Part One is finished! Thank you for your patience, and for all the kind notes in the guestbook.

How This Began

In the spring of 1993 a girl in our billing office at the hospital lent me her copy of The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller, which had come out the year before and which every woman in the building had already read. I read it in two evenings, the first in the bathtub until the water went cold and the second on the porch until it got too dark to see. Then I gave it to my sister Vera, and she read it in one.

When the movie came out this June, with Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep, Vera and I went the first Saturday it was showing. I went back by myself in July, to a weekday matinee, and sat in the back so nobody would see me. Somewhere in there I said to Vera, we ought to go see those bridges, and Vera, who has never once in her life said no to a car trip, said when?

So on a Thursday morning in October two sisters from Ohio, ages fifty and forty-eight, put three rolls of film, a thermos and a paperback in a blue Oldsmobile and drove to Iowa.

Thursday, October 12: The Drive

We left Mansfield at half past five in the morning, in the dark, with Vera driving and me in charge of the map, the radio and the coffee. West across the rest of Ohio and all of Indiana, around the bottom of Chicago in traffic I hope never to see again, and then across Illinois, which is wider than it looks. We crossed the Mississippi in the late afternoon. I made Vera honk.

Iowa in October is harvest. The combines were out in the fields all the way across, and the grain trucks, and the fields that were done were stubble the color of a lion. The sky out there is bigger than ours. I don't know how else to say it. Every motel in Winterset had been full since summer, so we stayed outside Des Moines, nearly seven hundred miles from home, and I fell asleep with my shoes on.

Friday, October 13: Winterset

Friday the thirteenth turned out to be lucky for us. Winterset is the county seat of Madison County, and it is built the old way, around a square with the courthouse in the middle, and stores on all four sides with their awnings out. The town was getting ready for the festival and there were people up on ladders hanging bunting. We had pie for breakfast at a cafe on the square, which I recommend to anyone, and nobody in there looked at us twice.

John Wayne was born in Winterset, in 1907, in a small frame house that you can go through now. Vera is the John Wayne fan in our family and she was very happy. She bought a postcard for each of her grandsons and one for herself.

The Roseman Bridge at Sunset

This is the one. The Roseman Bridge is the bridge in the book and in the movie, built in 1883 over the Middle River, out in the country west of town. We waited until late afternoon on purpose.

It is barn red, and longer than I pictured, and quieter. Inside it's dim and smells like old wood and dust and the river, and the walls are a crisscross lattice of boards, like a trellis for roses. People have written their names all over the inside in pencil and ballpoint, and some of them have written more than their names. I read a good many of them. I won't repeat them here. They belong to the people who wrote them.

When the sun got low it came in through the cracks between the boards in long gold stripes, and the whole bridge lit up from the inside like a lantern. There was nobody there for a while but us and a couple from Texas, and when they left, it was so still I could hear the water under the floor. Vera said she'd wait in the car. She's a good sister.

Saturday and Sunday: The Covered Bridge Festival

Winterset has held a Covered Bridge Festival every October for years, always the second full weekend of the month, and we had planned the whole trip around it. I think this year they got more people than they bargained for, because of the movie. We saw license plates from Minnesota, Texas, California and one from Ontario.

The square was lined with booths: quilts, wreaths, hand-carved spoons, dried flowers, and more covered bridge birdhouses than I knew existed in the world. I bought a small wooden covered bridge for my kitchen windowsill. Vera bought a quilted vest she has already worn twice. There was music in the afternoon, and a pork tenderloin sandwich about as big as the plate, and kettle corn, and we sat on the courthouse lawn in the sun and ate all of it.

Everybody there had read the book. That's what I keep thinking about. Strangers would start talking in line, and inside of a minute you'd find out which part they loved, and sometimes why, and you'd tell them yours.

On Sunday afternoon we drove out to the Cedar Bridge, the one on the cover of the book. Vera held up her copy next to it and I took her picture, and then she took mine.

About the Bridges

• Madison County once had nineteen covered bridges. Six are left.
• Why put a roof on a bridge? To keep the big floor timbers dry, so they last. A roof is cheaper to replace than a floor.
• The Roseman Bridge (1883) is the one in the story. The Holliwell Bridge is in the movie too. The Cedar Bridge is on the cover of the book.
• Winterset is about thirty-five miles southwest of Des Moines, and the bridges are scattered around the county on country roads. Get a map in town before you set out.

Our Pictures

All three rolls came back from the drugstore and only six were blurry, which for me is a record. I don't have a scanner, but my nephew says he can put some on a disk for me at Christmas. I'll put the best ones here when he does.