The deep hole full of water that used to be at the outflow of the twin culverts has been completely filled in with boulders and concrete. A jump thirty feet off the viaduct now would mean certain death. No more can the youth of Pediddleville claim a jump as a rite of passage. No more can I anticipate the day when my sons would share in the thrill. No more can I plan to explore the dark pool with my mask and snorkel--yes, I planned that for this Summer, figuring the chain link fence would prevent people from landing on my head from above. I'll never get to see what whoppers lived down there. For a small river like this, the pool would have been a home for the largest of its denizens. By now they have all gone downstream into Salmon River.
Never much of a daredevil, I have only jumped feet first off the thirty foot drop, but on YouTube you can see videos of people doing back flips, cartwheel dives, and even going off it on bicycles. It may well be that some of these videos, when they were brought to the attention of certain people, have led to the crackdown. It was always forbidden to jump there, but it wasn't generally known how crazy some thrill seekers could be in sleepy Pediddleville. The Bummer Patrol stepped in to save that inevitable drunken ass from himself, and themselves from a lawsuit.
I remember well my first jump off the Viaduct. I arrived, stoned, on a late hazy hot afternoon. We had been cruising around in my friend Ted's 1963 Buick Riviera. Ted had restored this old powerhorse of a cruisemobile in auto shop at school. He was a character. He was the first friend I made when I moved to East Pediddleville in fourth grade. He often spoke in an affected, convoluted Monty Python accent, and he had painstakingly mixed paint colors and used a tiny brush to alter his driver's license so that he could buy alcohol at age seventeen. Also in the car was our friend Roy, Ted's next-door neighbor, and Doug, who was more Roy's friend, but I knew him from Boy Scouts. Probably we had been talking about how we had been on a hiking trip in Vermont where we had seen local people in White River Junction jumping off a bridge into the Connecticut River, and several of us from our troop had jumped. This would have prompted Roy to ask if we had ever jumped off the Viaduct. Since I had never done it, we were now on a mission...
I had never known about this place until then. The road that winds along Salmon River comes to a hairpin turn halfway up a hill where the old train line ran. You could take the Airline Trail to the top of the viaduct and clamber down the steep bank to the viaduct, or you could take the lower trail in from further down the road. Originally a large trestle bridge over the creek valley, the whole area was filled in with gravel, after installing the culverts for the water, because of the increasing weight of the trains. It goes at about a 45 degree angle from the top to the viaduct several hundred feet down. Over time the water had dug out a deep pit which I think was at least fifteen feet deep at the center of the pool.
When we got down to the bottom of the steep incline, our shoes filled with gravel and sharp coal slag fragments, there were several people there jumping and hanging out. We stood there at the edge for a while watching others jump, trying to get our nerve up. Suddenly a young girl started screaming down below in the pool. Doug and I looked at each other with the instant acknowledgement that the quickest way for anyone to get to her was for us to jump, so off we went! Boy Scouts! The girl was fine without our help, but what a first time!
Industrialized "Safety" is not as beautiful as the twisty Hemlock roots that used to line the bank. I wish I had some "before" shots of the place, not just these photos of how it is now. It's the same sense of loss that you get when they put up a strip mall in the field you used to play in, or cut down your favorite tree, knowing it's gone forever, but it's worse because of how many people will miss it. I did bring two nephews of mine there to jump a few years back, but I will lament not being able to see my sons jump, and for myself never to do it again. Even the tame way I used to do it was exhilarating--truly feeling Gravity and then the splash and whoosh of bubbles all around you as you bobbed up in the pool. The truth is, it was totally safe to jump if you did it right. All it took was an easy little hop to put you right into the center of the pool. It was the crazies and the graffitists and the YouTube posters who caused concern over the place, and lawyers and the candy-assed douchebags who make them rich ruin everything. I've always felt that if I drown or break my neck out in Nature, that it's MY fault, and I'm not going to sue somebody just because they didn't stop me. But this is the world we live in, and for once, Pediddleville is superior.
