The Eagle Ridge Mountain Estates HOA went through a board recall election. The new president was a retired high school history teacher named Lucinda Garner, age 65, who sent me a handwritten note on her first day in office. Mr. Carver, please consider our 42 households the friendliest neighbors in Haywood County. We will not cross your bridge and anything heavier than a Subaru. I framed it.
It hangs in my office now next to a photograph of my father at the bridge in 2008. Pernell Brighgam testified at three separate federal trials. He told the Asheville Citizen Times afterward that the proudest thing he had ever done in 38 years of Forest Service work was the two years he had spent quietly photographing a hollow nobody wanted to see. I used part of the bridge restoration funding to do something Tully and I had been talking about since the morning of the arrests. We established the Carver Heritage Bridge Trust.
It is named for my father, Wendell Carver. The trust provides free engineering consultation to any owner of a historic timber span in North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, or Georgia facing structural threats from overweight commercial traffic. We pay for inspections. We pay for legal referrals. We pay for monitoring equipment for land owners who need it.
By the end of the trust's first year, we had assisted owners of 19 historic bridges across the southern Appalachian. Three of those bridges, I am told, were on the verge of collapse before we got there. It was Tully who insisted we plant a memorial garden on the upstream bank of Sourwood Creek in a small clearing that catches the late afternoon light. Burr oak saplings, mountain laurel, Carolina rodend, a single bench made from the south cord lumber that had been replaced during the bridge restoration. The bench has a small bronze plaque on the back that reads Wendell Carver.
He built things to last. So did his son. We dedicated it on the first anniversary of the trap with about 90 neighbors present. Adrienne came up from Asheville with her new husband. Pernell came in his forest service jacket.
Granger Pelum came in his NC do polo. Whitlock Trit came with his wife and an oatmeal cookie recipe Tully had been promising him for 2 months. Sheriff Carmine Doyle gave the opening remarks. Tully read the dedication. She was 12 by then.
She wore a navy dress and her grandfather's old field watch on her wrist. She read in a steady 11-year-old's voice that had grown one year wiser. Four lines she had written herself. This is a bridge. This is also a promise.
The carvers do not break promises. Neither does the bridge. The whole bank went quiet for about 3 seconds. Then somebody started clapping. Then everybody did.