Rage at Glass Window Bridge Eleuthera

“One child home, and one to the fold” -- Camalo McCoy

His name was Sam Pedican. He was 55, a salesman, husband, brother, father and some dead mother's son. He lived in the Bluff settlement at the north end of Eleuthera, The Bahamas, and on a windy, overcast day of chilly squalls, Sam Pedican needed to get to Gregory Town, fifteen miles south on the Queen's Highway, a route that would take him over Glass Window bridge, the narrowest point on the island. It wasn't a sales trip, something he could postpone until the weather improved. He had to get to Gregory Town to arrange for a casket to carry his brother who was dying in Nassau. Had Sam Pedican seen the future he would stayed at home; or he would have ordered two caskets, for he had only hours to live.

Eleuthera, an island 110 miles long, narrows at Glass Window to an isthmus only as wide as the bridge itself. On the eastern, Atlantic side the highway is flanked by ridges leading up to cliff tops 80 feet above the ocean. The approach is thus blind on this side, until you actually reach the bridge where the deep blue Atlantic heaves into view. On the western, Caribbean side the view of the emerald-green Bight of Eleuthera is expansive. You can see for miles. Seemingly harmless, the bridge at Glass Window is deadly. Owing to the high cliffs that narrow into a recess at this pass, Glass Window is susceptible to what Bahamians call rages--enormous waves from the Atlantic side, some reaching heights of 100 feet, driven up as they enter the narrow, high concave of cliffs. Spawned by storms far out at sea, these tsunami waves explode into the bridge even on days when the sky above Eleuthera is clear and blue. The weather provides no warning of what may be happening at Glass Window.

The force of these rogue waves is tremendous. When Winslow Homer painted Glass Window in the nineteenth century, a rock ledge topped the structure, creating the impression of a natural window. It has long since been destroyed. The succession of highway bridges that replaced the ledge have fared no better. A rage on Halloween day 1991 knocked the present bridge 11 feet closer to the Bight of Eleuthera. Boulders the size of Airsteam trailers heaved up by rages litter the cliff tops near Glass Window, stark testimony to the power of rages.

Early on the morning of March 12, 1996, Pedican parked his truck at the north end of Glass Window and made his way on foot across the bridge in heavy weather, arriving barefooted in Gregory Town some time later. He took care of the casket business, made some other stops around town, and hitched a ride back to Glass Window. By this time, mid morning, the rain had stopped but the wind was higher. Small groups of people had gathered at both ends of the bridge, their progress blocked by waves 70 and 80 feet high sweeping in ranks over the bridge. No one was getting across Glass Window.

Call to Lower Bogue

At about this time constable 1934 Camalo McCoy, a seven-year veteran of the police force, got a call at his home in Lower Bogue six miles north of the bridge. Someone had been washed over in a car, he was told. With two fellow officers, McCoy arrived at the north end of Glass Window twenty minutes later. Whoever had been washed over was nowhere to be found, but the car was belly-up in the Bight on the west side of the bridge. Among those waiting to get across was a tourist who filmed the scene with a video camera; another was the shoeless Sam Pedican.

A year after Sam Pedican died in a rage at Glass Window bridge, I sat in Constable McCoy's living room at Lower Bogue listening as he remembered that day. McCoy was a robust, muscular man of 27, with close-cropped hair and a broad smiling face that exposed a gap between his front bone-white teeth. He was seated on the sofa in his Sunday clothes. He'd had time only to eat lunch and take off his tie after returning from church. His wife Portia sat with us. From another room came the cackling admonitions of a televangelist.

The force of these rogue waves is tremendous. When Winslow Homer painted Glass Window in the nineteenth century, a rock ledge topped the structure, creating the impression of a natural window. It has long since been destroyed. The succession of highway bridges that replaced the ledge have fared no better. A rage on Halloween day 1991 knocked the present bridge 11 feet closer to the Bight of Eleuthera. Boulders the size of Airsteam trailers heaved up by rages litter the cliff tops near Glass Window, stark testimony to the power of rages.

“On arrival at the scene,” McCoy explained in police talk, “I could see the waves two, three miles away. I, along with the two officers, we went over to the south side of the bridge because that's where the vehicle had gone over, and while on the south side, we met Sam Pedican who wanted to come back over with us. So on the return, coming over, we waited for the waves because normally you're supposed to wait five minutes to let the waves come over in sequence. Wait for the seventh wave to come and then run.”

“So we waited to come back across -- the two officers, we all waited together -- and I waited for Mr. Pedican. He was moving slowly, looking down at his feet. When the time came to go I held my hand out to him and said, 'Sam, the waves is coming, we got to run.' But Mr. Pedican kept looking down at his feet. Then he looked up and said something I didn't hear.”

“So there was a lag in time. We made about ten, eleven strides, and we were smack dab in the middle of the bridge when the wave come and hit us full force. It was the first wave of the sequence, which is normally the biggest one.”

The Nassau Guardian had reported that the wave that hit Pedican and McCoy was 70 feet high. Was that possible?

“I believe it was higher than that, maybe a hundred feet. We got tossed up in the air and then dropped down on the slope, on the stones. I was holding on to the stones after the first wave, and before the second wave hit I saw Mr. Pedican down below me. I reached out to get his hand, and I called him -- he was on a rock below me -- and I shouted his name, but he didn't answer me. He must have been unconscious. I also looked up and saw the other two officers who was shouting down at me trying to tell me that another wave was coming. And when I was holding on to the rocks I called on the Lord and asked Him to help me, but this next wave come over and pulled me off that rock” -- he showed me his scarred hands where the force of the blow had ripped him from his hold, tearing flesh from his palms and fingers -- “and then I got knocked down straight down to the bottom.”

“And as I came down I could feel the waves knocking me back and forth between the rocks, the stones hitting my head all that time. I must have been unconscious for, oh, probably five seconds, something like that. After a while, I came to the surface and started swimming away from the current around the point on the north side and into the shore, to get away from the waves. From there I waded into the shore. The waves had tore my jacket off, and some of my pants. The two officers climbed down from the road and helped me get up the rocks. I never saw Sam Pedican again.”

Found Near Gaulding Cay

Constable McCoy's injuries were serious. “In that ordeal I suffered a broken coccyx bone, a chipped spinal cord, injuries to my knee caps and hands, plus numerous superficial injuries.” McCoy was taken first to the clinic in Lower Bogue--his wife, Portia, was told that he was dead -- and then air-lifted to Nassau where he spent a week and a half recuperating in hospital.

The next day, Tuesday, Sam Pedican was found floating face up south of the bridge near tiny Gaulding Cay. He was naked. The experience left McCoy with a dread of the bridge: “Even now, every time I reach that certain spot on the bridge and have to slow down, something in the back of my mind say that wave is going to come again and knock me over.” It also made a Christian of him. Before I left, he read me a poem he'd written one restless night after the rage that killed Sam Pedican, when he was having nightmares.

It was a cool and windy Monday morning;
I left home for work a few hours after dawn.
In route to the Glass Window bridge to render some help,
I never even thought of endangering myself,
I saw a crowd gather as we drew nigh,
The waves looked like they were reaching the sky.
Above the roaring waves and the air full of mist
I saw the gentleman we needed to assist;
My two comrades ran across the bridge quickly
As I waited for the man who had stopped suddenly.
He was saying something that I could not understand.
He then looked up at the sky and I reached for his hand;
I then heard a rushing wave, and the last thing I could see
Was a huge white wave crashing down on me.
I was afraid, I did not know what to do.
I felt I would never make it through.
My heart trembled with a fear that I could not confine,
My mama always told me that God is by my side.
I never thought that I would make it,
After being dragged and knocked about with rocks.
I heard someone say it was only good luck,
But I called on the Lord, oh, there is power in that name
And from that day on my life is not the same.
On that day He took one child home, and brought one to the fold.
He gave me a new life, and for Him I am bold.
Only God knew that I would make it that day.
What the future holds, no man can say,
For each of us God has a master plan;
You may run like Jonah, but you can't shun His hand.
God, He has seen what we all do.
When I was in sin, he saw me too.
He could have left me there to die,
Or even let the waves pass by.
God used the swelling tide to show me I cannot hide.
God could have done anything He wanted to do,
He let me live so that I can tell you.
He let me fall and fixed me back upright
And wrote my name in the large book of life.

From McCoy's house in Lower Bogue I drove north along the Queen's Highway past the airport road to Harbour Island (aka “Briland”) turning left to the Bluff settlement. Rolling into the village, I stopped to ask the first person I saw where Sam Pedican's widow lived.

“The blue house just there behind the church,” said the toothless old man from under his ball cap.

I turned and turned along the narrow streets, all the while in sight of Mrs. Pedican's house, but ended up at the public dock. It seemed that no street took my car to Mrs. Pedican's house, so I doubled back and parked at the church and walked to the neat, royal blue house where Sam Pedican's widow lived.

Pedican's teenage daughter Madeline, beautiful, barefooted, wearing a simple blue shift that accented her dark chocolate skin and small, uplifted breasts, answered the door. I was so taken by this lovely girl that I stumbled over my well-rehearsed greeting.

“My mama's not here,” she said, “she's in Nassau, visiting.”

“Well, I wanted to talk to someone about her husband's death.”

“He died in the rage last year,” she said without emotion. Inside the house I could see a young man--her boyfriend?--sprawled on the sofa in front of the TV. He was watching the NBA playoffs.

“His brother died the same day.”

“Really?” I knew this already.

“Yes.” She closed the white door behind her and looked down at the ground. I couldn't tell if she was saddened, or if simply the Pedicans had a familial habit of staring at the ground as Sam had when he started across Glass Window. “Daddy was just coming back over from Gregory Town that morning,” she continued, “where he went to get my uncle's casket, and when he was coming back over the bridge, the wave washed him into the ocean. They found him the next day and brought him back up here in a body bag.”

She quivered and her eyes suddenly welled with tears.

“I'm sorry,” I said, and touched her bare shoulder. She tolerated my hand briefly, until I realized I'd made a mistake and withdrew. Shifting the subject, I asked where her mother had been when Sam Pedican was killed.

“Moma been in Nassau then. She was sick in the hospital with stroke blood.” She wiped her tears with her finger and went on.

“I was there with her too, at the hospital, when my sister-in-law called and asked to speak to me. She said to me, 'Your papa gone down in the ocean. Your daddy gone. No more daddy.' Well, I had to be so brave because mama was so sick. I went into the bathroom and cried.”

I noticed again how beautiful she was, with her full lips and dark eyes, especially in this sad moment, crying in the hot shade under the afternoon sun.

“They found him naked by the rocks. The waves had tore all my daddy's clothes off him. And they brought him back here in a bag.”

I asked if she had any photographs of her father.

“Yes. Wait. I'll get them.”

She returned with a photo album opened to double pages of Sam Pedican lying in his casket. The images were ghastly: a swollen, barrel-chested man in a pin-stripped suit seemingly squeezed into the white silk lining of the body box, his hands folded just above his crotch, his eyes and mouth drawn tight toward the corners of his gray puffy face, his oval head covered with tight pills of white hair. The day he spent in the water had horribly disfigured him.

I asked where her father was buried and, half sickened by the heat and the sight of this lovely woman holding images of her starkly dead father, offered my condolences to Madeline Pedican and said good-bye. Following her directions, I drove past St. Paul's Anglican Church where Pedican's brother is buried, to the public cemetery at the end of the street where Sam reposes. Circled by a white cement wall waist high, the cemetery was overrun with dry weeds and vines. A pile of rubble stood beside an empty grave, freshly dug. Sam lay under a concrete slab near one corner.