Letter to the Editor: The Kiskatinaw Bridge deserves better

I was down at the old Kiskatinaw Bridge recently, and I have to admit, what I saw bothered me a lot more than I expected it to.

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There was what appeared to be burn damage on part of the wooden deck, and while I don't know exactly what happened there, or how the damage was caused, seeing it on that bridge was honestly heartbreaking.

Maybe that sounds a little dramatic if the Kiskatinaw Bridge is just an old bridge to you.

But I don't think it is just an old bridge to very many people around here.

For generations of my own family, that bridge and the area around it have been part of growing up in the Peace, and I know our family is far from alone in that.

There are places around here that become part of you without anybody ever really deciding they should.

You drive past them as a kid. Your parents take you there. Years later you find yourself taking your own kids there, probably telling them some of the same stories you heard when you were their age.

The Kiskatinaw is one of those places.

It is part of the old Alaska Highway, part of the history of this region, and one of those landmarks that almost feels sacred to people of the Peace, not necessarily in a religious sense, but because of the memories and generations attached to it.

That old wooden bridge has been standing there a lot longer than most of us have been alive.

Think about how many families have crossed it, stopped beside it, taken photographs there, walked across those wooden planks or stood underneath that massive curved structure and looked up, and maybe that's why seeing what appeared to be fire damage bothered me so much.

We sometimes treat old things like they are permanent simply because they have survived this long, they aren't.

Once they're gone, they're gone, you can't rebuild 80 years of history. You can replace boards and timbers, you can repair damage and you can probably build something that looks almost exactly the same, but you can't replace the years that made the place matter in the first place.

I don't know what caused the damage I saw, so I'm not interested in pointing fingers at somebody without knowing the facts.

I'm just sad that it happened.

I hope, whether you've lived in the Peace for five years or your family has been here for generations, we remember how fortunate we are to still have places like the Kiskatinaw Bridge, because there are fewer of them all the time.

Some places are worth looking after simply because they belong to all of us, and I think that old bridge is one of them.