The area itself is not completely unfamiliar; my family goes back 5 generations here, after all. My thrice great grandfather left Austria in the mid 1800’s and made the almost unfathomable, by todays travel standards, journey by ship with his brother down around the horn of South America and up to the promise of the West coast of America. His brother got off the boat somewhere in Peru. A journey of thousands of miles to an undeveloped foreign land with little but the clothes on his back, all alone. Now there is a man who knew what he wanted; or at least what he didn’t want, and now that I say it, I do know what I don’t want also, and perhaps that is what has led me here.
I have a few childhood memories, of Easter egg hunts at my Aunt and Uncles farm nearby, the hours long journey through flat agriculturally rich land to get there, the graveside service for my grandfather, here where our family plot is waiting, on land that my family donated to community over a hundred years ago. I remember marveling at the huge number of people in attendance. He was a beloved man, well liked, respected community member, business owner. I loved him dearly. I do not feel like that kind of man either.
Today I am trimming headstones. The crabgrass is relentless. It will completely cover a headstone in a matter of months. There are many many more headstones here than are visible. The cemetery is a little run down and underfunded. This small town has been around for over 160 years, but the population has never been over 299 people. Today it is around 180. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was half that in 10 or 20 years. There isn’t much opportunity here besides farming and with the way the land is being bought up and consolidated, a lot of the family farms can’t compete or are being pushed out. I remember my Aunt ranting about the grape vineyard that went in across from their place. She said it obstructed her view of the foothills in the distance. Little did she know how the walnut orchards and rice paddies of her youth would be replaced by the now more lucrative vineyards.
I say trimming, but really it is more akin to butchery or maybe the equivalent of a long haired hippie getting a buzz cut before being shipped off to some foreign land, to do a little butchery of his own. I use a probing tool to locate the headstone, a simple, somewhat crudely handmade tool that consists of a long steel rod pointed at one end, about 3 1/2 feet long with a welded “T” handle, the same one I use to find the corners of a buried vault that I need to open up for a burial. There are many pre-buried vaults here, some single, some double decker, ready to go for those with the foresight to plan ahead. I always strongly encourage people to ready a plan well before the need arises. You never know when the need may arise, besides, I have seen far too many tearful, stressed, confused faces and family quarrels and outright fights due to lack of planning and a failure of consensus. Everyone seems to have an idea of how a funeral should be, yet so often people of the same family rarely agree. A highly charged time like death is no time to try and hash out such important decisions.
Once I have found the headstone, I take another handmade tool, which is basically a shovel with a modified blade. The business end is about half the size of a normal spade but with a squared off end, which is sharpened. I drive the blade into the ground about 3” from the edge of the headstone, angled towards the concrete border, and then work my way around the perimeter until I come back to meet myself at the beginning. This headstone is completely covered, and takes some effort to tear away the easily 50 pounds of grass mat. It’s amazing how in a matter of months a 3 foot by 2 foot area of concrete and bronze or stone can be completely filled in by a few inch thick layer of dirt and grass complete with a jungle of creepy crawlies, unassisted. Maybe it has something to do with the generous supply of underground “nutrients” or just the virility of the crabgrass. Sometimes I save these living ecosystems to patch up dead areas of lawn or to fill in after a burial vault is reclosed, but this one is destined for the debris and dirt pile on the north end of the more or less 8 acres. As I heave the mass into my handcart, I notice a late model sedan pull into the gravel and dirt drive and slowly make it’s way towards the office. I watch a middle age woman get out; I wave but she doesn’t notice me and she starts to walk towards the office. This is my cue to switch hats, to take off my groundskeeper hat and put on my sales hat, or my hat of condolence, or maybe my sleuth hat if she is looking for a nearly forgotten relative. This is almost entirely a one man operation here, and I do it all, and sometimes more.
I walk up behind her as she is knocking on the office door and tell her good afternoon. She whirls around, looking a bit flustered, and demands to speak to the manager. I tread lightly and say “Speaking M’am, how can I help you today?” I can see that she scarcely believes I really am the manager, given my current state of un-managerial attire and the dirt and grass stains completing the look, but I assure her there is no one else here but me and invite her into the office to talk. I gesture towards the door, but her singular focus can’t be contained and she blurts out “I demand to know why Edwin So-and-So is buried here!” She proceeds to tell me about all his crimes to humanity and that he is way too close to her plot and a community outcast to boot that never went to church. The fire in her eyes was a little alarming, and might ordinarily have set me on edge and perhaps make me fumble for the right words, but I have found that since I have embraced this role as Cemeterian ( a word I coined for when people ask me what I do, as I wear many hats, and landscaper or grave digger are wholly incomplete, if not weighted with baggage. ) I have come to see my role here as kind of like a gate keeper, an ostiary if you will, tending the estuary between life and death, and with that role, unexpectedly I find myself quietly confident in maintaining the inherently calm waters here. A healthy estuary will buffer the onslaught of surging hurricane waters, trying to force it’s saltiness inland, and it also buffers from the inland rain waters, filtering sediment and pollutants, creating a rich and fertile zone of transition. Take me out of this flux zone, and I myself may become less calm. Instead, I give her a warm smile and let her anger tumble down harmlessly onto the grassy expanse before us. Do you know one of the things I like most about cemeteries, I ask her, and seeing the confused look on her face I don’t wait for a reply. This is the only lush green grassy place for miles around, kind of like an oasis, a sanctuary. You can come here filled with anger, or sadness, or grief, or simply ready to lay down and die, and you won’t be turned away. It’s kind of like the church at it’s best, that way.( I knew this would turn the tide.) Like the church, we don’t turn away the sinner, or the hypocrite, or the lost soul. We embrace everyone on equal ground ( as if death doesn’t embrace all, I smile to myself) and let god do the judging. I can see the flush of red draining from her face as she considers this, so I continue. Now, I would be happy to show you other plots if you would like to move, but I wouldn’t want to move if I was you. You have a real “purdy” spot there under that tree, I say adopting a little of the local twang to help sooth her, and besides, think of it this way, he’s a few plots behind you and technically you’d be blocking his view of the foothills, I say with a smile. She didn’t say anything, but I could tell she liked that, and a heated wind was clearly not pushing her sails anymore. I ask her how many of her family are here and how often she comes to visit, and after awhile she seemed to forget about being angry. I told her I was cleaning headstones today and that I would do her family’s next. She thanked me with a renewed warmth, and walked back to her car and waved as she drove away. The sun was making it’s way down to the top branches of the apple orchard that bordered the western edge of the cemetery, and the Mylar strips the farmers tied to it’s branches to deter the birds with flashes of reflected light were glimmering nicely in the late afternoon sun. I still had time to do a few more headstones before calling it a day.
When I took this job, I didn’t much consider the public relations aspect of it, the sort of extreme customer service through the emotions and little considered side of being human that death can stir and often unwillingly brought to the surface. I imagined a largely solitary work, which it mostly is. The office work is my least favorite; the permits and licenses that need to be submitted, the cataloging, notations of death and updating of records and files, balancing of books. There are the plot and burial sales, transfer of titles, the rare dis-interment paperwork. Maintenance is really the bulk of the work; the mowing of the vast lawn, pruning of trees and shrubbery, maintaining and upgrading the irrigation, the lighting, the dirt and gravel roads. There is also a bit of masonry in repair of monuments and setting of new headstones, etc. The machinery all need care; the mower, the backhoe, the dump truck- an old 1948 3 ton Ford, still chugging away, refusing to die in a field of death. I learned to operate the backhoe on the job, where we use it primarily for burial operations- opening up a plot to install a vault, either for pre-burial or at time of need, and to carry a vault from the yard and set it in the grave once dug. I can’t say why, but digging the grave is rather enjoyable for me. The soil here is very clay heavy, which can be a challenge in the wet winter months, and sometimes a burial has to be delayed because the equipment is too heavy and destructive and/or may get stuck. Most of the time it is a pleasure to dig in and the work reminds me of playing in the dirt with my Tonka Trucks as a child. The soil holds it’s shape well and I’ve become skilled enough with the backhoe to dig a very precise 8 foot by 3 foot by 8 foot deep hole, barely big enough to hold two 2000 lb concrete vaults. A perfect rectangular orthotope. It is an interesting experience, especially the first few times, standing at the bottom, 8 feet underground, bodies resting all around, some newly laid, others asleep for ages. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t, at least once, lay down at the bottom on the cool bare earth, just to get the full effect. They say it’s best to believe in what you are selling.
I developed a surprisingly wide array of different skills working here and learned many new things I wouldn’t have imagined, but I think one of the most interesting was the human side of it. Probably not the first thing one would think of passing by on an average day, on a lonely country road, a field of green with an army of the dead just out of sight. But of course, cemeteries and funerals, monuments and flowers and graveside services aren’t really so much for the dead as they are for the living. As much as I have learned here, none was more illuminating than navigating the emotions, the rituals and traditions around death. I myself have never been much of a traditionalist, and have always found it a little amusing how tightly people cling to their traditions while having so little understanding of them, and often so little agreement between friends and also between members of the same family. I found when I would talk to families about the importance of their traditions and what they would like in the service, or type of burial, or other particulars, they were often rather adamant about how something should be, but they could tell me usually nothing about why it should be done that way or even why it was important to them. The standard answer was almost always that that was just the way it was done, even though a brother or aunt or cousin was sure it was done a different way. Sometimes I would actually use that to help diffuse a squabble, asking them to tell me About their traditions and why it was important to them, knowing they didn’t have an answer, the momentary confusion would allow me to steer the conversation back to the deceased and what they would want, and away from their infighting to try and unite behind their collective grief. To be quite honest though, by and large, people did not want to talk about it. They did not want to think about it. What they wanted most was to get through it with as little thought or reflection as possible and get back to their lives, and complete that chapter.
This may sound unduly harsh, but it really is reflective of our society. Americans do not deal well with death and their own mortality. We have a culture that idolizes youth and vitality, that wishes to live forever in an idealized world. The beauty and life extension industry is huge and ever growing; we want to be forever young into the future, always looking back to what we were. We undervalue the vast wisdom that can come with age and experience, and shelter away the old people into “retirement” homes to be looked after by strangers.
I have softened my stance on traditions. I understand the comfort they can bring in trying times, and they can bring people together into community, and rituals are often an important part of daily life and can be a guidance and balm in times of transition. I do think though, that we too often shield ourselves from what we view as the uncomfortable parts of life. A learned response I believe. Most of our existence is based on the illusion that this will go on forever. We are unwilling to step outside the cultural narrative , the stories that give us comfort. It doesn’t mean we need to live in discomfort, but we need to be willing to explore it, for I believe there are great riches there. There is great beauty and depth in impermanence. Impermanence and finite existence is a fact. If we don’t expose ourselves to the anxieties that we manage through culture, and we don’t accept the greatest gift that death has to offer, then we are living a life at least partially in denial. By bringing the fear of death as close as possible to the surface, we can use the clarity of vision it provides to live a more fulfilling life. The terror of death and our response to it or denial of it, is primarily responsible for almost everything we do, whether we are aware of it or not, and we are mostly not. Death is at the core of what it means to be human, our knowledge and awareness of being finite. I believe it is the worm at the core of the human condition.
The modern American cemetery didn’t exist prior to 1831, but as epidemics of Cholera and Yellow Fever sweep the nation and urban church cemeteries were filling up fast due to huge numbers of children and others dying before their time, the rural cemetery was born. These first modern cemeteries were also the nations first parks and it was customary to picnic there with the recently departed. In the 1920’s with sanitation and modern medicine taking hold and early death becoming not so common, as well as public parks sprouting up around the nation, the practice became much less common. Most people stop by for a brief visit to leave flowers or small momento’s of affection, maybe cleaning the headstone, but nothing more. There are exceptions, and there is one family in particular that I can count on to come by 2-3 times a month. The whole family, kids, dogs and maybe a friend or two. They come complete with picnic basket and blanket, and spend 2 or 3 hours there enjoying the day and tranquil surroundings and maybe refreshing the flowers of their infant child, taken too early from them. Their reliability is touching. I can also count on a group of biology students and the professors assistant from the area state college to make a field trip here twice a year. There are a number of resident barn owls here and one of their preferred trees are the Italian Cyprus that border the South and East perimeter. As a result, there is a reliable copious source of regurgitated pellets, often mistaken for feces, at the base of these trees, and the students gather up large numbers of them to return to the classroom for dissection, separating hair from bone and identifying the various rodents that became the owl’s dinner.
I have come to appreciate and enjoy the owls presence here and find them to be fascinating creatures, not to mention they can eat up to 12 mice in one night and are far more proficient at controlling rodent populations than the best of tom cats. I am not much of a religious person, but if anything I have always considered nature my church as I draw much inspiration and comfort from it’s presence and machinations. It may sound fanciful or overly anthropomorphic to some, but I have often found that animals have things to share with us, if you have eyes to see. The owls have not disappointed in this regard. The Italian Cyprus is a favorite of theirs to perch on and digest their meal, but the Phoenix Palm is their preference for nesting, sleeping and raising their young. There are a number of these palms on site, housing what I estimate to be around 6-8 owls, maybe more during mating season. One of these Date Palms is located in the middle of our family plot and is over a hundred years old and about 65 feet tall. Over the last few years, I have become accustomed to their habits and ways, one of which is to routinely clean house 2 to 3 times a year, after which I find all manner of debris at the base of the tree. This can include maybe one or two palm leaves, sticks, leaves and branches of other trees, random bits of string or cloth and sometimes a faded artificial flower or two. This became a routine over the years and part of the general upkeep of things, until about my fourth or fifth year there when it took a turn to, at the very least a little bizarre, if not down right baffling. One morning, a warm, calm spring day without a stitch of breeze, much as it had been all week, I was walking the grounds with survey tools in hand ready to lay out an area for an upcoming burial. I walked by my family plot and noticed an unusual amount of debris scattered all over the 20 foot by 50 foot area of what appeared to be mostly whole palm fronds, which can be 8 to 12 feet in length. I walked back to the shop and attached the trailer to the lawn tractor to load all of the debris in. I had never seen anything like this, especially this quantity. After even the worst of winter wind storms I might find 4 or 5 fronds scattered about, but nothing like this. I started to load the trailer with fronds trying to figure out how they all came down at once, with no wind what-so-ever. After loading the trailer to the brim with 20 or more fronds, I began to find other items- what looked to be a very old child’s baseball glove, maybe from the fifties, two halves of a coconut shell, a ball point pen, an old red plastic comb, and a huge approximately 12 inch in diameter Tupperware bowl complete with lid. I also found two brown wax candles in the shape of a couple, but the strangest thing is that they were standing upright side by side like a newlywed couple atop a wedding cake, at the head of my Grandfather and Grandmother’s headstone, as if they had been gently placed there only moments ago. The couple depicted looked to be of a fashion and style that was not of today. Homemade candles are quite easy to make and these appeared as such and to be made out of common brown microcrystalline wax, the type commonly used for lost wax casting. They were in pristine condition, especially for such a soft wax. No claw marks, or beak marks, or scratch of any kind; nor any marring or melting of wax. This type of wax has a melting temperature of 90 degrees. It had to of been in that tree for some time, at least five years and probably much longer, before I came here, for I am very familiar with what is routinely placed on grave markers, and everything is routinely removed as it ages, and even the things I leave for longer, never have I seen anything like this. They are obviously effigies made to commemorate loved ones, but not in recent times. The summers here routinely reach 110 degrees or more. something like this could not have survived all these years in such pristine condition. But here they were, as if my grandfather had reached out from the grave himself and gently placed them there in the night. The most obvious explanation for all this mess was the resident owls who lived in that very palm, until you consider the perplexing physics of it all.
Barn owls are not as big as they look, with all the fluffy feathers and specially designed flight feathers to fly silently through the night, they actually average about one pound only. If you could reach up and grab onto a palm frond attached to the tree you would struggle to pull it down. The dead ones may come down without too much struggle, but the green ones need to be cut off with a fairly large pruning saw. How is it a one pound owl could dislodge one or two dead 10 foot long fronds, which at their base are at least as thick as your wrist, let alone 20 or more green ones? I doubt even a raccoon could do this in search of food, let alone get past the ferocious defense of two angry owls defending it’s nest, and even if it did why do I find no shells, feathers or carcass below? And why go to all the trouble of all this mess, why not just grab an egg and run? Besides, there were currently no chicks or eggs up there. So how did a one pound owl carry a heavy baseball glove up there? The Tupperware bowl was huge and obviously vintage from the seventies or before, with it’s weighty soft green plastic body and opaque lid; it was easily 2 to 3 times the size of the bird and definitely heavier. And why would it even want these things? Owls are not collectors like crows are known to be. They don’t even really build nests. They usually just lay their eggs on top of all their regurgitated food pellets. How could all this stuff even fit up there, let alone stay lodged through multiple winter storms. It all seems simply physically impossible, and quite frankly inexplicably bizarre, and the one thing that would seem the most possible and yet so strange is the two perfectly placed figurines. And let me say here, that my bedroom window is not 200 feet from this tree, and there is a very protective dog in the yard. No one comes on the property without us knowing. Was this a message from my ancestors? Was this a message from the owls? Was this a prank performed sixty five feet off the ground in the dead of night, right outside my window, with guard dog on duty? And to what end? Quiet whispering messages in the dead of night.
Come evening time, especially on warm clear nights, it is my habit to sit out on the porch, favorite drink in hand, watching the night come alive, looking for shooting stars or satellites moving overhead, listening to the night shift stirring. The owls are shaking off slumber, calling to one another, and with their numbers it often sounds like an old fashioned party phone line, with multiple conversations going on at once. A coyote howls in the distance, or a pack closing in for the kill and the wildly riotous chorus of cackling, almost laughing sounds they make when successful, as if cheering for themselves. The owls make a surprising array of sounds; surprising to me because I have researched the various sounds they are said to make and the reported reasons for each type of call, by various different breeds. They usually fall into categories of the stereotypical hooting or, with some it’s more of a cooing sound, and a screeching sound, some make an almost whinny sound, and the young will make a hissing when looking to be fed. I have listened to a large number of recorded owl sounds as well as some wild ones. I think the research may be lacking however. I am by no means an expert, but in my experience living with the barn owls here, they make a much greater range of vocalization than I have read about or listened to in recordings. These barn owls, with their asymmetrical ears and disc shaped faces capture the faint sounds of their prey lurking below. They are said to not technically use echo location like bats do, more of a refined listening location I guess, but I have witnessed and heard them, as they hover silently over potential mark, making a low clicking sound, and then suddenly swoop down and pounce. They are such skilled and refined hunters, the rodents have scarcely a chance. I could go on talking about the various other unique sounds I have heard from them, but there is one in particular which has taken a firm hold in my psyche. One evening, well past midnight, I was asleep in my bed, with the window cracked open. I can see the shop and it’s roof line from bed, about 12 feet away. I was startled from sleep by a very unusual and strange sound. I knew immediately what it was, or rather who it was, but that did not comfort me as the sound was like nothing I have ever heard before or since. I often struggle to describe the experience to people, and for the sound there really are no words. I had to double check that I was in fact awake, or maybe having a lucid dream. It sounds cliche, but I actually pinched myself, and I could clearly feel the weight of my body in bed. I looked to my dog, and she was awake too, though without the usual bark or growl that I would have expected. I looked out the window to see the owl perched atop the shop, just feet away. I wanted to get up to get a better look, but honestly I was in rapt attention, and if I am being completely honest, I was a little scared, not for my physical safety, but I felt almost willingly paralyzed as this otherworldly sound was penetrating the night and directly into my soul. This was the first time the owl had ever perched on the cold slippery metal roof of the shop, or anywhere so close to the residence, and as I have said, I am well versed in their habits and vocalizations. Normally any type of sounds are a series of the same sound repeated over and over- Hoot hoot hoot, screech screech, click click click, etc... This was entirely different, and sounded more human than bird like. There was no repetition, or pausing, or waiting for a response from another owl. It was also lower in volume than I am used to hearing from them, almost as if it was only meant for my ears. I can only describe it as an unearthly sound, almost like an alien language, a speaking in tongues of some ancient long forgotten dialect. It went on for some time, non stop, with out pause, as if finally being able to reveal some secret in long droning monlogue. I lay back and let it wash over me. The hair over my entire body was at attention, I tried to take deep easy breaths and not let my heart race; arousal, excitement, a bit of an edge, a bit of fear, a lot of awe. Was it some profound mystery unfolding before me, or just a silly human with a vivid imagination and a love of nature and it’s wonders? It went on this way for at least 20 minutes, and then, abruptly stopped. It waited for just a moment, and, without need to bow or explain, took silently to the air and was gone into the night. I lay there in sort of a numb awe. I frankly didn’t know how to react, it was so mysterious and beyond anything I had words for, my mind didn’t even bother to try and conjure up anything. I lay there motionless and in complete silence for hours. Sleep was unavailable, but I didn’t feel like moving. The air felt somehow sacred, any sound or motion would only dilute whatever it was I had just experienced. Is this how men of mysticism felt when confronted with transcendental experiences? Sounds ridiculous right? You wouldn’t think so if you had been here. As the light of dawn slowly penetrated, and night drained away like a fog in retreat, I still felt slightly altered, but decided to get up. I dressed in my work clothes for the day and laced up my boats. I turned to call for Sadie Blue, but she was already at my side. I open the back door and filled my lungs with the fresh morning air. I looked up to where the owl had been, hoping for something, some clue, some affirmation that it was real. We walked out the yard gate and onto the grounds, Sadie off like a dart, nose to the ground with lustful purpose, making her rounds. I walk over to the family plot and stand looking up at the Phoenix Palm and listen intently. Do I hear a faint rustling? Settling in for slumber? I feel the urge to say something, but there are no words. I look to my Grandfathers grave, for maybe something, not sure what. I stand there for some time. My Weimaraner has returned, and she looks up at me with those gorgeous expectant eyes. I stare back at her with the same fondness and tenderness that seems to have no end in her. The sun begins to peak over the foothills in the distance, always with promise, and the day begins.
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