Reaching Loda Prairie took me a couple of hours. I’d set out alone on a Tuesday morning on a whim, driving south without precise directions for how to get there. I hadn’t been to this small preserve in years, though I had the vague memory that it was northwest of the town of Loda, about 35 miles north of Champaign.
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The region is now noteworthy mostly for its extraordinary flatness. All I could see that day was a wide plain of pale crops and dark soil stretched out for miles under the cold gray sky. With the soybeans harvested and the corn shriveling in the fields, nothing blocked my view. Once in Loda, I spotted Pine Ridge Cemetery immediately. The ridge it occupied was so subtle it couldn’t be called a ridge anywhere but central Illinois. In this flat earth the evergreens on top of it stood out like skyscrapers.
I turned right by the granary, thumped over the railroad tracks, and drove out of town toward the trees. It was high noon, but the dark sky made it look as though evening were coming. Above a bare bean field a small falcon swooped low and swung upward again.
The two conservation organizations arranged to buy agricultural land adjacent to the cemetery and trade it to the association for the five acres of prairie. The association was willing to bury the community’s descendants in a former cornfield because the agricultural land would bring in income until it was needed for burial plots.
I slipped back out past the guardian sunflower and crossed the fence into the cemetery. It occurred to me how fortunate the people who visited the cemetery residents were to have the view of a true prairie. I’d never taken the time before to look around the cemetery, which holds graves from the 1850s to the present. Some of the white limestone tablets had been standing so long that the letters and numbers were weathered away completely, leaving blank slates. At the modern end of the spectrum was the Crum family’s shiny pink stone carved into the shape of two interlocking hearts. Mr. Crum died in 1993, and the birth year of Mrs. Crum is etched into the rock, followed by a hyphen.
