Monday photo feature

While doing some cleaning last week I found a few paddling- or river-related newspaper clippings that I'd decided were worth keeping for whatever reason.  I think I'll share them here over the next few Mondays.

Each summer when I was little, my family would join my parents' best friends' family at the cabin they owned on the Spring River at the resort town of Hardy, Arkansas, a couple of hours from Memphis.  These trips felt magical to me for many reasons--I think I've mentioned in the past that I first got in a canoe at Hardy--but there was nothing I loved more than the old steel bridge, dubbed "the broken-down bridge" by my sister and me because of its rusty, rickety appearance.

This article appeared in Memphis's daily newspaper, The Commercial Appeal, after floodwaters swept the bridge away in December of 1982.

I was no longer a little kid in 1982--I turned 15 that year--but I was still naive enough to believe that I could count on beloved traditions and routines to go on forever.  The demise of the "broken-down bridge" was one of two major blows to that belief I took in '82 (the other being the sale of the beautiful property my summer camp had occupied since 1924; thankfully, the camp's director was able to arrange a partnership that bought the camp and moved it to a lovely location nearby).  Today, a generic concrete bridge spans the Spring River where the old one had stood.