A Bike-Ride Oasis

By Stan Purdum

On any lengthy bike ride, I eventually need a rest break, and that’s when coming upon a rural cemetery is like finding an oasis. 

In a seemingly haphazard scattering, small cemeteries sit adjacent to country roads, the kind cyclists prefer. These burial places are ideal rest stops. Even in regions where trees do not otherwise abound, most cemeteries offer at least a few, providing shade where I can recline and cool off. And in many places, graveyards occupy high ground, affording attractive vistas for my rest period and a rolling start when it’s over.

Many of these cemeteries started out as churchyards. With the passing years, some of the congregations have disbanded or moved to other quarters, and the church buildings have been torn down. But graveyards are not so easily relocated, and so they remain, quiet and, it seems to me, content in repose.

They are so tranquil that I’ve often wished camping were allowed on their grounds (for cycle-tourists only, of course — not RVs). Surely the permanent residents would voice no objections. Regrettably, most cemeteries are posted as closed between sundown and sunrise, an injunction against vandalism, I guess. And I suppose cyclists possessed of vivid imaginations might feel uneasy spending the night in a graveyard.

I doubt I’d be bothered, though. If, in any sense, the dead can be considered the “hosts” of the property they now inhabit, the mood I sense on their grounds is not that they’d like to scare me off, but that they are no longer touched by the concerns of living. The world goes on, but the dead hold their place, immutable. What has been is gone; what will be doesn’t matter. In graveyards, I sense no angst of existence, nor, for that matter, any intimation of immortality. What haunts me in a cemetery are not ghosts, but the sense that in the larger scheme of things, my own time on earth is but a heartbeat.

While cooling down from my pedaling exertions, I often stroll among the old stones, reading inscriptions. The stones heading children’s graves always touch me with sadness. The markers over those who lived long lives simply communicate, “I’m gone, but it’s okay.”

Still other grave markers bring a chuckle. In one cemetery, an older man was tending the grounds. When he saw me idly walking about reading the monuments, he directed me to a weatherbeaten old stone from an early 1800s burial and told me its story. Apparently, before his death, the soon-to-be departed felt neglected by kith and kin and expressed his sadness in the epitaph he composed for his own headstone:

Here the old man lies.

Nobody laughs and nobody cries.

Where he has gone and how he fares,

Nobody knows and nobody cares.

After his demise, but before the stone was inscribed, his wife and brother learned of what he’d written. They couldn’t persuade the stone carver to leave the inscription off, but did manage to get him to add a couple of lines:

But his brother John and his wife Emaline.

They were his friends all of the time.

I agree with something George Bernard Shaw once wrote: “Life does not cease to be funny when people die, any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.”

Somehow, I’m always a bit surprised after stopping in a cemetery that I don’t come away with some kernel of wisdom or an increased understanding of the nature of life or perhaps even some resolve to live the remainder of my time allotment differently. But I don’t.

I always seem to leave unchanged — glad for the peaceful, pleasant rest stop and the contemplative moments to be sure, but basically unchanged.

I’m convinced we need a few things in our world just to “be.” Not to demand change, not to teach, not to urge greater effort and certainly not to engender anxiety. Just to be.

At least, that’s enough for me. 

—From Stan Purdum’s book, Roll Around Heaven All Day

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Stan Purdum has ridden several long-distance bike trips, including an across-America ride recounted in his book Roll Around Heaven All Day, and a trek on U.S. 62, from Niagara Falls, New York, to El Paso, Texas, the subject of his book Playing in Traffic. Stan, a freelance writer and editor, lives in Ohio. See more at www.StanPurdum.com.