when it opened on my right. It carried us away from the main flow of the river, maybe close to a mile to the Florida bank where the pines rose up. We hugged the bank, padded with pine needles that muffled the sound, and then slipped along the rocks that formed the foundation for the interstate. Flashing lights lit the apex of the bridge. There were men on top with what looked like cameras, and men in uniforms were directing traffic on the southbound lane. They’d closed off one lane, causing what looked like a nasty traffic jam north of the bridge. I brought the canoe up under some trees and tied her off, thinking. Above me, on my right, some thirty feet up the bank, sat the interstate. We had maybe a hundred yards to go before a hard right turn would shoot us under the bridge. If they had people under the bridge, they’d be on the Georgia side, because the Florida side was too narrow. No place to stand.
People used the bank beneath the bridge at I-95 for all sorts of purposes, most of which weren’t legal. Trash covered the bank, outlined with palmettos, tall dead oaks and a sandy beach, and at the far end sat a stone circle around a much-used campfire. In the sky north of us, along the highway, towered a sign for a truck stop and cheap gas. It was a landmark we could see for four miles before the bridge and five miles after. If you were with a slow group, you could paddle nearly a whole day in the shadow of that one sign.
I tied off and found myself dozing. I don’t know for how long. The crumple of metal and the shattering of glass woke me. I looked up and saw a small plume of white and black smoke. The men standing along the bridge stepped away from the rail. I didn’t wait. I pushed out of the trees, pulled hard on the paddle and sprinted. I paddled fifty yards. Then seventy-five, and finally, when the water opened up on the right, I cut hard