Barrier Island Bridges

Years before they built the bridge that connected skinny Dauphin Island to the mainland, my grandmother made her way across the Mississippi Sound by boat. She glimpsed Mobile Bay, felt the bounce of waves and tasted air salty with de Soto and charred Confederate forts. Her own great-grandfather had been a Union man. Ahead lay the island, an impressive fourteen-mile sediment deposition rising from the Gulf of Mexico.  

There, she taught in a one-room schoolhouse, grades one through six, and the community provided her a modest residence. Whether she could hear the evening tides retreat or advance is lost to history, but the progression of my family remains. Most long-time islanders never completed more than six years of education. They fished year-round and in the summer shucked oysters for extra money—occupations that required mere stubbornness to make a living from the sea. So it was with my grandfather, who I’m told fell for my grandmother’s easy smile and accomplishments.  

No one remembers the exact date or season when he first appeared outside the schoolhouse at day’s end, but he waited there for weeks, maybe months, and offered to walk her home. She didn’t think much of the scrawny half-Greek with dark, slicked hair and mischievous eyes. Nor did she like his drinking and card playing, activities he was purported to do on occasion. She rebuffed him yet he waited. Smitten, the story goes. 

Why she traveled across three states, chose the island and then my grandfather, I will never know. Did he play his guitar, serenade her? Maybe she was called by the sea. Maybe an island was an easy place to forget the past. Maybe the oil fields of her native Texas drove her to a place unencumbered by boom and bust. She once told me she’d believed she would never marry, was not attractive, but she loved to teach and could lose herself in books. Although she would travel no greater distance than her journey to Dauphin Island, her mind would travel for a lifetime. This I know.  

I also know she chose the island and my grandfather. She chose him despite his lack of a high school education and his stench of fish. His smile, guitar, work ethic likely played a role, but who can say for certain? The deepest places do not add up. Before the island had a bridge, she made choices. An island remains an island only so long as it is without a solid crossing. My mother and I forded the path she made, sandy and watery though it was, still is, and strewn with washed-up shells, oyster beds, and a past we can never know.  

Ramona Reeves is a writer living in Texas. Her collection of short fiction, It Falls Gently All Around and Other Stories, won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was published by University of Pittsburgh Press. Her most recent fiction and nonfiction have appeared in South 85 Journal, Post Road, Bridge Eight Literary Magazine, and The Adroit Journal. An excerpt from her novel is forthcoming in Huizache in the fall. Find her on Instagram @ramona.reeves.writes or at ramonareeves.com. 

This essay is a Short Reads original.