Bunker Hill Road

I was on Bunker Hill Road heading toward Mooresville.  I came down the hill past the house with the ghost tree to the bridge at the outlet of John Moore’s lake.  The bridge was broken down and people were out on it looking around, so I got out to see what had happened.  The main bridge had rusted through and collapsed on the east side and a strange wooden structure had been built adjacent to it on the west.  As I went down into the collapsed area there was a wooden wall with a door in it that opened into the area under the wood framed expansion, which had also partially collapsed.  On the west side of the room under the bridge was a wooden dam wall with the lake right at the top of it at about my eye level. 

My old enemy Jim Bowyer and one of his cohorts were there and they were looking around talking about what could be done.  An older couple was picking through pieces of broken concrete, rusted corrugated metal pipe that had been covered with concrete, scraps of wood, expanded metal, and gravel that had all been part of the cobbled together bridge expansion.  They asked Bowyer why this hadn’t been fixed right.  Bowyer said something about budgets and trying to save money.  They weren’t buying it.  They said (correctly) that someone had spent a lot of money building the ridiculous little room that rebuilt John Moore’s dam, and if they’d spent it on the bridge, everything would still be working.

I thought about jumping into the fray by saying the reason he’d done what he had was because John Moore had been a long time shoddy developer who had probably helped get Bowyer elected and most of the people in the Mooresville area had voted against him, so Moore got what he wanted and Bowyer gave Mooresville what he wanted to give them, which was nothing.  But, I remembered that I was long past that fight and there wasn’t much I could do now, 14 years and 120 miles removed from being involved there, so I kept my mouth shut.

Later I pulled into an angle parking spot in front of a school.  I wasn’t planning to park, just turn around, so I didn’t worry about the handicap parking sign at the head of the spot.  As I was pulling in Sallie Thomas came up to the front of the car shaking her finger at me.  She thought I was going to park there and she was ready to let me know what she thought of it.  I told her I was just turning around, but she gave me a look that said, “I don’t believe you”.