227. Cemeteries

 There is something very pastoral and peaceful about cemeteries. They are almost always in places of quiet beauty and solitude usually on the outskirts of town or on a hilltop out in the country. Often times they are around beautiful old churches with classic or gothic architecture. I know they are typically associated with great sorrow and more often than not people—living people—would rather avoid them than go picnicking there. That isolation could also be part of the appeal to me. Probably the biggest attraction for me at a cemetery is the history quietly tucked away, some of it never to be remembered but much of it memorialized in the tombstones.

I have made it a habit of visiting cemeteries whenever I get the chance. The isolated little town of Riggins, where I grew up, probably helped me escape some sense of cemetery sorrow. There were all kinds of small family plots in the back yards of people’s homes that had originally been old homesteads in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Sometimes I could go hiking up trails near the Salmon River and find a tombstone of some beloved family member whose tombstone long outlasted the homestead that has now been reclaimed by the Forest Service or BLM. I always found this sense of history in a very remote area exceptionally intriguing, just as I found it intriguing that I could hike into alpine lakes that were named after old times that I knew as a child. These remote tombstones were physical connections of my own to the landscape where I lived. They were people whose families I knew even though my own family graves seemed to always be in the cemeteries that, until I was a teen, I never actually went to.

Of course, now some of my visits to cemeteries are specifically to see the graves of those loved ones I have lost in my own life, but that wasn’t always so. As I said, there were several little family cemeteries around where I grew up, but there were also the typical community cemeteries. I think the first of those that began to seem so fascinating were the cemeteries of the several ghost towns in my part of the world—places like Florence, Mount Idaho, Silver City, etc. They often had wooden grave markers and many of them weren’t really all that old now that I think about it (maybe fifty years) because you could sometimes still read them (this was in the nineteen sixties). I wish now that I had known something about cemetery preservation because there is much to be said about a place just by matching a tombstone with a recorded birth or death certificate. Of course, as a child, I had no such notions.

I’ve seen entire community cemeteries where all the old gravestones were in Norwegian or Finnish or Welsh right here in Idaho. In Samaria, Idaho there is a tombstone for the leg of an amputee whose remaining body is also buried across the yard after his subsequent death a few years later. Odd little things like that lend so much character, sometimes humor, and story to a community. In New England, the old slate tombstones from the 1600s and 1700s are more legible than the marble ones from the mid-1800s so that you can gather all kinds of information from the colonial people who were very much aware of the brevity of life as observed on their tombstones with the creepy little death heads, hour glasses, grim reapers and epitaphs. In Deerfield, Massachusetts I saw the stone of a mother and her infant who had died together in childbirth. It was well over 200 years ago, but the clarity of the stone gave me a very real glimpse of the pain that the family suffered from those deaths. While it may be something some would want to shy away from, I find it comforting that these people went through so much pain just so we could exist. And they almost always chose the most beautiful of places to honor and memorialize their living, and I also find that both comforting and fascinating. I truly love cemeteries.