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But if this truth concerning primordial waters seems a bit abstract, I can always go back to Fred Applegate's find of a decade ago. Just a few miles from here, he found a fossilized "seashell" atop his sheep hill. Yes, a seashell on top of a sheep hill. How fast can I say it?
When Fred died, the fossil was not among his effects, so we will never know whether the mollusk Anomia, Acila, Crassastella, or Solena was the decapod that made him shout, "Eureka!"
And now Fred is up here in the cemetery awaiting future geologic epochs, resting in red dirt.
I always bring a little of the cemetery home with me. I've just finished cleaning the rubber hobs of my "graveyard" shoes that are really meant to be gardened in and have wandered sock-footed into the kitchen where I've settled down at the table with a cup of peppermint tea. I'm thinking about the two brothers I just met: Jerry and Terry, the gravediggers.
They arrived driving a pair of gargantuan pickup trucks, emphatically changing the meditative quiet of the cemetery with the slamming of doors and a great deal of yelling as they tried to make themselves heard over engine roar. One truck carried a backhoe, the other a large rectangular object shrouded in black plastic and tied down with ropes.
Who was I expecting? Pockmarked, toothless fellows straight out of a Dickens novel? Or maybe I pictured narrow-faced, liquor-swigging gravediggers from a Bela Lugosi movie? I certainly was surprised to meet these pleasant, robust-looking men, both bearded, very well fed, indeed, but muscular and fit as they surely need to be in their line of work. Considering that they had work to do, they were quite talkative. As they took care of the business of unloading equipment near the site of Elsie Patton's grave, they took turns answering my questions.
A poet named Douglas Jerrold once referred to Jerry and Terry's vocation as "...the ugliest of trades..." Still, the brothers have apparently been happily digging graves for some eighteen years. Except for slack periods when, I gather, Death, thank God, takes a holiday, and the fact that the brothers must be perpetually "on call," they both claim to like the work.
I didn't ask them if they concurred with something else Jerrold wrote, "Now, if I were a gravedigger...there are some people I could work for with a great deal of enjoyment."
The brothers work exclusively in rural locales in cemeteries similar to ours. They are hired by small "mom-and-pop" funeral homes and don't go to big commercial cemeteries, many of which are owned by large corporations. "Those places have their own gravediggers, and they carry markers and headstones, flowers and everything else, right on the premises. They don't have much use for independents like us," Terry volunteered.
The brothers work in three adjacent Oregon counties and claim that they know how to reach each and every cemetery no matter how tucked away amidst hills and fields. Surprisingly, in this geographically large county (Douglas) sprawling over some five thousand square miles where the total population is only slightly more than 105,000, there are more than two hundred known cemeteries, many of which resemble ours. In Oregon, weighing in at only a measly 3.5 million--smaller than the city of Los Angeles--there are at least three thousand cemeteries.
I can only imagine how many tens of thousands of small and medium-sized rural cemeteries are scattered all over the United States. Strictly speaking, many of these cemeteries may no longer be found in rural areas since in much of North America, as in many parts of the world, cities and suburbs have surrounded graveyards of all sizes. What was a rural burying ground as recently as a decade ago may now be next to a Wal-Mart parking lot or even under it.
Because of later urbanization and what seemed an endless availability of open land until the latter part of the eighteenth century, U.S. cemeteries located in burgeoning metropolitan centers did not experience the overcrowding long prevalent in Europe and the British Isles. On both sides of the Atlantic the traditional location of burial grounds adjacent to churches was at the root of overcrowding. It began to occur to city officials, members of the medical community, and more enlightened citizenry in various parts of the world that it was time to remove cemeteries from urban centers, and away from the long arm of ecclesiastical authority.
Ironically, before the advent of Christianity, many societies, including those of the Greeks and Romans, declared it unlawful to bury the dead inside of city walls. It was the Church that brought cemeteries into urban settings, insisting that the dead be buried in churchyards. In England, and various parts of the continent, it was not unusual for a choirboy to find himself gagging as wind brought fumes through the choir loft's clerestory from the decomposing dead buried in an adjacent cemetery. Conditions were even more odious in old cathedrals, where cemeteries had been established literally underfoot. The church granted their most influential and well-to-do members the right to bury their dead in stone vaults located directly beneath the sanctuary floor. In warm weather, churchgoers swooned in their pews.
These unpleasant conditions were not limited to European churches, however, since American parishioners were also seated atop burials in various eighteenth-century churches located in the heart of cities. To have been a passerby, parishioner, or worse, a gravedigger, at New York's Trinity Church in 1822, for example, when officials demanded that the church burial ground immediately be covered with fifty-two huge casks of quicklime because of the offensive odors and danger to public health, is almost too terrible to contemplate.
Perhaps Jerry and Terry would have not answered the call to become buriers of the dead--the result of Terry reading an ad saying "Gravediggers Wanted" a few days after he'd dropped out of high school--if they had been forced to put up with the overcrowded conditions experienced by their historical counterparts.
(continued on the next page)
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