It has now come full circle

Somewhere in those woods its fallen remains lay upon the ground, and soon I persuaded my friend to again accompany me on a reconnaissance mission. We searched the area where I thought the tree had stood, and there was plenty of rotting and splintered wood around. There were other dead and fallen trees back there, but one pile of splintered remains we found I thought was most likely to be my tree monster. Like Baltimore’s metal monster, it did not fall in one piece, but was scattered all around. My friend was bored and wanted to leave, but we stood there for a few moments as I silently mourned the loss of this eerie sentinel of the forest. I finally got a close up look at the thing that had given me the creeps, the thing I was at one time almost afraid to go near. And then I grabbed a piece of splintered wood, about a foot long, and took it home with me, a souvenir of a lost monster of my childhood.

It has now come full circle to a monster that lurked not in the woods but in the middle of a busy freeway. One that anyone could approach and drive over, or not, as they chose. Unlike the tree, as a driver I had little to fear of the Key Bridge as long as I was able to avoid it. But like the tree, the bridge looked a lot more creepy from a distance than it really was. Only my foolish sense of misdirection got me trapped into traversing it. In contrast, that old gnarled tree would (in my imagination, at least) come to life and stalk children, in the woods or anywhere else in the neighborhood, Halloween or not. But logically speaking, a scary bridge could only momentarily trap and terrorize those who willingly went on to cross it. Or, to passively invite the despairing to leap from its heights and end their lives. It surely had no way to seek out and lure in victims, or did it?

Ancient mythology, especially Greek mythology, is full of examples of unlucky people being seduced and lured to their deaths by curses, spells, deadly beings and haunted places. Lost sailors beguiled by the song of the Sirens would be drawn in too close to treacherous shores and end up drowning as their ship is dashed to pieces on the rocks. Whatever irresistible sounds they thought they heard, they were instead lured to their deaths. So what was it that drew my friend’s buddy towards the Key Bridge over and over for years until one day he could no longer resist its call and leapt to his death? Ancient mariners desperate for the sight of land mistakenly crashing their ships into rocks would have had no intention of dying. If anything, they would have done everything they could to survive. But what was it about the Key Bridge and other such structures that draws those who actually want to die? In those ancient days there were mystical places, evil underworlds, temples to gods of death and cursed structures, both natural and man-made. Places and locations that held a lot of power, admiration, awe and dread. Places and structures that were the stuff of legend and epic stories, some that were alleged to be haunted. Areas associated with monsters and supernatural creatures, full of mystery and fear.