Tamme van Klinken is standing in front of the gate with his bicycle. He stares through the bars. His parents are buried ‘somewhere back there’. “It is on the open field. They felled trees there last year, so I am hopeful that the grave was not damaged,” says Van Klinken hopefully.
Anjo Geertsema, public order and greenery adviser at the municipality of Emmen, nods: “We have indeed cut down trees there. The typesetter made the conifers sick, so a lot of them were removed.” The alderman adds to his colleague: “If we had not done that at the time, the disaster after the last storm would have been unimaginable. You can now even see that healthy trees, roots and all, have been ripped out of the ground.”
naughty shoes
Harm Schoo, also a visitor to the cemetery on this Tuesday morning, strolls through the branches. “I took the plunge and went to see if my parents’ grave on the urn field by the pond remained intact,” says Schoo. That turns out to be the case. That didn’t matter much, though. He points to a surrounding tree: “If it just falls in the wrong direction, I’ll be very different here.”
Schoo turns out not to be the only one. It is crawling with the relatives. Also behind the gates. Most take the warning signs for granted and go take a look anyway. Van Klinken has doubts. The alderman is still on the corner. “Maybe when the alderman is gone, I’ll go there as soon as possible.” Van der Weide understands that: “I can hardly stop them.”