This sounds like one of those really long jokes that your uncle tells at a family reunion after he's tied a few on, but it's real:

For almost two decades, a 58-foot-long, 10-foot-wide and 6-foot-high pedestrian bridge sat idly in an overgrown field in Akron, Ohio. It had been removed from a nearby park for a restoration project, police said.

Live shot of you, rereading that paragraph a few times over again:

That's right: There was a nearly-60-feet-long bridge in the middle of an "overgrown field in Akron, Ohio" for nearly twenty years. Just think about that for a minute: While you were graduating high school, getting into Wheezer, writing your senior capstone thesis, getting married, changing diapers....that bridge was just sitting there in that field. Just waiting.

Until one day, it wasn't:

But early last month, a passerby noticed something was amiss with the structure. The brush around the bridge had been cleared and the deck boards were missing, police said.

A week later, the entire structure was gone.

Let's cut back to that live feed of you:

That's right! The whole thing just up-and-vanished. The alleged thief is one David Bramley, who police claim "paid a local trucking company for a crane service," which was "later used to place the bridge on and off a vehicle that transported it" away from the field.

Mystery solved! But wait, you're surely wondering: Why, oh why was the bridge in the middle of that field for nearly twenty years in the first place??

Until around 2003 or 2004, the Akron bridge was located at Middlebury Run Park, a trail along the Little Cuyahoga River, according to the Akron Beacon Journal. It was removed for a wetland restoration project, police said, and relocated to a field on the other side of the river, next to a large office building. There were plans for the bridge to be reused in a project for a women's shelter, the Beacon Journal reported.

Oh, yeah, sure, they were gonna get around to "reusing" the bridge any day now. You can only imagine the Akron Public Works Bureau being asked about the bridge at every single city council meeting for nearly twenty years and just having the same line every single time:

The lesson: If you leave a bridge in a field, lock it up with a heavy-duty bike lock or something.

The world is a strange place.