This Old Bridge

Yesterday I drove way up north (about 40 miles as a crow flies, 80 as a truck drives) to meet with world class general contractor and log home builder, David Phoenix, of Phoenix Family Building Company. David and his crew operate out of Centerview, Missouri and travel all around the midwest, mid-south and beyond building high quality homes for folks with discerning taste. They're currently building a very nice and secluded 5000 square foot log home overlooking Table Rock Lake, for one of his clients out of  Kansas City. I plan to go back up sometime in the near future to watch them work on the log portion of the build. It's not a Pioneer log home, but Dave told me it's a very nice 12" milled log home shell and should turn out to be a real nice home. His desire is to get to a point where he's only building log homes for Pioneer Log Home clients. He and I are on the same page. I only represent Pioneer and it's my desire to assist David in getting there as well.

While trying to find the building site, I came across this little gem nestled in a river bottom of the Southern Missouri foothills. For the better part of 59 years, this bridge was the only way to get across the James River anywhere near this part of the country if you wanted to conduct commerce or visit a friend in the once thriving community of Galena (not to be confused with Galena, Illinois--a completely different town). As you can probably tell, this bridge was certainly worthy of 6 or 8 minutes of my time.

I've found that when I take time to look around a little instead of just being focussed on getting where I'm going, there's all kinds of cool stuff sitting around that would be real easy to just drive past without really even noticing. Had I not taken the time to pull off the road when I saw this structure and "snap" a few pictures with my camera (my real camera-not my camera-phone), I wouldn't of had any idea about the history of this cool old bridge. I also know that for the 10 folks from China who occasionally read this blog, you've got to be thinking to yourself that a bridge built in 1927 isn't an old bridge at all, rather, is just getting broken in. But for us short term thinking Americans, that's an old, old bridge. Of course, we consider a house built in 1992 and old house: which makes me realize even further that we really are just a bunch of silly Americans over here-silly and too often short sited in our thought process. We're not short sited about everything-some of our folks are focussed as far out as August...which is the beginning of the college and NFL football season. Now that I think about it further, I think we've got some work to do as an overall society. Maybe I'll tackle some of that in a future post or two. Silly Americans!