O’er the Bridge – Round the Bend

 

Up the Gabrielino Trail from Gould Mesa...

Whatever our journey; a Walk with God, our life, or a simple hike in the woods we come to points of choice – go over the bridge or not, go around the next bend or not.

This is the unknown. We can plan to the nth degree and still we do not absolutely know what we will find on the other side of the bridge or around the bend, or even on the bridge. We make our choice to move on or not and then go with a mix of faith and trepidation. On a hike we may have walked dozens of times and there we give little thought to the unknown beyond the possibility to meeting someone else on the trail or maybe a view of wildlife. With life, walking with God or not, there may be degrees of knowing the outcome of our choice but always laced with the possibility of surprise.

Crossing bridges is an adventure, rounding curves exploration. As the Station Fire raged on in the back country of the Angeles National Forest late in 2009 I was AT&T’s Radio Planner and Coordinator for California and Nevada (I had no counterparts in other regions). I was tasked with inspecting our microwave stations back in the forest. Okay, I was feeling particularly invulnerable after having been allowed back to our home to find it standing after I was certain to find a pile of burnt rubble and smoldering debris and I volunteered to go up into the mountains to find out how our sites fared. Actually, I didn’t volunteer, I just did it.

I rounded many bends that day and most of the bridges I crossed had been deemed safe by structural engineers. Most but not all. I was able to visit all our sites with the exception of Camp 16 whose access road was still closed due to ongoing investigations into the loss of two firefighters, our team visit to that site is story all to itself, and a sobering one at that.

During my expedition, if a long one-day trek can be called an expedition, I found surprises around several bends; three or four bears scrounging around an abandoned fire base station for food, the Sherriff’s helicopter and its crew at Mt. Disappointment, and then Camp Colby across a bridge that hadn’t yet been inspected.

Camp Colby, now known as Colby Ranch, is a location equipped with a meeting/mess hall, residential and visitor cabins, and other out buildings that all provide the infrastructure for organizations to come for educational, religious, and business retreats. The camp is connected to the communications network via one of the microwave radios I had responsibility for. I expected the camp to have been burnt to the ground, what I found was a miracle brought to us by the Grace of God and fire fighters determination beyond reason to save the camp.

I found people here, stranded and isolated. Their one vehicle was out doing errands and hadn’t been allowed back in. When I showed up it seemed I was some sort of conquering hero. This camp is nestled in the crook of three hillsides and is a wooded vale with one access road o’er a bridge to the Angeles Forest Highway. The folks there told me of the flurry of firefighting activity that had saved their little vale and this is where the heroics took place.

They had plenty of food but no communications and their loved ones had no way of knowing their condition. The radio site here was in perfect condition lacking only the power to operate it. The feed stations along the backbone of the system were in similar condition, some with singed antennas and buildings but all operational. I was able to radio out to our operations people and by the end of the day they had generators in place and the Camp Colby telephones on line.

I was informed later that the bridge I had so blithely crossed had supporting members seared and still smoldering. Our operations trucks arrived with an inspector to allow access after I had left to complete my inspections. I had unconsciously made a choice to the cross the bridge – what if I hadn’t? How long before the camp attendants’ loved ones knew they were safe? Fool that I was, I was operating under some sort of faith and shield.

It seems to me to be the ‘or not’ part of our decisions is where the risk really is. We risk not seeing the miracle, meeting the person that needs us to alter their path of destruction – we risk not seeing the waterfall round the bend or the great vista through the notch in the mountains only accessed by going over bridges, crossing streams, rounding bends, and scrambling over rocks. When I risk the ‘not’, it tends to leave an emptiness where the adventure not taken would have filled a gap.

Then there is the option of turning around and going back. The thing about this option is that we still need to cross the bridge and go back around the bends that got us there in the first place. Who knows what happened to the bridge in the meantime, or what creatures have come along behind us round the bend?

...and back down the trail.

Life is an adventure, walk its path with a greater degree of faith with open eyes for the surprise, the opportunity to achieve something great or to simply gaze over the vista, a vista otherwise known as the rest of our lives.

Always remain in His grip.

jerry