Free The Silver Bridge by Gray Barker

rather heavy, and two trailer trucks ahead of us slowed our pace, as we traveled up the incline of the arched structure. The bridge shook and swayed.
    “I always tell people that this old bridge is going to go down some day,” Ben said: “although I suppose it must be safe or they’d close it. It has a unique suspension structure—there are only two others like it in the world—and it is supposed to give with the weight, I understand. Still, it gives me the creeps when I’m on it in heavy traffic.”
    I knew I must get up at six the next morning to fulfill an early morning school appointment, though I wasn’t sleepy, even at 10:00 p.m., my usual bedtime. I wondered if I were keeping Ben up too late and asked him if he were tired.
    “Goodness no. I’m a night owl since retiring from the school business. I got in the habit of staying up to hear the Long John Nebel program on WNBC, New York, which begins at midnight, and it just sort of stuck.”
    “Let’s drive out to that place where the fellow is supposed to have seen a weird flying saucer that looked like a Volkswagon—and whose dog hid under the bed for days after.”
    “That’s a remote area, but let’s go. And it’s a good excuse to continue our conversation.”
    We rehashed the interview with the young couples as we drove. We swung off the main road onto a narrow strip of blacktop. I remembered the area vaguely, for I had once driven through it to demonstrate the uses of an overhead projector to teachers in a small, two-room school.
    “You’re getting into real back country here,” he told me. “We constantly tried to get these people to let us bus the children into town, for the facilities we could give them out here were limited. But these people stick pretty much to themselves and insisted on hanging onto their small community school. It was difficult to get teachers to come out here. It is difficult to get to during the winter, and the people are quite backward and superstitious. At one time they raised quite an outcry because evolution was being taught. I think the school board finally gave in and gave them pretty much what they wanted. Most of the kids quit school once they can legally do so at 16. Goodness knows just what they live on out here. I suppose some of them are on relief, but many of them are fiercely independent and won’t accept help. They probably barely subsist from truck farming, or finding occasional and temporary jobs in town.”
    We drove by one of the dilapidated houses. The frame dwelling had long ago deteriorated almost into a sagging ruin. An old car, propped up on stilts, stood in the yard, with one of the wheels off. From the inside came a dim source of light, probably from an oil lamp. Passing another similar house, I saw a furtive movement at the window, and I thought I could see a small girl peeking out. Coal smoke from a chimney blacked the immediate area.
    Around the bend streamed lights from a very small church, with no bell tower, and identified only by its bright white paint and the suggestion of arches in its windows. A few cars were parked outside.
    I slowed the car, stopped and regarded the edifice. From inside we could hear a rousing singing. It was an old song I half remembered from my rural childhood:
“O they tell me of a land
      Far beyond the skies;
O they tell me of a home far away…
O they tell me of a land
      Where no storm clouds rise;
O they tell me of an unclouded day!”
     
“O that land of cloudless skies!
O that land of the unclouded day!
O they tell me of a land
      Where no storm clouds rise;
O they tell me of the unclouded day!”
     
    “Although the song is familiar, within the context of this evening it sounds rather strange,” I said; “as if they were singing of another planet—though I suppose they’re singing about heaven.”
    “An unclouded sky likely would be Mars,” Ben ventured, seemingly caught up in similar fantasy. “Maybe they’re singing