THE OLD WOMAN ON THE BRIDGE

This Fall, my wife and I ventured into a driving trip through several western states. We spent a few days in an old Montana town along the upper reach of the Missouri river. With its 1882 hotel and store fronts, including a saloon with a bar worn from a century of bent elbows, it stepped right out of a John Wayne movie.

One morning, a heavy fog quilted the area. We decided to walk along the banks of the river to an old metal bridge spanning the Missouri. The bridge, completed in 1888, was designed to lead from the far bank to the "downtown" stores to facilitate trade. Now, it serves only for pedestrian traffic and curiosity.

We walked onto the bridge and its floor of wide wood planks spaced to reveal the rushing water below, and headed toward the far reach of the bridge. As we ambled, we suddenly noticed an old woman walking toward us. Dressed in a long coat and scarf, she labored slowly with her cane. As she reached us, she said "I have waited 14 years to see the river in a fog." No other words were spoken. She continued past us and we continued to the far end of the bridge, where we saw that entry to the bridge was barred by a fence. As we turned, the old woman was nowhere in sight. She had disappeared.

Where she came from and where she went, I do not know. Why she was waiting for a fog, and why she told us that, I do not know. Who she was, I do not know. In life, it seems, we encounter most people simply as "passersby." Few if any words may be spoken, and who or why or where remains unknown.

After we exited the bridge, my thoughts became a wish that we had paused to engage the old woman with a cane in conversation. What was her interest in the fog over the river, and what could she tell us about her town and herself? Was this a missed opportunity to be more than passersby, or was that all there was?

As the rising sun intensified and burned through the fog haze, I watched the hypnotic swirl of river current dashing under the bridge, a passerby itself. Interestingly, the water ultimately would become drinking water for much of the St. Louis area, the beginning point of the Lewis and Clark 1804 Discovery trek following the Missouri.

As the sun dispersed the river fog, the mystery of the old woman with a cane on the bridge hovered in my own fog.