And a break from the prospecting to wander up the hills to visit the cemetery in Wayne. Wayne, formerly a large coal town, now with a population of 33 and a cemetery filled with over 150, "Visitors Discouraged", a 15 or 20 minute walk to the top of the hill by the radio tower.
"Visitors Discouraged", the cemetery is now on private land, overgrown, forlorn, surrounded by barbed wire, thickets of bushes hide markers, what very few markers remain, for 150 graves I can find not even a dozen, the rest are marked by the cribbings poking through the soil, by the depressions of their having fallen in, the cemetery itself is death, no graves tended, 60 or 70 years since the last burial, and in another hundred erosion will be washing the coffins and bones out of the bluffs into the town, to be found with the dinosaurs...
The pictures are bad, I apologize, midday on the prairies, hot, bleached wood markers and crosses fallen into the hollows, I could have waited there for some color with the setting sun, but really, this, this is it: eternity under the stark prairie sky. Many of the graves of are of children taken at 1 or 2 years, Spanish Influenza, other diseases, I take my photos, disturb nothing but a deer who finds the thickets good cover, and when I leave it returns.
