Rediscovering home: The story behind the repair work at Nine Mile Bridge
Bruce Moats
The bulldozers pushed scrapers until full of rock and dirt. The material was then hauled off to be used for fill on other sections of the new Interstate 90.
My five-year-old self watched from a fence post as the heavy equipment of many kids’ dreams cut away at the earth until the highway reached down close enough for a bridge to be built across Cedar Creek.
The interstate took one of our pastures. I recall dad literally using a big saw to cut the beams that held our old barn together. He cut away a section of the barn that would have encroached upon the highway right-of-way and pulled it into the barnyard with the tractor. He put boards on the exposed end of the barn, and I grew up with the reduced barn as both place of work and fun. My friends and I built tunnels in the loose hay we piled into the barn. But tamping the hay as a youngster when it reached up to my waist was not so much fun.
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