Up North Avenue we went and then over to St Charles Road and up down, turn around, up down an access road looking for a pioneer cemetery which supposedly lay behind a cement factory, but not so far back as the railroad track. This all used to be prairie, rumor has it, but it’s hard to imagine. Concrete desert sprawl and spread and ugly, a stark monstrous ugly over what used to be alive.
The cemetery didn’t have prairie as promised because it had been mowed, well planted with ‘real’ grass, a lawn, and then kept mowed. The stars and stripes flew in the center and barbed wire choked around the top of a new fence and there was a keep out sign saying you’ll be prosecuted to the full extent of the law if you deface or damage anything in the cemetery; and the full extent of the law looked expensive with court costs and everything included. Next to the cemetery sat an acre square outlined by an older broken fence which was black with weather (and weather when I don’t type the w, and before I’ve typed the ‘er’, because it’s late and my hands are cold reminds me of earth (and will now, always, remind me of earth)) and there was winter prairie here in the second square, looking a bit dead but like it might be alive in the spring and there was snow covered grass on all sides and outside the perimeter grew winter trees with compact birds’ nests protected in crooks of branches.
The next prairie was closed for the season.
After that was the one with the DNR truck and the sirens and the powerstation we didn’t see until we were leaving Goose Lake and heading for I-55.
The last stop on our prairie tour took us down a country lane. Snow blown and fenced only by violent barking dogs, we found the cemetery we’d imagined: broken gated, big stoned, with prairie right there among the dead; prickly pear cacti dry and living poking up from snow, and you knew that the pioneers knew this prairie as well as the un-prairie trees which had grown too, because the burning which encouraged prairie, not trees, had stopped, and the lives of the dead were counted in years and months and days if they were much beloved and hadn’t lived as long on this earth as the living needed them to make it.
published in PN Review 178
