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Then there is the matter of the plastic flowers. Is there anything quite so depressing or enduring as that bunch right over there? Those blue plastic roses moldering in a mayonnaise jar wrapped in aluminum foil. But now, close to boot and crutch, a contender appears on the grave of Agnes Peters, 1918-1975. These may well take the prize in the plastic-flower competition: astringent orange daisies poked directly into pale fish tank gravel and strand upon strand of ragged aqua ivy surely chewed by a Rottweiler.
In my mind, I see Dana's piquant face, her large glasses and close-cropped reddish hair that belies the fact she is eighty-something. A few moments ago those blue eyes ignited as she took in the spectacle of a family plot just across the way from Lee's.
She was uncharacteristically adamant saying, "Outlaw plastic flowers altogether. Anything plastic. You need rules, Shannon, and then you have to enforce them." We stood there scanning the low, white plastic picket fence pinioned along the edges of golf green outdoor carpet. Rising out of the center of a profusion of phony peonies was a sign: "Grandma," spelled in reflecting mailbox letters.
"These things just don't fit in here." Dana's lips made an uncompromising line. Shaking her head she said, "No. This is not the five-and-dime. This is supposed to be a designated pioneer cemetery."
RED DIRT
This uplifted ridge, shaped like an earthen wave rising from gently tilting valleys, is a perfect spot for a cemetery. It affords the truly long view: From here it is possible to contemplate the distance between this world and the next. Yet, as I wait for the men to arrive who will dig Elsie Patton's grave, I am not moved to consider the possibilities of the Hereafter or even of the here and now. This May morning, I am reading the epochs of the Great Before, trying to decode the ancient signs written in ridge, rock, and sediments rhythmically laid down over the course of millions of years.
The impulse began yesterday when I spoke with a funeral director who told me gravediggers were bringing the vault that Elsie Patton's family had ordered for her burial. The graveside service is scheduled for Saturday, and the gravediggers wanted to install the vault this afternoon. The funeral director said he was aware that
things were changing at our cemetery; he wondered whether we would continue to deposit our "spoils" in the same place.
"Our spoils?" Terrible images sprang to mind.
The voice, low and smooth, became faintly patronizing. "That's right, you haven't been at this too long, have you? The spoils: the dirt that is leftover after the grave is dug. A vault displaces quite a bit of dirt and the gravediggers will want to deposit it in the right spot."
"We haven't changed that," I said briskly. "They can put it where they always have."
But the fact is, before yesterday I hadn't thought about how much dirt is leftover after a grave is dug. I've only had the experience of dealing with a few burials, and one of them was not a burial but what, according to the law, is an "inurnment." The family took care of actually burying the ashes in an urn.
Now that I know about "spoils," I understand that the pile of dirt, so surprisingly red, deposited in a low part of the cemetery near the southeast corner, is not merely fill dirt but instead the residue from numerous gravesites over the years.
As for the vault: My sense of what that might be is pretty vague. I came up here to see whether it lives up to my Gothic imagination, and to introduce myself to the gravediggers, who know their way around this cemetery better than I do.
This red dirt: It seems disrespectful, and even profane, to refer to it as "spoils." When wet, it sticks to the shoe, and although it is always red it is distinctly redder after a deep rain. The exposed part of the ridge where I am standing wears red dirt like an old topcoat, or more aptly, like a fireman's dusty windbreaker.
Fire, however, was not a significant part of what shaped this long view I am relishing--unless one counts water-silenced lava extrusions, sending undulant shock waves throughout the warm Eocene seas of some forty million years ago. These extrusions, although volcanic, were not emitted from great lava-spewing cones like Mount Etna, or, much closer to home, Mount St. Helen's, which, even in the 1980s, left ashen pyroclastic footprints over much of Washington. Instead, the volcanism that formed portions of this landscape came from molten basalts oozing through fissures and vents beneath a semi-tropical sea which quickly doused the fire.
As for ice: Cycles of glacial cold missed this place entirely. It is true that, just thousands of years ago, remnants of the ice-hurtling Missoula Floods managed to push broken ice and careening waters all the way into Oregon's Willamette Valley--the southern tip of which is just twenty miles north of here. To say that these floods were vast would be an understatement. It is estimated that at their height they carried icy waters three or four times the present day volume of all the rivers in the world.
Water is the mother of this landscape. An ancient extension of the open ocean once reached as far to the east as today's Cascade Range until it eventually receded, leaving the Pacific Ocean we know today. The seafloor exposed to chastening winds and rains gradually took on the familiar aspect of the hills and valleys spreading before me. The landscape's contours are still changing in ways imperceptible to my short span, but changing nevertheless, subtly altering this comfortably rumpled landscape with its melange of rough ridges and smooth-sided hills; its creek-coursed wetland swales knuckled with hummocks.
I am picking up a handful of red dirt, ruddy from a smidge of iron and millennia of oxygen. This dirt tells it all. Along with the tinge of minerals, I am holding sea sediments and the pulverized evidence of volcanism at work. And as I let go, feeling it spill through my fingers, this dirt testifies fathoms.
(continued on the next page)
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