A tale of Two Rivers

Bridge stretches from its rather shabby beginning to the promise of lush woods

Fishermen cast into the waters of the Little Maumelle River on a recent Saturday evening, as seen from the midpoint of the Two Rivers Bridge.
Fishermen cast into the waters of the Little Maumelle River on a recent Saturday evening, as seen from the midpoint of the Two Rivers Bridge.

— On a recent Friday it rained, surprisingly, slightly annoyingly, pattering down onto the Two Rivers Park well-dried landscape. The drops that missed me splashed noisily onto the leafy canopy that covered most of the paved paths that wind through the park.

The drought that shriveled Arkansas this summer finally microwaved the underbrush into crispy dryness, much of the shrubbery looking like decorative sticks poked into a bowl of marbles, suitable for a credenza.

After contemplating the dryness I decided not to begrudge nature a little rain.

Besides, it gave the landscape a muted, misty shroud, a nice atmosphere for photographs.

On July 23, with great fanfare, the Two Rivers Park Bridge in west Little Rock was opened to the public. The bridge got a lot of attention, justifiably so.

But a bridge is still just a bridge, which according to a dictionary, is built to “connect or reduce the distance between.”

In this case the connection is between what I call the mainland, the southern bank of the Arkansas River, on the northern edge of Little Rock, and the peninsula of Two Rivers Park, which projects eastward between the Little Maumelle and the Arkansas rivers.

All these compass points add up to the tip of the park, a place not visited by those of us not interested in pedaling relentlessly in Spandex or in walks longer than 20 yards. For folks not interested in biking up and down the entirety of the park’s asphalt paths, the eastern end is now their most likely destination.

Now accessible to those with less lung capacity, the bridge deposits one into a scruffy, roughly landscaped scene, limbs chain-sawed and trees trimmed, its grass bush-hogged. It’s a rough-and-tumble place; the only similarity between it and virgin forest is that both have trees.

But it’s open and wooded. Beauty it will grow into. Give us a cool, wet spring and nature will do its green thing on the park.

The promise is there: a cathedral-like stand of tall pines, a Gordian knot of thick vines, stalks of green reeds thrusting from the water, a brief glimpse of a four-point buck, and a V of birds heading south.

What comes before and after that glimpse of scenery is the bridge, its thin, white concrete connection sketched across the lower end of the Little Maumelle River. On a more recent Saturday afternoon it’s clogged with bikes, walkers, strollers and doggies. During brief chats with fellow bridge users the consensus is that every dog is good looking, every bike is great, every run is good and every kid is beautiful. And the view from the bridge ain’t bad either. At the end of the day most everyone stops halfway between peninsula and mainland to watch the sun settle behind the red, yellow and pink Pinnacle Mountain horizon. Halfway across and halfway between day and night.

Style, Pages 29 on 10/18/2011

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