STARK, N.H. — The third charter bus this month from the same senior living facility in Old Saybrook, Conn., became firmly wedged in the eastern truss of the 162-year-old Stark Covered Bridge shortly after 11 a.m. Friday, leaving 41 retirees and one activities coordinator to eat their pre-packed turkey wraps in folding chairs along the Upper Ammonoosuc while two volunteer firemen measured the clearance with a carpenter’s square and shook their heads.
The bus, operated by Sunshine Coach Lines of West Hartford, is the same model and, in two of the three cases, the same vehicle that has now arrived at the bridge’s posted 9-foot, 4-inch clearance and proceeded anyway, citing what driver Dale Furmano described to Coos County deputies as “a real strong feeling we’d make it this time.”
“We put up the sign. We put up a second sign. We put up a sign before the second sign warning about the second sign,” said Lorraine Picard, who has chaired the Stark Covered Bridge Advisory Committee for nineteen years and is, by her own description, out of sign ideas.
Picard noted that Friday’s incident was the first to coincide with what locals consider true peak — a 36-hour window in which the maples behind the Methodist church turn a color residents agree no one has yet successfully photographed. The trapped retirees, she added, were “actually getting a real nice view of it, all things considered.”
Inside the bus, several passengers were heard to express mild satisfaction at the development. “We were going to stop here anyway,” said Eleanor Dwight, 78, who had pre-purchased a four-ounce bottle of locally bottled syrup at a rest area outside Lancaster and was now eating it directly with a plastic spoon. “Frankly the schedule was very tight.”
Furmano, who has driven the Old Saybrook foliage route for eleven years, declined to comment beyond noting that the bridge “looked taller from the parking lot” and that his employer-issued GPS had specifically recommended the route as “scenic.” Asked whether he recognized the bridge from his two previous incidents, he indicated that he did, but that something about the angle of approach was different each time.
A flatbed from a wrecker service in Lancaster was expected within the hour, though Stark Fire Chief Merle Tibbets said the more pressing question was what to do about the fourth Sunshine Coach Lines bus, currently 22 miles south on Route 110 and, according to its tracker, making good time.
Picard, asked whether the committee planned to lower the posted clearance or raise the bridge, said the committee planned to do neither. “It’s a covered bridge,” she said. “It’s been the same height since 1862. The buses are the part that keeps changing.”