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.
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.”
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 Goulding 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.”
