Retreading Memories

Dear Tired Ones,

Starting in the summer of my sophomore year in high school, I worked full-time for my father, who was the general manager of a family-owned tire shop. Initially I worked in the automobile division, mounting and balancing tires. Most winter evenings after school I was responsible for studding snow tires, using an air gun to insert dozens of individual rivet-like ice grippers into pre-molded insets at the apex of each tire’s tread lug. Studded snow tires were made illegal sometime around my senior year—seems little metal spikes had a tendency to destroy asphalt.

Auto tires were a sideline; most of the business was retreading truck tires. Used carcasses were buffed smooth, and a dense preformed tread was cured onto the smooth casing in one of two heat and pressure chambers, which produced 128 road-ready tires a day. Most of the casings belonged to our customers. Salesmen fanned out from Omaha nearly 250 miles in every direction, inviting truckers to entrust their used tires to us, which we returned within two weeks ready for another 120,000 miles.

After my junior year and through college, most of my summers were spent running the tire pick-up and delivery routes for vacationing salesmen, following gravel and dirt roads to trucker garages in exotic places like Takamah, Weeping Water, Odebolt and, somewhat ironically named, Plentywood. My father thought vehicle air-conditioning was a waste of money, so running these back roads in a Ford 250 with 60 tires balanced between the truck bed and a rack trailer was not exactly fun. But I was out of the heat of the shop, and once you got the hang of driving on high-crowned back roads, you could get enough breeze to make the journey tolerable.

Lunch was always from a brown bag, accompanied by a thermos filled with cold iced tea or lemonade. I’d pull off wherever there was some shade, shut off the truck and languish by the side of the road. Frequently, I found myself near some abandoned cemetery, a few dozen graves marking the place where some pioneer boomtown went bust when the railroad arrived one town over. Among these forgotten plots, I found a lifelong fascination with lost graveyards.

Plodding deep into cultivated fields toward unplowed patches of prairie grass dotted with markers, one is first struck by the tiniest stones memorializing children whose lives were measured in months and days rather than years. Larger headstones recollect heartier citizens, though sometimes commemorated with dates and causes of death like toothache, consumption, dropsy, fever or typhus, lethal conditions as forgotten as their victims. But the real reward of my taphophilia were the obelisks and monuments elaborately engraved with poetry, quotes or phrases commemorating the relationships or character of the deceased.

In 1870 Mark Twain composed an essay for his column in The Galaxy magazine lamenting the loss of post-mortem poetry. I tripped across the article searching for verses I recalled from my explorations of funerary grounds, hoping to identify their authors. Alas, the composers of these eulogistic rhymes are as forgotten as their commissioners, but I concur with Twain: “There is an element about some poetry which is able to make even physical suffering and death cheerful things to contemplate and consummations to be desired.” I will share with you but two of my many favorites:

Affliction sore long time he bore, physicians were in vain –

Till God at last did hear him mourn and eased him of his pain. 

and,

Dearest father, thou hast left us here thy loss we deeply feel;

But 'tis God that has bereft us, He can all our sorrows heal. 

I don’t mind the occasional tour of historic cemeteries. Chicago has several, and I commend a visit to Rosehill, Oak Woods and Bohemian National. But my preference are the overgrown memorial gardens for those whose history has been forgotten, and all that is left are the broken cobbles of lost memory.

Musing also for my love of Emily Dickinson, I remain,

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor