Much like a camera captures an instance of color with the press of a button, I had expected that writing the description of that same instance would also be a snap.
The road ahead made a perfect bend, creating the perfect mystery and suspense for a tale. As cliché as it may sound, a bit of eerie fog began to slowly close in on the road at the curve, flowing from the trees with a predictable spookiness.
Behind me, the road had been straight and flat, and the little narrow highway bridge had reminded me of a time long before, back in the past when I was working on a road crew as a flagman along a similar bridge on the edge of a similar forest, and it was a bridge with a similar sense of impending danger.
That particular bridge within my memory happened to have been located in between a forest of pine trees and a paper mill, so that all day long the narrow bridge trembled with the force and weight of the massive logging trucks which thundered across it. Being paid by the load, there wasn't much that could slow these log trucks down during business hours, and stopping one of these heavy rigs was both difficult and costly for these big timber drivers.
Watch for Falling Logs
Walking along that bridge on our first day at the site, we had noticed that there were dozens of freshly-cut logs laying in the ditches around us, and as another truck full of bouncing logs went screaming past, we knew that we were in a dangerous situation. These truck drivers were not slowing down for anything, and we all laughed as the crew chief handed me a little red flag on a stick: my job would be to stop the trucks when needed, and to slow them down if possible.
The flag language was simple enough: ”The flagman’s flag held straight out means STOP, and a 45 degree angle downward means SLOW... “
So it was that for a few days I found myself standing on that narrow bridge with that little red flag, doing my best to both slow down traffic and stay out of the way, when one day a voice crackled from my walkie-talkie. It was the other flagman down the road, and his voice sounded urgent:
”This one’s not slowing down!”
I had been assured that all of these truck drivers knew and understood the language of the flagman’s flag, and as I held mine out at the correct 45-degree angle, I saw a faded red log truck coming towards me with fierce intent and a deep steady bellow from it’s engine. I stubbornly held my flag-- even adjusting it to the STOP position-- but the passing truck’s grill whacked it hard, nearly knocking the flag's pole from my hand.
The Crew Chief
I need to mention the crew chief here. He was a guy they called LC, and he’d surveyed all over the USA from Maine to the California coast, yet nobody knew much about him otherwise.
LC had the face of a hatchet, and upon his thickly corded red neck was a short stubble of reddish beard, a growth which then climbed and finally protruded from nearly every inch of this narrow chunk of skull that was his head. His blue-grey eyes were in there somewhere, darting with keen discernment, and they caught you like a hawk when they caught you. Me and the rest of the crew looked up to LC because he was taller than the rest of us for one thing, but also because he was plain scary in every way, and he just looked crazy as hell.
The Right Tools for the Job
The logging truck passed me and I spun hard with my freshly-violated flag, just in time to see LC pop up out of the ditch and-- with the greatest of ease-- he lofted a small sledge hammer into the truck’s front grill as it passed.
At once, a huge billow of black smoke shot from the truck’s smokestacks while the brakes were hit hard, causing the back wheels of the empty trailer to bounce and skip on the pavement for an extraordinarily long time, and with smoke from the barking tires now joining the curling draft behind the trailer, the rig finally came to a stop with a shudder.
As the smoke cleared, we watched as the driver opened his door and swung down to the ground holding a tire tool in his right hand, and without hesitation he began marching towards us with bad intent.
We were land surveyors. To clear brush along a line we would often use a long-handled kaizer blade for the bigger thickets, but for everything else we carried machetes in sheaths right there on our belts with our plumb-bobs, just as a matter of course and habit.
LC quickly drew his machete from it's canvas scabbard, and then for a tense second he must have also pierced the approaching truck driver with a single telling glance from that face that he wielded, because the driver stopped, turned around, and got back in his cab, shoved it into gear and took off down the highway.
We went and found LC’s sledge hammer, whereupon we all went back to our peaceful land surveying, and we eventually wrapped up that job and went home, surrendering the bridge back to the logging trucks.
For this post I was planning a writing exercise wherein I would imagine a visual scene and then try to write about it, but I got completely distracted with that real-life bridge story. I was going to title this article something like ‘How to Write About Nothing’, and it would have involved the development of a fiction story beginning with the description of an imagined scene, just to see where the words would lead. They led here!
All photos above thanks to Wikimedia free images
