It is the way of men to take from the Earth’s makings, wood and steel and stone, and to build things. To fill these things with hope of long use and admiration, so much so that, for the attentive ear, they will often sing. Sadly, it is also the way of men to outgrow their need for these things that they build, to forget, and to leave them to the slow dismantling of weather.    

Over a yawn of silver-green river, there spans just such a forgotten thing. A bridge that once sang as sweet as any sunrise, but having gone so long unused by both man and machine, its voice was seized by rust, and its song trapped deep within its iron bones.  

The River, wide and old, and slow as the summer doldrums, remembers when the bridge was young and bright and red. When it still sang, its voice strong and filled with hopes of usefulness. The River remembers. For it was the River who gathered the last of Bridge’s expectations, that fell, one by one, like the chips of its bright red paint, into the River’s deep, green waters. Gathered the expectations, and carried them away to the settling sea.

From time to time, bits of river bottom grow restless and long for sunlight, full and still. 
     Snagging grain after grain of passing sand, they add to their height, working their way upwards, until finally they reach the fabric of the river’s surface, its underside, where they push and push, until the gentle whorls are rent, and into daylight they rise.

Their first years above water, these bits of river bottom are perfectly content with being only sand, with basking in the sunlight, shells and driftwood collecting at their shores. But spring after spring, seeing the buds burst forth green on the banks that flank the River, they begin to ache, as earth will do, to be productive, to bear life. 
     So the Bottom’s snag at leaves, compostables. They build soil, rich enough to catch the eye of any seed aloft, breeze-bound and in search of a patch of bare earth to set roots. Soil, solid enough to coax to their shores the walnuts, hickory nuts and acorns, cast into the river, afloat.            

As he knew the story of the forgotten bridge, Peter Pan was thoughtful enough to cock his head when he came to it, sparing a moment to listen for any hint of the song trapped within its iron bones. 
     Hearing nothing but the slow churn of lost hopes in the deep green waters below, he crossed to the center, and with his own great expectations, poked his head through the bridge's riveted gridwork and looked down.

There it was. Just as the story told. A bit of restless river bottom, bare of briers and grown tall with trees, its width and breadth no more than a boy with a slight limp could run, at least once, without winding.
     And in the treetops, bare now with fall, the nests. Not of twigs and sticks as a bird will build, but great wads of leaves. One, two. Twelve. Fifteen. 
     Peter Pan shivered with the odds. The grains of sand, stacked one by one to raise the river bottom ... to build an Island. The gathered seeds. The hundreds of floods thwarted over the years to husband such a fair stand of trees. Trees with nuts no less, food for the Island's sole inhabitants, who, with neither wings or an inherent inclination for swimming, arrived there on a log, cast by a chance strike of lighting into the waters upstream.
     There it was. Cut off from the World. An island inhabited entirely by squirrels.  
     Squirrel Island.
     Just as the story told.