The date for our trip was Friday,
May 22, 1992. Mrs. Falkner said we
shouldn’t go on the weekend leading into Memorial Day—then asked us why. (She almost always did that, asked us why about things.) I raised my hand. She smiled, nodded in my direction.
“Because it might be more crowded?”
I said.
Mrs. Falkner looked at the other
students. “What do you think,
class? Could that be a reason?” (She often did that, too—made us think about what someone else in the class had
just said.)
Everyone seemed to agree. And Mrs. Falkner said, “Yes, that was my
thinking, too. We’d like to be on Middle
Island mostly with things that are not
people.”
We laughed.
And went on with our planning.
We learned a lot of interesting
things about Middle Island—and about the community of St. Mary’s, West
Virginia, that sits right on the shore of the river nearby.
White farmers arrived in the 1790s
and routinely buried their dead there in a little cemetery. But as time passed, people neglected the
cemetery, forgot about it. Eventually it
was plowed over. Now, only plants and
wildlife life on the island—everything from ducks to blue herons to bald
eagles. There are small mammals, too,
like rabbits, deer, raccoons, and red foxes.
The town of St. Mary’s, now the
county seat of Pleasants County, was laid out in 1849 and then—as now—it followed
the Ohio River. A man had supposedly
seen a vision of the Virgin Mary on the site.
A steamboat landing lay at the western end of town. For years, the only way across the river was
by ferryboat. Now there’s a nearby
bridge, and train tracks run right through the center of town, CSX locomotives
and trains sharing the street with cars and pedestrians.[i]
The weather was perfect that day of
our trip—almost as if Mrs. Falkner had ordered it from a catalogue. Low 80s.
No chance of rain. Hardly any
wind at all.[ii] Brown-bag lunches in hand, we all filed onto
the bus,; several parents were going along, too, including Mrs. Eastbrook. She smiled when she came on the bus and saw
Harriet and me sitting together. She
couldn’t have been surprised. But I
always liked her smile. It had become
more rare in the months and years after Dr. Eastbrook had disappeared.
The trip didn’t take very long,
only about a half-hour or so from our school to the Refugee Headquarters. We crossed the river near Marietta into
Williamstown, West Virginia, then followed Waverly Road. As soon as we pulled into the lot of the
Headquarters, Mrs. Falkner told us to wait a minute. She went inside. We waited.
We waited. (We were not good at
waiting—not patiently, anyway.)
A hundred years later, she came out
and walked briskly to the bus. “Okay,”
she told us, “they’re ready for us.
We’ll go in—quietly—and one of the rangers will talk with us about the
islands and about what we can expect to see today. Be sure to have your questions ready!”
We did.
Right outside—just before we
entered—I noticed a sparrow had built its nest in the framework of the roof
overhanging the entryway. The sidewalk
was splattered with bird droppings, so I watched my step, then looked up at the
mother bird, who was looking right back at me, her bright right eye gleaming
blackly. I had an odd sensation—that she
was trying to tell me something. A feeling I dismissed as silly. Impossible.
Inside were several rooms, but in the
main one the ranger’s information desk near the door and at the back was a
large window overlooking the Ohio River.
The ranger, a cheerful, knowledgeable woman, talked awhile about the
islands—about the Refuge—and about Middle Island, which lay about sixteen miles
upriver from the Headquarters. She reminded
us that no one now lived on the island—except plants and wildlife—and that
there were only a couple of buildings.
In another large room we looked at
some of the displays about the island, about the wildlife (they had living fish
and turtles there), then boarded the bus again and headed east on a narrow
country road that passed farmers’ fields full of hay baled in large rolls, some
mobile home parks. A rail line ran
between us and the river. We passed an old cemetery, and as I looked at the
stones gliding by, it seemed to me that some of them were glowing. Faint, pastel colors softly illuminating the
ground. Dream-like …
We passed some chemical plants, too. And, not far from our destination, a power
plant whose large cooling towers made it look like a nuclear plant. But it wasn’t. It was coal.
Mrs. Falkner had told us something
terrible that had happened at the plant.
On Thursday, April 27, 1978, they were pouring concrete for an
additional tower that had reached the height of 166 feet, but the scaffolding gave
way, and the entire structure collapsed into a mangled pile of concrete and steel. And human bodies. Fifty-one workers fell to their deaths that
day. One family from nearby St. Mary’s
lost eleven of its members.
As we drove past the plant, we
could see the towers, very close to the road, and all of us were very, very
quiet, thinking of that day, the day that so much happiness and hope had ended
in a moment.
St. Mary’s, right on the Ohio
River, is a small, attractive town.
Old-fashioned looking. The way
towns used to look before malls and expressways and national franchises changed
the look of everything—made places all over the country look just like any
other place.
A little ways into town, we turned
left on George Street, and there, just a couple of blocks in the distance, we
could see a rough bridge connecting St. Mary’s to the island. Opened in 1928 and called the Short Route
Bridge, it had originally crossed the entire river, with only a ramp descending
to Middle Island. But—worried about its
safety—they closed the Short Ridge in 1969 and had only ferry service until
they dedicated a new bridge in 1977. They
destroyed most of the old Short Route Bridge.
Only the portion leading down to the island remained. We looked at the sign as we slowly approached
the bridge: Middle Island, it
said. Ohio River Islands National Wildlife Refuge.
A whump! of bus tires and we were on the bridge. Slowly we moved forward, and we could see,
just ahead, a sharp right turn that would carry us down to the island, down to a
narrow road that ran alongside the river at the island’s northern shore.
As we crept along the road, the bus
would sometimes stop at one of the Refuge signs, and Mrs. Falkner would ask one
of us seated on that side of the bus to read it aloud for the rest of us. But at one place we got off and took a look
for ourselves. It was a marker that told
us that some graves had once been there—some graves that had been destroyed by
earlier farming activity on the island. These were the ones we had learned about in class. I looked at the names and dates.
The earliest was born in 1776, the same year as the Declaration of
Independence. And even the most recent
one was a long, long time ago, a person born in 1815. I also noticed that one person had died in
1818. The year that Frankenstein was first published.
We saw that the dirt around the
stone had recently been raked. As if
someone were somehow caring for it.
Middle Island is about two miles
long (and 240 acres), and about halfway along the road are the two maintenance
buildings. There, we parked the bus and
began our walk along the nature trail, a loop of about a mile that took us, at
first, through high grass, then into the woods.
And just as we were entering the woods, things began to happen.
I had noticed as we were crossing
the bridge on the bus that the sky to the west was starting to look …
different. A gray line of clouds seemed
to be approaching—not dark storm clouds but the sort you see when the day is
going to change from sunny to cloudy.
Nothing to worry about. But by
the time we reached the trail, the clouds were on us, and visibility was
already diminishing. I could hear Mrs.
Falkner, just ahead of us, call back and say: “Stay close to your partner,
everyone. It may get a little foggy.”
Harriet and I took that as our cue
to hold hands. And the moment we entered
the woods, the very moment, the fog settled in on us, and I could not see
anything.
Harriet did not seem at all
worried. In fact, she seemed positively excited about not being able to see
anything in front of us. “It should be
pretty easy to stay on the trail,” I said hopefully. “The grass is cut low and as long as we don’t
bump into any bushes or trees,” I added, “we should know that we’re still on
the trail.”
Harriet’s “Hmmm, yes” was her only
reply.
We inched along, the scrape and
tread of our feet on the ground—and our breathing—the only sounds. Then Harriet did something that changed
everything. She dropped my hand and
cried, “I’m going to run ahead and scare some of the others!” And before I
could stop her, before I could say anything, she had disappeared into the
mist. And I was alone.
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