It has been nice exploring the roads again. Yesterday I had a trainee with me in northwestern Nebraska, along the South Dakota border.
We came across a sign in Cody bragging about the Cody-Kilgore Cowboys and their state championships. It just so happens I know someone with the name Cody Kilgore and had to stop to take pictures to send.
A few miles west of Valentine, we noticed a road called German Settlement Road. I tried to find more information about the settlement, but only found the story of a declining town called Crookston nearby and the Zion Lutheran Cemetery.
Crookston recently lost their last remaining church and is down to 70 residents these days. Other than the post office and liquor store, the residents now drive to Valentine for all their needs. It is just life in rural America, far from the big town life.
Here is a little piece about that wide spot in the road slowly growing quiet.
German Settlement Road
The Lutherans finally
closed the church last year,
abandoning the remnant,
alive but just waiting internment
down German Settlement Road.
Zion has taken their
Mütter und Väter,
Oma und Onkel Fritz,
Tante Anne and her
three stillborn.
The heavens are clouded,
the land still feeling their shadows,
but the cemetery seems to hold
more faithful than those remaining
above the grass and stones,
along this gravel no longer driven,
this dust no longer stirred.
| Copyright © 2023 by Michael E. (Maik) Strosahl Maik has focused on poetry for over twenty years, during which time he served a term as President of the Poetry Society of Indiana. He relocated to Jefferson City, Missouri, in 2018 and currently co-hosts a writers group there. |
Maik, I’m glad both that you are back on the road and that you’re glad too! Your creative forays into sights along the highways and byways are special. Surely others of the many, many truck drivers in the U.S. today must also explore places glimpsed on their drives. Or are they actually very few in number? You may be an even more special commercial driver than we thought.
ReplyDeleteI don’t remember your ever mentioning encountering other, like-minded drivers; have you ever talked with any?
I have run into a few explorers, but not any that share their adventures in poetry. One reason why I train is that I enjoy the hearing the stories of how others have made this decision in their life to go on the road and the other great conversations with people you basically live with for a couple weeks while they learn the necessary skills to go into their own trucks. Other than training and brief encounters with other drivers at restaurants and fueling stations, there isn’t a lot of interaction among drivers, unless you get a cb radio, which has its own separate set of issues these days.
ReplyDelete