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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