An Informative Daytrip

We recently drove to my wife’s home area west of the Missouri River to find and visit a few isolated cemeteries where some of her ancestors are buried. She was born and raised on a farm in the Raleigh area, a rugged but beautiful area with an uneven skyline full of buttes, plentiful pastureland, and cropland where farmers can raise good corn and small grain with adequate rainfall.

Many of the early settlers were Germans from Russia, a group who had been invited to farm in Russia but later on had to escape the hardships which were placed upon them. Some of them settled in this area to begin wresting a living from their new land.

The cemeteries were named Holy Infant, St. Gabriel, and St. Vincent. None had remaining church buildings, all having gone the way of little country schoolhouses that used to dot the countryside. One of the graveyards wasn’t being maintained so we had to walk through tall thick prairie grass while keeping a watchful eye for rattlesnakes. Holy Infant was near what used to be the little town of Brisbane. 

We were in Brisbane once over thirty years ago and saw a building standing along with a couple other signs of past life. Now that building had disappeared; I saw no sign of prior habitation whatever except for the railroad grade that runs past the village site. My brother-in-law remembered a large stockyards and grain elevators that once stood beside the railroad.

Most of the graves in these cemeteries were marked with an iron cross fashioned by local blacksmiths. Sadly, many small crosses marked an unnamed grave, probably an infant already forgotten. 

With my brother-in-law driving, I was able to look the countryside over and notice that  hundreds of acres of  unharvested wheat still stood in the field. He said he’d never seen so much rainfall as they’d had this year and with the ground remaining wet, machines couldn’t drive in the fields. Now the straw in those fields has started breaking down and the kernels are starting to sprout. One curious farmer did combine some and took it to the elevator to see if they would take it. No, they rejected it. It must have been disappointing after having watched the lush stand grow through the season.

One year, 1962, we experienced frequent downpours and very wet ground on our farm. I was away at college and Dad waited until the ground froze in November before he could combine it. It still yielded well, but that’s the only harvest they brought in. Luckily it hadn’t sprouted.

Crop failures have occurred in the past, worldwide, many times over. We still hear stories about the drought in the 1930s and topsoil blown and piled like snowdrifts. It caused the huge migration of farmers emigrating to California as portrayed in Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath.” Grasshoppers? Old-timers said they were so thick that they ate fenceposts and fork handles.

Nebraska was hit with heavy flooding this spring from the melting deep, late snows. Scientists tell us flooding will grow worse in the future. Glaciers and the icecap are melting which will raise sea levels and endanger coastal cities. A trip down Highway 46 reveals hundreds of acres that were never worked this spring because of our late and heavy snowfall. And not to sound amusing, the birds and the bees are disappearing. Some won’t accept the fact of climate change and its effect on weather patterns and our environment. This is in spite of an overwhelming percentage of scientists who say it’s so. I’m afraid the scientists are correct and hope it isn’t the new normal.