Words + Images

My brother described a scene that I wish someone would paint.

He lives in Virginia, not in a rural place, but not an urban megalopolis either. A plain old city with a crumbling downtown and further out global firms building plants, and the accompanying fancy housing for their management, on lands that used to be working farms, if not outright plantations if you go back far enough.

It’s a city near the river and crisscrossed by highways but in the beginning it was the railroads that allowed this city to make its fortune, bridging north and south, a passage way for goods of all sorts.

It was on a literal bridge that the incident took place.

My brother was driving home on a nice new road. He was recounting stories of his day to me when he said, “Oh my God. You won’t believe …” I reacted thinking at first he was seeing a roadside accident. He calmed me down and then explained, “Overhead, the bridge that crosses the road, there are deer passing by in the night. They are walking on the railroad tracks on the bridge overhead fading in and out of the mist.”

A number of people pulled off the road to watch, like my brother, hoping no train would come before the animals could walk into the surrounding fields and woods. Nothing happened. Just the lingering memories of a beautiful sight.

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