The headstone — as you can see in the photograph I’ve included here — stood alone, at least thirty paces from any other marker in the little one-acre graveyard. Still, it was there, intact and still upright, and I was grateful for that fact. The cemetery had been used for less than four decades, from its founding in 1881 to the final burial in 1920. Once the small chapel on the accompanying acre ceased to exist, no one consigned their loved ones to rest there. The place became so forgotten that its decorative lilac bushes grew into a huge patch, concealing nearly all of the stones. People would drive right and be unaware of the nature of the site, even though they could have thrown a tennis ball out a window and the ball could easily have landed on one of the graves. Nowadays local volunteers keep the shrubbery trimmed and mow the turf. If not for that, even I, who knew where to go, might have struggled to find it.
I had always meant to stop there, sooner or later. The problem was, I had kept saying to myself that I would do it when I happened to be passing through Nebraska. But given that I live in California and always have, I reached my sixtieth birthday having found no occasion in my adult life when I had cause to be “just passing through” Nebraska. My path-of-least-resistance approach was inadequate. I had to make the goal a bucket-list item.
In 2016, I was in Kansas City, MO to attend the World Science Fiction Convention. My wife joined me on the final day, and the next morning off we went on a long, snaking course to visit family graves in not only Nebraska, but South Dakota and Iowa as well — all three of them states outside the scope of previous explorations on my part, or hers. We arrived at the lonely little graveyard on the third day, reaching it about ten minutes after we had rolled through the forlorn village of Creighton, population 1125. After paying our respects, we would go north about three miles to Winnetoon, population 63. Vacant as those communities were, we would see encounter smaller ones the next day, including, as we crossed into South Dakota, the hamlet of Wewela, population FIVE.
