Living in isolation: How one town lost access to the Alabama River and its sense of safety

A few years back, a man in rural Monroe County crashed his motorcycle while driving down an imperfect county road. He was in the unincorporated community of Packers Bend, and it didn’t take long for resident Charlie Johnson, Jr., to find him.

Johnson immediately called 911 and waited with bated breath, unsure of anything else he could do to help. He said the man seemed to be hurt pretty badly. After over an hour, the ambulance still had not arrived, so Johnson gave up on waiting. He recruited two other men to drive the injured motorcyclist to the closest hospital, 35 minutes away and one county over.

“The ambulance never showed up,” Johnson said. “Nobody shows up.”

Johnson said terrifying situations like this are not uncommon in his part of rural Alabama, especially since Packers Bend lost its two-car ferry that would take residents across the Alabama River toward Monroeville.

Commutes that once took about 25 minutes with the ferry now take over an hour, and the intensified isolation is taking its toll on the town.

The local Monroe Intermediate School has struggled to fill open teaching positions; residents report a lessened presence of law enforcement; and estimated emergency response times have risen.

In at least one instance, an ambulance bound for Packers Bend was accidentally routed down a dirt road to the defunct ferry. A person lay a few hundred yards away, across the river, waiting for help that would take a minimum of 60 more minutes to show up.

Residents in Packers Bend have a bad feeling about what the lack of transportation infrastructure could mean for their future. They want to fix the problem before a worst-case scenario becomes their reality.

The history of connection

A little boat of some sort has connected Packers Bend to the rest of Monroe County on and off for nearly as long as the community itself has existed, according to community members and their oral histories. The crossing point is called Davis Ferry.

Local resident Allie Huff, 74, said she couldn’t remember a time before recently that a boat was not in operation there. Her father and grandfather both spent years at the helm, transporting a few dozen vehicles across the river and back every weekday.

“My father died in 2007. I’m just glad he didn’t see it close,” Huff said. “That’s so depressing.”

The first recent closure came in 2011 when an army pilot crashed a helicopter through the cable that guided the ferry across the river. Officials then said that specific boat — which had been in use since the 1970s — was unsafe.

No one made any moves to get the boat back up and running until 2013 when Etowah County gifted its ferry from the Coosa River to Monroe County.

“It was completely free. All the county had to do was get it here,” Packers Bend resident Gerald Huff said, standing beside the beached ferry boat. His mother Allie has told too many stories about their family’s history with the ferry for him not to know the details by heart.

From 2013 to 2016, things ran as smoothly as they could have. Then as winter ended, water levels in the Alabama River fell, and the riverbank destabilized. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the group that manages public-use land along the river, recommended operations cease until the riverbank could be stabilized again.

That never happened.

‘A lot of lives could be saved’

While officials decide on a course of action, people have died because emergency services could not arrive in time.

Krystle McCaskill sat by her father’s side as he took his last breath. Her mother found him slumped over in their Packers Bend home, struggling to breath, and she called an ambulance.

“It took them two hours to get here, and we lost my dad,” McCaskill said. “They always get lost in this area, so we need access like that.”

Packers Bends sits near the crux of Monroe, Wilcox and Clarke counties, so when someone calls an ambulance there, the emergency vehicle could be routed from any of the three.

McCaskill isn’t sure where the ambulance for her father was coming from, but by the time it pulled up to the home, she didn’t care.

As she told the Montgomery Advertiser her story, a crowd of other residents gathered behind her, all chiming in with examples of people who died before emergency services could reach them. Others spoke about times they called for help from the sheriff's office, and because no one came, they were forced to “self-police.”

“I think a lot of lives could be saved,” McCaskill said.

Efforts to restore

Over the last seven years, the community and local leaders like Huff have persistently asked the Monroe County Commission to help them restore their easy access to the rest of the county where they pay taxes.

The county commissioners have allotted various amounts of money in their budget since 2016 for testing and estimates of how much it would cost to restore the riverbank and the ferry.

Back in 2016, they approved about $1,700 for a boat landing on the east side of the river that was never built. The most recent estimate for a total fix, made in 2021, was between $1.5 million and $2 million, according to a county commissioner.

The price of a real solution keeps rising, but no change has yet to be implemented.

“It’s not the fault of the people of Packers Bend why it’s costing the way it costs now,” Huff said. “We're having to pay the price for them failing to do their job.”

Since the start of 2023, the public access road leading to the river, which traveled over a creek, has washed out about a half mile away from the river bank. This would happen annually as waters rose and fell, and in previous years, the county has sent a crew out to fill in the dirt and maintain access. This year, they did not.

Now, the people in Packers Bend can’t even reach their side of the river, much less utilize it.

“Somebody should just fix the road so I can go fishing,” Slater Huff III said. “We’ve been sugar-coating all our lives and still never got anything.”

Huff, Gerald’s uncle and Allie’s brother, thinks asking for the ferry back is asking for too much. He just wants to fish on the Alabama River like he’s been doing since he was a kid.

The worst-case scenario

In addition to being the descendent of multiple ferry operators, a farmer in his own right and a community leader, Gerald Huff also serves as assistant chief of the Packers Bend Volunteer Fire Department.

Without the ferry, he says, the safety of the people in Packers Bend’s floats in a precarious position. The residents can only self-police and take care of one another to a certain extent.

There are fears for the community and its K-8 school that they don’t like to voice.

“God forbid,” Huff said.

In the 2021-22 school year, the local Monroe Intermediate School employed 13 teachers and staff to educate and care for its 64 students. Every adult in the building is trained in CPR and emergency procedures.

Pre-K teacher Emily Walker attended one of the training sessions last year, instructed by a local nurse.

“She said, ‘If there comes an emergency, all of you have to know how to do this and how to do it correctly because you're going to be waiting a long time for somebody to come,’” Walker said. “Even if we had an emergency with one of our kids, you just can't get the help that you need quickly.”

Walker started teaching at the school before the ferry stopped service. In those days, she had a quick 22 minute drive to work from Monroeville — on the east side of the river from Packers Bend.

Now, it takes her nearly an hour, and she has to circle into Clarke and Wilcox counties before reentering Monroe. She loses cell service for 17 miles every day on her way in.

Walker loves the school, its children and the parents there so much that she doesn’t mind the trek. Her concern lies in the school’s ability to recruit new teachers and keep the children safe.

“The community has been forgotten. Just because it's across the river, nobody ever really thinks about it,” Walker said. “But even if they're an isolated community, their safety should still be important to everyone.”

Where the county stands

Longtime Monroe County Commissioner Billy Ghee said he’s trying his best to help the people of Packers Bend, but it’s difficult to focus any significant amount of money in an area that’s so small and isolated. There are four total commissioners, plus the commission president, so the people of Packers Bend need more than just Ghee on their side.

“It wasn’t always like this,” Ghee said, standing on the dirt road that leads to the river. “I’m in a position where these are the fine people that vote for me, but when I make decisions, I have to think about the whole county. I would like for the other commissioners to feel that way.”

Ghee likes to call the problems in Packers Bend “a morality story.” He says little benefit would come to the county, state or federal government by rebuilding the river access or reinstating the ferry, but it would be the right thing to do.

“This area has two things going against it when it comes to government: small in number and poor,” Ghee said. “The federal government has its hand in everything with this river running through here. You know they do, and so does the state. The part that's broken down really belongs to them.”

In 2022, the county’s annual budget sat around $13 million, according to Ghee, but commissioners could not agree to allocate the $2 million needed to restore the river bank and ferry.

Ghee thinks the state and federal government should provide the funding for the solution, and he wants Gov. Kay Ivey, who grew up in nearby Camden, to take a meeting with him.

“If we can get the governor’s attention on this project,” he said, “You’re going to see a whole different type of attitude on the local level.”

Hadley Hitson covers the rural South for the Montgomery Advertiser and Report for America. She can be reached at hhitson@gannett.com. To support her work, subscribe to the Advertiser or donate to Report for America.

This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Riverside community lost public access to the Alabama River