DREAMS IN A BACKWATER

PART ONE:

Introduction

I

(1)

CREDO

I live in a little house on a hill at the edge of a small town.  Down below me, in the valley, lies the town proper, from all sides of which the land slopes upward into a series of low, rounded peaks.  These are the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains, smoothed by weather and time into a softly undulating terrain.  Viewed from a distance, these hills appear covered with a surfeit of trees and this gives them, at first glance, the illusion of being but sparsely inhabited.  Seen up close, however, this ostensibly uncharted land is revealed to be interlaced with streets and houses, driveways and yards, interstate highways and old country roads.  There are, certainly, a good many trees, even a few small woods, to be found – but this is no wilderness against which humans must struggle in order to secure their existence.  That battle was won a long time ago.  Rather, this is nature conquered and tamed, cultivated and groomed so as to provide the most complimentary background possible for the descendants of those earlier combatants whose memory may be forgotten, but whose urge to command and order the uncivilized character of the world about them lives on.  It is, or has always seemed to me, a curiously strange mutation of forces that has brought into being, from the stock of the natural world, this intricately networked hodgepodge of houses and stores, factories and farms, sewage systems and gas pipes, electrical currents running through wires, cement sidewalks and tar-covered roads.  I look out on it all from the vantage point of my house on the hill with a frequently puzzled, and sometimes doubtful, eye.

The cemetery for the town where I live is located up on top of this hill.  Through a small stand of trees and down a short dirt road, it lies quite near to my house, no more than a few minute's walk.  I go there often.  To some this might seem a curious, even a strange habit to indulge, but I find that the cemetery makes a good place for thinking; wandering through its tranquil domains seems to help facilitate a more tranquil wandering through my own thoughts.  And although I'm not a particularly morbid person, I must admit that I find the presence of the dead peculiarly comforting.  They give me a sense of continuity, I suppose; even of hope:  those people lying so peacefully under the ground have, after all, been through something much worse than anything I've ever faced.  Of course, they didn't survive what they've been through – but still.  I find that their presence helps me to keep things in perspective.

The cemetery is soothing in other ways as well, acting as a sort of balm to the senses, it being so quiet and old and also quite beautiful in a rustic sort of way.  Evidently a good deal of thought was put into the planting of the trees and shrubbery, for there is always a freshness of size and shape to greet the eye.  Of color as well – for in springtime the rhododendrons, of which there are many, put out great masses of flowers, red, purple, pink, or white; then they look like fantastical party balloons, or huge, old-fashioned ballroom gowns.  In autumn the leaves of the trees – maple, oak, elm, birch, and ash, their branches flung up against the sky – turn the color of fire; and of course all through the summer there are flowers of many different kinds blooming on the graves.  The gravestones themselves are surprising for their variety.  Those who were rich in life have erected huge granite slabs, or towering obelisks, or somber religious statues, to mark where they lie in death.  One section, the oldest part of the cemetery, has several long rows of tall and very thin, flat stones, these stuck close together and jutting out of the mossy ground every which way.  Many are engraved with quaint lines of old-fashioned verse, such as the following:

Another section is filled with row and row of very small stones; these stand as mute testimony to those whose lives lasted only a few years, or a few hours, in this world.

It sometimes surprises me, when I go to walk there, how many other people I find roaming about in the cemetery.  "What are you doing here?" I want to ask them.  "Haven't you anyplace better to go?"  As for me, the answer to that question is simply, "No."  The dead, I find, are exactly the right company for me:  all I really want is to be left alone.  Of course, some of the people I see are visiting the graves of relatives.  But others treat the area as a sort of park.  They come here to walk their dogs – or themselves, or each other – for pleasure and for exercise.  Sometimes kids can be seen riding their bicycles along the narrow, winding roads, or they can be heard whooping and hollering through the woods.  For running all along one side of the cemetery there is a deep ravine, with a creek at the bottom, and a fairly large strip of woods beyond – large enough to provide home to a small herd of deer, and a flock of wild turkeys; also to chipmunks and squirrels and to birds of course, in countless numbers.  I've seen groundhogs there too, and the shy opossum; once I even saw a giant turtle that had dragged herself up to the top of the ravine and was in the process of scooping out a nest for her eggs.

Here, right along the edge of this wood, the ravine dropping down below me on one side and the cemetery opening out beside me on the other, is where I like to go walking.  It's a soothing place, quiet but, what with the untrimmed weeds growing there, just a little unruly.  I remember how, one autumn several years ago, I'd thought of making this little pathway of mine even more enjoyable by buying several packets of wildflower seeds and scattering them along the way.  I'd first got the idea in the spring when I spotted a clump of daffodils growing in amongst the weeds, presumably the result of someone having cast some extra bulbs aside after planting what they needed on a grave.  I thought of what a pleasure it would be to see flowers blooming unexpectedly here and there all along the edge of the ravine, and of how other people might enjoy them as well, wondering where they had come from; I even thought of how it might inspire them, during their hour of need, to a greater degree of confidence in the cycles of the natural world, of which death is but another part.  But whether because the autumn leaves were so thick the seeds never reached the soil, or because the weeds coming up next spring were so many that they crowded out all new growth, none of the seeds I'd scattered ever grew.