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Reflections on a Family Reunion

Today, I consider the end to things. Markings on the side of the road. Rites of passage. The children of the maize struggling under a vast oven of Midwestern sky. The wind blows, but the rain does not fall.

I am of course, talking about Carhenge, but more on that later…
The last weekend in July, 2004, saw Herrick South Dakota’s 100 year anniversary. My ancestors, on the Furhman side number among the town’s first inhabitants. My great grandpa Furhman was the town mayor a few times. He helped to build the railroad that at one time cut across the prairie. It’s long since been ripped up. The road that went to my great grandparents farm is not overgrown and gone.

Herrick’s population of 400 is now 105. But there it is. A collection of houses on gravel roads in the middle of a vast empty sky and corn. Don’t lock your car. Leave the keys in the ignition.

And so families gathered to celebrate the centennial. Celebrate our continued existence. My family gathered, went to reunions, a parade, a wedding anniversary, and a birthday.

We arrived in time for the Counties All School Reunion. This was a reunion of attendee’s of rural schools. Tiny one room schoolhouses where one or three or ten students of various grades would be taught by a high school graduate. My grandmother, 92, was the oldest graduate/school teacher there. I sat and listened to family members discussing their experiences attending rural schools in 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and the night went on.

Later, we went to a local bar/meeting place to have beer outside. I saw a thousand stars in vast slash. I drank beer under a blue moon by a corn field while a country band played love songs.

Herrick had about a 1000 people come to their centennial parade. We were all in it. You’d do your turn and then sit to watch. All of us on a flat bed trailer. My grandmother in a rocking chair. My aunts and uncles playing cards. The little ones in children’s rocking chairs at the end. Throwing candy. Trucks pulling trailers full of families. A car dressed up like a pig in honor of the annual potluck Squeal Meals. Everyone tossing candy and my little cousins scurrying like I once did. We came with three buckets of candy and we left with three buckets.

A last hurrah for a town that can no longer muster a little league team. It takes half a county to gather enough children to play. The young adults just don’t stay. A state where half those young adults who remained joined the National Guard to make a little extra money. Now things stand even emptier as mother’s wear pins with their son’s and daughter’s faces. At each ceremony asked attendees to remember the children on far away shores.

Odd to think that the Lutheran church in Herrick was picked up by a tornado two years ago and carried away. The Catholic Church is now a playhouse and we heard a concert given by two music students. A tenor and a pianist. Handel and Bach. The theme to Oklahoma sung as South Dakota. Snippets of opera. Rogers and South Pacific Hammerstein as we sat on folding chairs and fanned our selves in the stifling heat.

At the end of the concert in the Catholic Church that was, the young tenor sang a song that was sung at his grand parents wedding in that church fifty years before. It was their anniversary. Family reunion. They were all in yellow t-shirts with the frozen image of 1800s unsmiling solemn ironed on. He came down off the little platform. Gave his grandmother and his grandfather a hug and then sang the last song of the evening.

I saw lightening scratch at the black sky.

I attended a church service at a baseball diamond, where once I watched my cousin’s incomprehensive play. The theme of the sermon was change. How we dragging our shoes in the dirt and ce. The road stretches infinitely forward and under that hot vast sky it stretches back.

For the first time in all my visits, the school house where my mother and her mother went to school was open to the public. I listened to my Uncle Don discussing the difficulty of playing basketball because they had a wood burning stove at one end of the gym. (The gym was about the size of our living room.) They had a student stand in front of the stove during games so that no one would run into it. Looked at the class of 54’s grades on the wall.


But really, it’s all about Carhenge.


On our way from 500 miles to arrived, we passed through the town of Alliance Nebraska and there just a wee bit north of the town is a replica of Stonehenge – but you know, using Chevy’s.

“Carhenge was built as a memorial to Reinders' father who once lived on the farm where Carhenge now stands. While relatives were gathered following the death of Reinders' father in 1982, the discussion turned to a memorial and the idea of a Stonehenge replica was developed. The family agreed to gather in five years and build it. The clan, about 35 strong, gathered in June 1987 and went to work. They held the dedication on the Summer Solstice in 1987, with champagne, poetry, songs and a play written by the family.”
Memorials, remnants, celebrations.

 
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