This photo is of a forest path that my buddies and I often explored, hiking along the river and seeking new and exciting camping spots.
Imagine yourself as one of us, tramping through the poison ivy, swatting mosquitoes while trees groan in an overhead breeze that never reaches the forest floor. Birds chatter in the distance, suddenly interrupted by the much closer scolding of a squirrel, balanced on a high branch, feet planted and neck extended as if about to launch himself your way.
And then you stumble to a halt when you come across this, in the middle of nowhere and with no logical reason for being there.
Then, a little further down the game trail, this.
Searching for an explanation, you climb a nearby rise to take the lay of the land. As you part the last willow fronds to peer ahead, this is the scene that is revealed, stopping your breath in your throat.
These current photos are a view of the same area I and my buddies haunted all those years ago, the only difference being that when we were kids, the approach remained intact, allowing us to cross the bridge (however unwisely) on the rotted 120-year-old timbers. Since those days, good sense prevailed, and the approach has been demolished, as you can see.
This is the same bridge that inspired the abandoned railroad featured in the wilderness escape in my book Inheritance, Book Three of The Seekers Series.
And just as I described it in that book, this is indeed a bridge from an abandoned railroad, though not for the reasons purported in Inheritance.
The real story is even stranger.
I won’t go into detail here, though I might at some later date, but the short version of the story is this:
In the middle of the 19th century, two competing railroads wanted to connect the village I grew up in with the adjacent county seat. The regulators, tired of the bickering, told the two railroads that whichever reached the destination first would be the railroad to which the regulators would give their blessing. And the race was on . . . and promptly lost by the builder of the bridge I just introduced to you.
There the ruins remain, lying in wait to surprise and intrigue new generations of intrepid explorers.
If you, like that group of kids who first discovered these forgotten ruins, love intrigue, adventure, and the thrill of an unsolved mystery— then you’ll enjoy The Seekers Series.
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