Navy Sweater, Straw Hat

You bicycle because you want to. Because you can remember  the first time you rode a bicycle with training wheels and the first time you rode without. From Spring to late Fall a day without a bike was a lesser day. Incomplete. Insubstantial. You’ve lied to your parents to get a new one. You’ve lied to them to ride a better one. Going for a bike ride gives the day weight. Materiality. You can say that you’ve ridden for more than an hour, or that you’ve ridden fifty kilometres,  or that you’ve ridden south on Road 1N for two miles and then across on Road 3N for six miles, until the gravel and packed dirt miles cede to an overgrown field lane and you’d thought better of it and turned North on Road 7W, which was newly-graded gravel, and soft and marbly, but the extra work of it made you feel better, and you rode it for another six miles until you turned East on Road 9N and though about completing the square. Covering six square miles – 36 sections, 24 miles. A reasonable ride, for gravel and dirt – the wind coming in at thirty kilometres from the Southwest. You’ve been somewhere, and you’ve been back again.

When you slow to turn South on Road 1W, to complete the square, something about the regularity of it, the predictability, made you decide to ride one more. You had the energy today – the legs, as they say – and you’d seen the arched wrought metal of the Eigengrund Cemetery entrance in front of its lone Cottonwood, set out in the middle of the section, a cornfield to the West, canola to the South, Wheat to the East and Soybeans to the North. An odd patch in the regularized industrial agriculture quilt.

Destinations help. Sure the destination is the journey, or vice versa, however it goes, but a stop, and some time off of the bike, to stand back an admire it, lean it up against a tree or lie it down on the grass and then walk the new land it’s carried you to, there’s simple pleasure in being somewhere else. Somewhere you’ve taken yourself to. Somewhere out in the middle of something, or even toward the end.

The lane that follows from the wrought iron arch that stands at the gravel road divides the cornfield from the canola. The corn is more than six feet high, but not yet tassling. The canola has finished blooming and has begun its turn from green to grey and then to brown. The lane is a half-mile and at the end of it is the cemetery. As you turn in to ride it, you see a pick-up truck at the end of it, and a figure wearing a straw hat pushing a lawnmower. You’re disappointed, but in a way enervated by curiosity. You’ve heard of this woman, Tina Heinrichs, who tends to this garden of the dead. This poetic maiden to the grim reaper. You ride up and she pushes on, the mower buzzes in the heat. She wears a dark cardigan sweater that, at first look, seems black, but as she rounds the corner and passes near you, you can tell that it’s navy – deep deep blue. Whether or not she sees you, you cannot tell. The wide and deep brim of her straw hat covers her face, and she seems intent on the path of the mower. She passes you and continues on to the next corner. She’s nearly finished. The grass around the graves has already been mowed. She’s finishing the edges – one or two more passes will complete the work.

You want to know. Who doesn’t? But she mows on, and you do what you’d decided to do three and a half miles back. You walk to the centre of the cemetery. You walk North along the West edges of the lines of the markers. You’ve remembered and impulsively followed the suggestion of some adult from your youth that you don’t want to disrespect the bodies of the dead by walking overtop of them, so you walk along the lines that must divide them – heads and feet lined up facing East – rows of sleepers in pods waiting for the Lord and his second coming. At the stone cairn in the centre of the yard you stop to read about the unidentified graves that have been marked by six-inch concrete disks embedded in the earth to mark the spots.

The story goes that the living relatives of those buried here, with the help of a local excavator who uses a backhoe with astonishing dexterity, digs pilot holes, exploratories, and notes where the soil is or is not uniform black loam and, by such observations of the mixing of the grey clay with topsoil, knows that these disturbances are signs of burial. Rows of grey disks and a cairn name and place the unknown that a flu epidemic in the 1920s took – children for the most part. My aging father tells me he remembers it well. No vaccine to save them. Not enough water to keep them cool and wet. Nothing to be done, and the children died as though they were the only ones to hear the Lord calling. As though they were the only ones with the sense to desert the hard cold and heavy prairie gumbo. As though they rebuked their parents for this paradox of humility and hubris. And here you stand, still alive (your aging father would have been six or seven years old at the time that he survived, just a half mile North of this spot, while others succumbed) flouting these obvious endings.

The mower motor hums and rounds again as you step away to walk back to your bike. Mrs. Heinrichs looks up as you reach for it, as she passes along in front of you. In that moment you see each other, her small, gentle face lightens into a smile, and you smile too. It was you who had the vision of a harpie, or Virgil, the Medusa grimly circling to introduce you to the horror and consequence of human folly. Rather here you confront the lines and crows feet of a grandmother who tends and gathers memories. She invites. She makes the way. She reminds, sure enough, but she says, there but for the grace of God, and she moves along.

You ride off past her, still mowing between the corn and canola fields, the land now more or less entirely tamed and settled. Death set aside by bike rides for fitness, pharmaceuticals, and genetic modification. And still you smile with her above the hum of her mower and the steady cycling of your feet on the pedals.