Guest post by Frederick Manfred Simon.
“Go slowly and go far”
November 30, 2018
An inclement November afternoon finds
the sun burning a hole into the blanket of volatile, steel-woolen
clouds as engineer Jory Langevin trundles west at 10 mph making a
light engine move towards Hartline to pick up harvest loaded hoppers
after descending the grade from Hanson moving from fill to cut to
fill to cut again and again where descending crepuscular rays -
Fingers of God - touch the earth as the souls that have poured out
their lives across and into this vast and copious land may well be
ascending Jacob’s ladder toward heaven. It is said that this
particular portion of Promised Land was settled by a moiety of
Calvinist Welsh. Fat and green home lands and hamlets left so very
far behind them n’er to return, leaving with what little of their
very modest possessions in hand, under arm, and on back, surely must
have driven weary women to wail, and tired, homesick children to
break out in tears of angst as they scanned across what appeared an
endless, lifeless scape of desolation they had traveled an ocean and
continent to arrive at, while the patriarchs rejoiced in having won
and found freedom - salvation at last - from indentured servitude to
fickle landowners and folly kings, irrespective of what that freedom
looked like to their clan. Unwavering in their faith and its
foundation of predestination, they, like John E. Williams, from
Anglesey and his wife, Elizabeth, from Llanarmon, Cymru (Wales in
Welsh meaning “Fellow Countrymen”) went about speaking and living
their distinctive Welsh language and culture while rebuilding their
lives working their land - not another’s - establishing new
communities, and, of course, giving thanks to their savior in
erecting the “Zion Welsh Calvinistic Church” and setting aside a
plot, from whence this image made, where to say goodbye to the
predestined who have gone ahead to the eternal kingdom, and John and
Elizabeth now rest together in eternity under a headstone obscured by
dead tumbleweeds. The century since has left the church razed and the
cemetery unkept, nondescript, and insular within a wheat field on the
corner of dirt roads 43-NE and U-NE a few miles east of Hartline
along the CW, it and they but forgotten.
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