Why I hate the Rime of the Ancient Mariner

I know I drowned in a previous life. Or at least one of them. For the longest time I thought that I had drowned in all of my previous lives. When I was growing up, we had a bridge that connected Duluth to Superior….it was the Arrowhead bridge….a hulking, gray, wooden structure that creaked in the breeze and seemed barely wide enough for two cars to cross one another. It had a lazy S curve to it, and I would get physically ill any time my parents decided to drive us over the bridge. I had to lay in the backseat of the car on the floor and hum…loudly enough to cover the thud of tires moving over the timbers.I always had visions of that bridge collapsing as we drove over it. Could never shake the feeling.Eventually, they demolished the old structure and replaced it a few miles down stream with a great big concrete bridge. I remember driving to the remains of the ramp….looking out across the river where the Arrowhead bridge once stood, and seeing the same vision of a collapsed bridge that had haunted me since I was four years old.Oddly enough, it was at the old ramp that I would have a pretty major breakdown when I was twenty….Weird night that was. Best friend Mike had to get me under control. I was going to swim out to the middle of the channel and drown myself….because, get this, the Moon wouldn’t stop following me around. Growing up in Duluth---a shipping city---I guess it was natural to have a heightened respect for the power of water and the Great Lakes and all. The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (an ore boat) played pretty heavily on the minds of almost all of my friends. We were in elementary school when that happened I guess.That stirred up memories of another time that I drowned. Convinced that I was among three boys swept over the side of the pier, they died in a storm, nearly 50 years before the laker went down.Then, there is the last freakish story that I found out when I was in high school…we ( a tassle of us, Jim was there and Mitch O’Connell, Ed Bartl, Kevin McKuen, and another Kevin and a kid named Jay for sure) were walking to a new fishing spot along the St. Louis River….it was near the Oliver bridge and we had to cross a narrow train trestle to get to the good spot….a couple of the guys had been there before, and swore that the currents were perfect for bringing the big walleyes in….the trestle was low to the water…maybe only 10 feet above it….and it was probably only thirty yards from end to end….I remember locking up though as I crossed it. I made some excuse as everyone but Jim continued toward the fishing hole…..eventually Jim got me to “shuffle” my way across and continue, but I was pale as a ghost and he wasn’t sure that I would be able to make the way back later that afternoon…When I told my mother about it (much later) she told me about three boys she went to school with who drowned while swimming there…my father had been invited along, but my grandfather had grounded him for stealing the family car, so he wasn’t able to go…So, maybe that’s all a little bit weird…but what is even more bizarre now, is that I feel the most at peace when I am standing on the shores of a big body of water….lake or ocean…