We all want to leave our mark on the world, especially if we’re in love.
Sometimes, if there’s nothing pressing to rush home to after work (a leaky faucet, a hole that needs digging), I turn off the quick tar road and meander my way back to the house mostly on dirt. Dirt roads are slower and quieter, and on some days I need that.
Not long ago, on a fine summer day, I pulled off the dusty road and parked under the pines next to Hemlock Bridge, the oldest covered bridge in Maine (1857). The slanting sun glowed orange in the long dust-trail kicked up by my car and below the bridge’s 109-foot span the old river ran boney and low, its bed choked with rocks, lilies and weeds. Long grasses waved to the sea in the slow current while hidden beneath, the ever-ravenous pickerel lay waiting.
Hemlock Bridge is a long way from nowhere and I expected no company save crickets, but as I walked up into the shade of the bridge I saw a man silhouetted at the far-end of the arch. He walked slowly toward me, crossing the bridge from side to side, staring at the walls and occasionally bending over and lifting his glasses onto his forehead.
When we were just a few yards apart, he spoke.
“I’m looking for my wife,” he said softly, peering behind the fourth timber on the left. Then he caught me looking and saw my left eyebrow raised as a question mark.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, easing my fear that he was touched. “I carved our initials on this bridge forty years ago, and I just can’t seem to find them.”
He stepped up onto the massive laminated arch that formed the spine of the bridge, his hands gripping the old wood for balance.
“I may have carved them someplace adventurous,” he said, peering up into the dark rafters.
After the man left (his wife, it turned out, was just down the road at their house) I walked slowly through the old bridge, examining beams and cross-braces and poking into nooks and crannies. I found initials, dates, and messages everywhere—hundreds of them—etched into nearly every surface. Some proclaimed the simple existence of a single person in time: Cliff Akers, Worcester, MA, 1946; DT, South Standish, 1876; Leonard Stevens, ‘48. But many—perhaps most—proclaimed the existence of two people, linked by far more than just time: Keith & Jill, 1968; Ty and Becky; Stormy & Susie, ’47. These inscriptions were often surrounded by hearts with arrows through them. At the southern end of the bridge, against the west wall, a girl named Ginger seemed to be on the mind of several local boys, and at the opposite end, I chuckled when I found J&N, 1886—written in ballpoint pen.
While taggers in the big city may rant and rave with their spray paint, disfiguring walls and underpasses with bold, bombastic filigrees, give a country man a few minutes on a summer day and a pen-knife and an old bridge and he’ll more than likely climb up onto a window sill and scratch his dying admiration for a certain girl.
I understand his sentiment and I share his need to shout love with the point of a Swiss Army knife.
Many years ago, when my wife Karen and I had been married for just a decade or so, we drove up the winding road to the top of McClure Pass in the Colorado Rockies. Fall was well underway and at 8755 feet above sea level the trees had turned to gold. We walked up an old woods road through a grove of stately trees, their trunks straight, their dry leaves clicking and clattering in the blue breeze. After a few minutes we sat down on a big boulder to rest. I got out my little knife and walked over to carve my admiration for a certain girl on a nearby tree: Peter + Karen 4-ever.
We’d left our mark.
And I could find that place today—I remember exactly where that tree is. Near the top of the pass, park on the right just shy of the height of land, walk north up the old woods road until you need to catch your breath, and there, just beyond the boulder, you’ll find our names—surrounded by a heart with an arrow through it.
About shoulder-high.
Third aspen on the right.
First published July, 2007