Our aerial railway didn’t last long. We soon tired of it, and instead utilized the materials for a rope suspension bridge. We procured from Lumberville half a dozen old barrels and used the staves as a flooring for the bridge. The staves were linked together by a pair of ropes at each end woven over and under, as indicated in the drawing Fig. 97. Notches were cut in the staves to hold
Fig. 98. The Suspension Bridge. the ropes from slipping off. The flexible flooring thus constructed was stretched across the river and secured to stakes driven firmly in the ground. A pair of parallel ropes were extended across the stream about three feet above the flooring, with which they were connected at intervals of five feet. The bridge was 25 feet long, and while rather shaky, owing to the fact that there were no braces to prevent it from swaying sidewise, still it was very strong and did excellent service.
Pontoon Bridge.
At the head of the mill-race, where the channel was fifty feet wide, we built a pontoon bridge. We were fortunate in securing six good cider barrels at low cost, also a quantity of “slabs” from one of the sawmills of Lumberville.
Fig. 99. The Pontoon Bridge. “Slab” is the lumberman’s name for the outside piece of a log which is sawn off in squaring up the sides. We made a raft of these materials and floated them down the river to Lake Placid. The bridge was made by anchoring the barrels in the channel about eight feet apart, and laying on them the floor beams, which supported a flooring of slabs. The floor beams were narrow planks 1 inch by 4 inches, taken from the bridge wreck, and they were placed on edge to prevent sagging. Of course we had no anchors for securing the barrels, but used instead large stones weighing about 100 pounds each, around which the anchor lines were fastened. We found it rather difficult to sink these improvised anchors at just the right places, for we were working at the very mouth of the mill-race, and were in constant danger of having our scow sucked down into the swirling channel. Once we were actually drawn into the mill-race and tore madly down the rushing stream. By Bill’s careful steering we managed to avoid striking the shore, and just as we were off the Tiger’s Tail Reddy succeeded in swinging a rope around an overhanging limb and bringing us to a sudden stop. A moment later we might have been dashed against the rocks in the rapids below and our boat smashed. Shooting rapids in a scow is a very different matter from riding through them on a plank.
The King Rod Truss.
Our bridge building operations were not entirely confined to the island. Two of them were built on the Schreiner grounds at Lamington. Reddy Schreiner’s home was situated a little distance above the town where Cedar Brook came tumbling down a gorge in the hills and spread out into the Schreiners’ ice pond. Thence it pursued its course very quietly through the low and somewhat swampy ground in the Schreiners’ back yard. Over this brook Reddy was very anxious to build a bridge. Accordingly, before returning to school in the fall Bill made out a careful set of plans for the structure, and after we had gone the rest of the society, under Reddy’s guidance, erected the bridge.
The structure was a cross between a suspension bridge and a spar bridge. The banks of the stream were so low that, instead of resting the floor of the bridge on top of the inclined frames, as we had done over the mill-race, it was suspended from the spars by means of wires. The crossing