Chuck Neisess
Chuck comes by the table where I’m waiting to hear a story. “Let me go fill my cup, and I’ll come sit down and visit.” He comes back, sits down. We swap a little small talk—the elk were in his yard this morning, just running back and forth all night. He watched them for a while from the pump house, standing there dressed up in insulated coveralls trying, not successfully, to get a good picture. He eases into the story today, settling in before he says, “oh, I thought I’d tell you the story of when the bridge washed out on Highway 2.”
It was February 1974. In those days they would have a raffle for a cake during half-time at the games in town. It was my daughter’s turn to bring the cake for the raffle. We had a lot of snow that year, and then, all of a sudden it started raining and raining and raining. I came down the night before the game and right there at Jack’s Cafe you couldn’t even cross the bridge! Water was already too high. A few of us had gathered around there watching wondering how high it was going to get and all, rain just coming down the whole time. The water was really coming up high, you know. There was an old wooden bridge a little way upstream from that, something they had put in way back to haul across or maybe to get up into Garrisonville. We decided we better go up to see what was happening there.
It turned out, that little old wooden bridge was holding back a huge pile of logs and trees. Great big old logs were just stacking up there holding back an incredible amount of water! We could hear the power of the flood in a kind of rumbling low growl, boulders being rolled and tumbled along the bottom down from the canyon, and that old wooden bridge was just swaying under the weight of it.
Jr. was standing there looking at it and he said, “I’m gonna get some dynamite, and we oughta blow that out of there before it gets any bigger!”
“Oh Jr.! You can’t do that!” everybody said, but there were more trees and stuff coming down all the time and it was building a heck of a dam of itself! So when Jr. gets back from his truck with that stick of dynamite we just watched him walk right out onto that bridge, swaying and bouncing. He just lit it, tossed it up onto the pile, and scurried back out of the way. It wasn’t a long bridge, but he had to make it off of there before it went, so he was running!
There was just a tremendous amount of stuff held up behind there, so, when it blew, that big rumbling boom shook all that loose, and all that water and debris went right down to the highway! Well, course, that was what washed the highway bridge out—boy, that stuff really went! The water came up over the road and washed out both ends of the bridge all the way down to the bottom, so when my daughter called later that night asking for me to come pick her up, I knew they wouldn’t be letting anybody come through there! She parked and walked down to the railroad bridge and all the way down to Lake Creek and back up to the highway where I got her. She had her car, she was driving a ’67 Rebel then, on the one side see, and I had the old station wagon on the other.
By the time we were going in to the game, they had gotten the stream back in its banks and going under the bridge, but the road was just gone on both ends. So we had to climb down a ladder, walk across that washout, climb up a ladder onto the bridge, and the same at the other end of the bridge, down a ladder across the washout and up a ladder back to the road. It was still raining like crazy, and I was carrying that cake trying to keep it kinda dry and not drop it, up and down those ladders!
