Looking Out: The football bridge
Growing up in my hometown in the Deep South was a wonderful thing.
Morenci, Michigan, is the southernmost city in the state, thanks to the so-called Toledo War that moved the state line 9 miles north. The war caused no casualties. If you have to have a war, that’s the best kind.
One of the constants in the lives of the good folks of Morenci was The Football Bridge.
Who built it, and why, is a mystery to me, but there are probably people who know for certain and many more who think they know.
The Football Bridge spanned The Mighty River Bean, shown on maps as Bean Creek. Since “The Mighty River Bean” is a mouthful, we all called it “The Crick.” The Crick is 50 feet wide and 10 inches deep, except for the swimming holes that dot its pathway through the landscape.
The Crick has a great magic trick up its watery sleeve.
At the very southern edge of town, it crosses into that faraway land called Ohio. When it does, abracadabra! It suddenly becomes the Tiffin River. It flows southward to Defiance, where it joins the Maumee River. I could toss a twig in Bean Crick from atop The Football Bridge and it would eventually find its way through Lake Erie, over Niagara Falls, through Lake Ontario and into the Saint Lawrence River. It would then enter the Atlantic Ocean and would end its journey on a stony beach in Derrynafinia in Ireland. Every time.
Now that you know the geographical importance of The Crick, you can start to appreciate the importance of The Football Bridge.
How the bridge got its name is no mystery. For generations, the football field was located a few blocks away and on the other side of the stream from the school. For anyone to go from the dingy locker room in the old school building to the field required running nearly half a mile down paved roads, across the muddy land around the grain mill, through the trees and crossing the hundred-foot Football Bridge which was fashioned of cables wound around big cottonwood trees and decked with wooden slats. It bounced and swung wildly as we football players ran across.
There were two other options, sometimes made necessary when too many of those wooden slats gave up the ghost to rot and football cleats.
The less civilized option was to run nearly a mile through town, across a highway bridge and to the football field.
The final option was to take the train.
There was a factory on our route and an empty boxcar was always parked on its railway siding. One of our guys would climb up and turn the big iron wheel to release the brake. We’d put our well-padded shoulders to the boxcar and get it rolling, then hop aboard through the open door. Our designated brakeman would stop the rig before we rolled across the state highway that coursed through the town.
This saved us 200 yards of running, which was good because we’d get plenty of exercise at football practice. The process was repeated for the return trip.
Eventually someone — we never knew who — would replace the broken deck boards on The Football Bridge, and we’d again enjoy swaying and bouncing our way to practice across the crick. Years passed and a new high school with adjacent football field was built. The Football Bridge disappeared.
For those grammar critics reading this true story and wincing about the use of the word “crick,” I need to explain that there is another stream running through Morenci called Silver Creek but known to all as The Creek.
Clearly, if you have a creek, you also need a crick. Otherwise, how would you keep them separate?
— Jim Whitehouse lives in Albion.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Looking Out: The football bridge
