Lone Fir: The Cemetery

The printer says the books will be here on or about September 4th. One-hundred-and-thirteen pages. I'm not one to review my own book, but I'm quite delighted with it. It came out looking just like I laid it out; which maybe doesn't say so much for my layout skills, but at least I can't complain that they messed up my order. What I haven't figured out yet, is how to set up ordering through this blog; maybe it's not possible. Some PayPal tie-in. In the meantime, it should be available (soon) on Amazon and, sometime after the 4th, at local bookstores (Portland, OR). Metro might also carry it. It retails at $12. If you want one, send me $13 (a buck for mailing) and I'll send you one back. Or more, if you send me more money; I'm flexible.

It got to be more of a book than I originally intended—I'd just wanted a cheat-sheet for tours—but once I got into the actual size of the project, as well as delving into the history, it was apparent that a more thorough treatment was in order. What the heck, how many guides come with footnotes?

The dynamics of Lone Fir can be baffling even to its intimates, as if ancient, unsettled ghosts insinuate themselves into the Friends and bring old scores to toss onto the floor at meetings, like dead carcasses; though the scores too are faded and illegible. They lie unseen, unacknowledged, but still festering, only felt by observers as a vague unease. Which is a way of saying that I don't know if the book will be available through the Friends or at their tours. They'd make a bunch of money that way, but…

Why does that person cast no shadow?

I'm splitting the net wholesale receipts with the Lone Fir Foundation which is charged with fund-raising for the Memorial Garden and further, large-scale restorations. My contribution will be tiny, but will, hopefully, increase awareness of the foundation and its goals. But think of that when you're sending in your money. We can both use the bucks.

If you want to contact me by email, it's "johan.mathiesen@gmail.com." It may be the best way to order a book, at present.

Following are screen shots of  the cover and a few interior pages:

Back to the Future: Neighborhood Cemeteries

I'm giving a talk here in a few days to the annual convention of Oregon funeral directors and cemetery operators at Seaside, OR. Primarily, I'm focusing on do-it-yourself cemeteries, but I end with a few remarks about the future of cemeteries, which I've reposted here. The photos are selected from those illustrating DIY cemeteries.

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Agency Warm Springs Cemetery

Correlation: The rise of the lawn cemetery has been accompanied by the rise in cremation rates. Is there a causal relationship? If there is, what is it?

I believe that the rise of the large lawn cemetery—taking the maintenance of the cemetery out of the community and leveling the playing field—has withdrawn the value and use of the cemetery to the community. That, along with the steadily increasing cost for an increasingly abstract service, has driven many people out of the market place. Why buy sterility?

The lawn cemetery, as much as anything, was the result of the commercialization of the industry in the U.S., the necessity to trim costs and to stay in the black. The rest of the world did not follow our lead.

Other than National cemeteries where they give their plots away, can lawn cemeteries expect to survive?

Rob Strasser Grave: American Legion Cemetery (Manzanita, OR)

Question: should cemeteries ever have been commercialized? What are we going to do with all these stone parks that weren’t designed as parks very well? Are we creating a network of private parks that have little value for their communities? If we know all cemeteries eventually turn into parks, shouldn’t we design them with that in mind? Could the private sector ever afford to do that? What kind of job would they do? What are the constraints?

Two questions: 1) is the shift to cremation permanent? 2) what are the consequences of no longer having a memorial place for the dead? If we no longer have a physical spot to be with our departed, will that connection be lost? Do we care? Places where ashes are scattered tend to be lost to succeeding generations. Can we recoup memorialization without reversing the cremation trend? Do we want to?

Supposition: the majority of communities in Oregon are already in the cemetery business either directly or through maintenance districts. Some still have functioning IOOF or Masonic cemeteries that are, essentially, a community responsibility. All those cemeteries are still in business. I would wager that none supports itself.

Fire Pit: Camp Polk Cemetery

Fact (as I know it): aside from the golf course fantasy—it seems every golfer has come up with it—the idea of integrating cemeteries into a communities general park system has not been explored. Off-hand, I don’t know of any parks which include pocket cemeteries or free-standing columbaria. I don’t know of any park schemes considering burials or niches as a partial funding mechanism. For the most part, cemeteries operate as sub-functions of parks and recreation departments, not as an integral feature; and they’re certainly considered a drain, not an asset. Does that need to be reassessed?

Fact (as well all know it): parks developed out of cemeteries. Are the functions antithetical? Could governments use internment fees as a way of generating acquisition funds?

Who should be in this business and what’s it going to look like tomorrow? Is memorialization a thing of the past? Is it worth recovering? Is there a partnership available? Do you want the Post Office to manage your burial? Perhaps not.

It would be nice to have a dialogue about this, but I’m not sure how or with whom. Grade school kids and politicians? Neighborhood cemeteries?

Paul Washington Cemetery

Gadsden Purchase

Arivaca Cemetery

Out there is a forest of cacti. There are lots of smaller cacti, just large enough to rip you to shreds, but the towering saguaro dominate the landscape, looking like so many Beefeater Guards or hitchhikers out in the middle of the desert. I wasn’t prepared for the extent of the cacti forest nor the amount of growth in general. Interspersed with the cacti are rangy, miserly mesquites with small silver-shaded leaves scrunching niggardly at the sun. It’s not a forgiving landscape, but it teams with life; and that’s not including the people sneaking through from Mexico. If I wasn’t honest, I would tell you about the blistering heat and the rattlesnakes slithering through the sand, but the temperature was in the high-40s when I visited, and the snakes were too stiff to leave their holes. The cacti were out, though, so it was advisable to stay on the path.

This was my first visit to the Southwest, much less the Gadsden Purchase. They play at being Mexican down here and they give their streets and developments Spanish names, like Rancho del Cerro or Paseo de Chino, and they like to deck out in turquoise and silver; but it’s the same people who pretend they’re Hawaiian or Montanan or whereveran. To be fair, I was south of Tucson strung out in a blossoming oasis of old people, tens of thousand of people fifty-five or older. Their favorite sport is bocci where they roll the balls along artificial turf instead of tossing them down the alley. You can play it until you’re almost dead. I’ve never seen such a congregation of white hair in my life. If your spouse dies and you’re fifty-two, you’ve got to pack up and leave. I told you it wasn’t forgiving down here. They have small craft shops in the community centers, and if you’re not a resident, they won’t sell to you. Really. I guess there’s not enough craft to go around. If you want tourist ware, try the Indian lady across the street; she can use the money.

Relationships are complex in the West, no less in Arizona than Oregon. We all have Indians and we all have retirees and we all have Mexicans and we all have aging hippies and we all have ranchers and we all have tourists and we all have miners and we all have meth heads and we all have survivalists. And Mormons; we have Mormons. Blacks and Asians on the Coast. Not all equally distributed, to be sure. Nonetheless, wherever you are, exactly who you are is hard to say. We all want to have a voice.

Elton Waack

A big argument is authenticity: who has a right to what? How long do you have to be here to take part in the discussion? Whose water rights are we talking about? I asked my brother-in-law, where do they get the water for all these subdivisions? As water went, it was warm and slightly sulfurous.

“Oh,” he replied, “they have their own artesian wells; they get it from the aquifer.”

“How long are those wells going to last?” I asked.

“Not as long as they hope.”

And then he talked about how the saguaro are all going to be gone in eighty-years, thanks to global warming. It takes eighty-years for the first arm to begin to appear on a saguaro. Those arms in the air? They’re not hitchhiking; they’re waving goodbye.

Mexicans or Indians, I can’t tell which. They both say they were here before the rest of us. Except the Apache. The Apache came down here in modern times. They let loose after the horse came up from the latifundistas and the gun came down from the couriers de bois. But the question of whose land it is will always resonate. The Mexicans think the whole West Coast is theirs. For them, the border is an inconvenience making it difficult to travel between ancestral lands. Their identity is not tied to a specific spot of land. The Indians, on the other hand, are tied to their reservations whether they live on them or not. Their identity is place-specific. Excepting that now all Indians are Métis, like it or not, and their identity as an Indian is always tenuous and self-defining. Perhaps it’s a matter of language; the Mexicans maintain a national language which unites them all, regardless of their differences at home. At home, regional differences are paramount in self-identity. In America, you’re all Mexican and regional difference are lost on us. Their pan-national language, though, separates them from the mainstream population, which has only a limited window into it. It assumes a form of identity protection in the face of cultural onslaught. The Indian, unfortunately, has nowhere to hide. Even if he or she could remember their native tongue, it would not have been a national tongue; there was none.

Aside from those groups, there are numerous others of many races who have been here for a long time and surely consider themselves as native to the place as anyone else. Their identity comes from where they were born, not where their ancestors were born. And that’s an international human question: what is the relationship between self and place? How many generations do chickens have to lay eggs in the oven before they become buns? Whatever the answer, there’s a lot of crusty folks who are willing to lay their life down to call themselves Westerners.

McGee Ranch Cemetery

The Canadian Métis deal with identity in a reasonable way; the only way any of us can determine identity, really. The Métis are one of three recognized native populations in Canada: the Inuit, the Indians, and the Métis. By definition, the Métis are a mixed breed grouping. In the beginning it was largely East Coast Indians marrying (or whatever) largely French voyageurs; the offspring were Métis. Because they weren’t totally accepted by either the indigenous peoples or the invaders and yet were so numerous, they ended up forming a people unto themselves. They have formal associations and branches all over the country. They like to point out that being a half-breed Canadian is no different from being a half-breed American. It’s their considered opinion that both halves breed. The tricky question is how big does ones Indian half have to be before one qualifies as an Indian? You’d think in this day and age that DNA analysis could pinpoint markers for any tribe in the US, but…

The number is: whatever you want it to be. The import thing, the Métis say, is whether or not you think yourself a Métis. Well, you say, you wouldn’t be asking the question if you didn’t already think you were a Métis; so, is that enough?

No, say the Métis. Other Métis have to say you’re a Métis, too. If all the guys down at the bar say, “Sure, you’re a Métis with the best of us,” you can pick up your feathers at the union hall. Otherwise you might just be a half-breed. Or an octaroon.

The story of the West is the story of waves of immigrants. And I don’t mean since the wagon trains; I mean since forever. The tribes didn’t pick up and start to move only when the Europeans arrived. From language distribution to genotypes to haplo groups to oral and written histories, we know that the Americas, like the rest of the world, have always been in flux. To a certain extent the questions become ones of from where do the invaders come and how long were they there? Conquering and being conquered is the history of the world. From how far away does an invader have to come before they’re considered foreign and not just neighborhood infighters?

Back to me, again. I’m an aging hippie. I permanently moved to the West Coast in 1969 after visiting a couple times in the earlier 60s. Two of my children and all of my five grandchildren have been born in the Pacific Northwest. Where I grew up now exists as a storybook memory. It’s no longer a real place. Oregon is the only place I know. I think I belong here. I think it’s my place. There are a lot of people like me. We all want our voice. We all think we’re native. Who’s to say?

Tumacacori Mission Cemetery

Which made me wonder about the dynamics of Arizona. We were on a back road, returning from the tiny village of Arivaca, when we were stopped by the Border Patrol. No, they didn’t drive up behind us and flip on their lights; they had a regular check-point set up on the road and they were stopping everyone coming through. There were four or five guys, a couple trucks, a shade tent, a huge fan—they say it gets hot—and a barbeque grill set up in the middle of the desert.

“Hi, where you folks coming from?”

Good looking young guys in crisp uniforms. Nobody wore a hat and nobody wore sunglasses. There was no failure to communicate.

“Arivaca.”

“Uh-huh.”

Where else? The road doesn’t go anyplace after Arivaca, and Arivaca is hardly a place in itself. There’s nothing out that road but Arivaca.

“Actually, officer, we’re smuggling Mexicans.”

One has to assume it’s working, because illegal immigration has dropped eighty percent in the past half-dozen years. Most experts think a different dynamic is at work and that the Border Patrol is no more effective than ever, but that the number of people trying to cross has dropped. Which, frankly, is more realistic.

Nonetheless, when you count all these random checkpoints, the big permanent checkpoints, the squads of police patrol trucks cruising the highways, and the helicopters lumbering across the Sonoran desert, one has to think one is looking at a growth industry gone mad. Do we really need to arm the border at what cost? Must we try and control the ebb and flow of humanity with guns? Why is violence always our solution?

What worries me more: illegal Mexicans or Goldman-Sachs? How come there are no guns holding off Bank of America? From whom do we need protection?

Arivaca Cemetery

Arivaca is a good place to see one approach. The cemetery has that raucous  Mexican vitality but is equally comfortable welcoming the hippie and the cowboy. Anybody with a hammer and a saw can put up a mausoleum as fancy as the next person’s. I can imagine there’s been any number of parties here. I’d come help decorate the place, if there was a keg of beer. Maybe some tacos. They wouldn’t care if you were an Indian, either. Really, I think you could be a pasty white guy from New Jersey and still be buried here.

McGee Ranch Cemetery

Which is more than one can say for the Tohono O’Odham. Not only do they not want you walking in their cemetery, they don’t want you taking pictures of their cemetery. Even from the road. When I crouched down to take a picture of the “keep out” sign, two pickup trucks did U-turns and admonished me for ignoring the “no photographs” signs. That I hadn’t stepped onto the property didn’t faze them; the signs say “no photographs,” period. It didn’t seem I should argue niceties of the law with them, so I slunk back to the car and took a couple shots from the window as we were leaving. Take that! Now I have a camera full of Indian spirits that I don’t know what to do with.

Tohono O'Odham Cemetery

I made a quick visit to a large cemetery complex of some three or four cemeteries in Tucson, but didn’t begin to have time to do it justice—it demands several days; though my sister and brother-in-law did lead me to a darling ranch cemetery they knew of from having hiked past it with their hiking club, that I had ample time to enjoy: the McGee Ranch Cemetery. The ranch and the larger community of McGee Ranch are where the Sierrita Mountains begin thrusting their bare elbows out of the desert. It gets no lusher as one rises in these mountains. The ranch—the size of which I’ve been unable to pinpoint—has an unusual policy: any blood descendant (of age) of the original McGees is welcome to come to the ranch, carve out their couple acres, and build a home. They don’t care if you’ve been living in Mongolia for two generations, a desert plot awaits you in Arizona. Let me warn you, though. If you bring your wife (or other way around, if it applies) with you and you should happen to die, she’s out of there unless you had kids of age. They’re strict about that sort of stuff down here. At least that’s why I was told. Honest.

The cemetery’s up a draw leading into the mountains and is blocked by a gate. They’re happy to let you visit the cemetery (or they were happy to let us visit the cemetery), but they’d like the courtesy of being asked. Fair enough. Do stop and do ask and do walk the few hundred yards up the dusty road to the cemetery. The road got traffic on it while we were there, but nonetheless was pocked with numerous animal prints: deer, dog, and large cat. Larger than house cat. It’s a busy desert.

Each grave is delineated by a ring on stones, and they march in regular order underneath a canopy of trees. There more than a bit of whimsy and humor here and it’s devoid of excess sobriety. Just the place to visit on a sunny afternoon; provided it’s not too hot. They tell me…

Evergreen Cemetery - Tucson

If you ask me—which you didn’t, but I’m going to tell you anyway—it’s an uneasy truce, this border. I don’t know how long it can last; not forever, that’s for sure. Someone’s going to have to tell these people they’d better pray for cheap desalinization or else they’re going to have to pack up and move home. They should take hints from those ancient dwellings they find down here: civilizations come and go. Mostly go. They dry up and blow away. And if you’re thinking of getting water from the Pacific Northwest? Forget about it; we have fools enough of our own. And don’t think about moving here, either. I just said we have fools enough of our own.

My advice: if you’re going to die in Arizona, head for Arivaca. You’ll find good company there.

Mission San Xavier del Bac

Post Card

Pettys Cemetery, Ione, OR

First, the banjo.

Second, skip the bluegrass.

Rhythm banjo. I don’t like that barrage of notes that banjo players insist on throwing at the listener. I’m too old to get that fast. And they tend to loose the rhythm in that machine gun fire. It’s as if they don’t want you to hear the individual notes: “If I play incredibly fast, everyone will be so wowed that they won’t notice it’s a banjo.” When I first began to coax individual notes out of the banjo, I thought it sounded Japanese. Now I think of it as swamp rock banjo. Just what you’d expect there in the Northwest.

But I digress.

I’ll admit that I go through ten minutes of guilt everyday because I haven’t written anything lately for this blog. Then I get over it and go on with my day.

Denio Cemetery, Denio, NV

If I were to write a post, Id tell you that a bit back my son and I took a 1300 mile trip around the outback of Oregon. Aside from visiting twenty cemeteries or so, the highlight and ostensible reason for the trip was to drive the White Horse Ranch Road, a seventy five-mile gravel ride from just south of nowhere to its nearest neighbor. That would be Denio, a gas station surrounded by about thirty people who never make their presence known. Outside Denio, where other towns sport deer crossing signs, Denio provides donkey crossings. Wild donkeys, they have them there. They do. A hundred miles from Denio to Lakeview and we had it to ourselves except for the donkeys. Paved yet. The road, not the donkeys.

Unity Cemetery, Unity, OR

The countryside we traversed is the same country where Meek’s Cutoff is and where the movie of the same name was filmed. The original wagon train had something like 200 wagons in it. In the movie there are three. It stars Michelle Williams, who specializes in movies with enigmatic endings, often in Oregon. The Kings, Nahum (1783-1856) and his wife, Serepta, after whom Kings Valley Cemetery was named, were in that train. It is harsh country.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, one goes east to go to the West, if one lives on the wet (no, there should be no “s” in that word) side of the Cascades, which most of us do; but the West of Oregon is a far cry from the West of Colorado or Montana. That West got taken over by Hollywood, Las Vegas, and Texas. Less show and more grit up here. I don’t come here to get away from it all; I come here to come here. The photos are all up on Flickr.

Sunset Cemetery, Ontario, OR

I’ve been doing a survey of Lone Fir Cemetery Cemetery, our local crown jewell pioneer cemetery, for the past year. I wasn’t aiming to record every headstone, because genealogy is not my interest, but rather those in certain classes. The broadest and most subjective class are those stones of an “interesting” design. It’s hard to imagine a more subjective classification than “interesting.” It includes most all of the handmade markers plus those of highly unusual design, such as a spherical polished ball engraved with dragons or a scrabble board in full color.

Lone Fir Cemetery, Portland, OR

 The first person to have been buried at Lone Fir was Emmor Stephens, grandfather to a fellow named J. B. Stephens (after whom a Liberty ship was named). When J. B. and his wife died some years later, he had a monument which carries three-quarter life-size carvings of them both. That’s impressive enough, but on the reverse it has an equally notable epitaph.

“Here we lie by consent, after 57 years 2 months and 2 days sojourning through life awaiting    nature’s immutable laws to return us back to the elements of the universe, of which we were first composed.”

This is a mighty strong faith being expressed here, a faith in Mother Nature. It set a tone for the cemetery which rings to this day. Conventional religion creeps in here and there—it’s a cemetery, for Christ’s sake—but the overall ambiance is a full appreciation of this world and its universe. Carl Sagan could have written that epitaph. It’s why my wife and I chose to be buried here. And we were lucky; shortly after we purchased our plots, they closed sales on new ones.

But I digress again. Enough about me.

Another category is as subjective as design: interesting epitaphs. No “Gone but not forgottens,” okay? A third grouping is more defined: cameos, either photoceramics or portrait engravings; while the final sets have hard-and-fast edges: all Woodmen of the World and all white bronze markers. I did this survey with an eye towards A) giving tours of Lone Fir; and B) publishing a small guide to the cemetery. You’ll notice, none of my classifications have anything to do with who is buried there; that’s for the local historians and genealogists, whom I wish well.

But I couldn’t compile a guide to the cemetery without some knowledge of how it came together, so that’s taken me into a little research; which is all a round about way of explaining why I have ignored my guilt feelings and marched on with what I’m doing.

Then there’s the book effect. Having a book published is a little like getting a doctorate: instant credibility (unless you publish it yourself, then it’s an Internet diploma). Instant credibility is handy and a large part of the reason why the book came out as it did. When Ashland Creek sent an email inquiring if I was interest in putting a book together, I instantly knew that the important feature here was to get it published. And the sooner the better. Ashland Creek thought sooner was better for marketing purposes, and I thought sooner would be better for marketing myself. My presumption was the second book would be easier to publish than the first; hence I made almost no fuss with whatever Ashland Creek wanted to do. My mantra was, “If you guys like it, I like it.” 

That worked.

My focus, though, is on the future. The next time I’ll have a little more freedom to say, “No, the monkey in the gray flannel suit stays.”

Sunset Cemetery, Ontario, OR

It Coulda Been

Forest Lawn
Photo: LuisAHHH!
In 1917 a thirty-six year old man from Liberty, Missouri, Hubert Eaton, took control of Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California, and rechristened it Forest Lawn Memorial Park. The American cemetery would never be the same. Mr. Eaton’s singular achievement was to remove death from the cemetery. It was not without precedent. The very word “cemetery” was promulgated in preference to “graveyard” for the same reason a hundred years earlier; so, to replace “cemetery” with “memorial park” was continuing a time-honored, euphemistic tradition. Only sex provides as many linguistic deflections as does death.

Forest Lawn
Photo: Striderv
Eaton went further, though, than merely changing the name; he went on to ban the most potent symbol of the cemetery, the tombstone. Eaton insisted that all markers in his cemeteries (he eventually took over/created others) be flush with the ground. When Hubert said “lawn,” he meant “lawn.” That it is much cheaper to mow a flush lawn than to squirrel around a forest of headstones didn’t hurt, but it may have been more important to Eaton to eliminate the perception of death in his cemeteries than it was to save money.

If Hubert Eaton would have confined himself to eliminating the presence of death in his boneyards, this story might have ended a lot differently, but like many people, he had a vision he felt the rest of the world deserved to share. A devout Christian, he populated the edges of his lawns with oversize reproductions of statuary from around the world. Findadeath.com assesses the situation succinctly: “Somewhere along the line, someone convinced this guy that he had good taste.” He even went so far as to build a wedding chapel on the Glendale grounds and began offering weddings in a form of cradle-to-grave service. It worked, just ask Reagan, the Acting President.

Forest Lawn
Photo: davewetsprocket
No cemetery since Mt. Auburn in Cambridge, Massachusetts, changed the landscape of American cemeteries the way Forest Lawn did. Almost overnight, virtually every cemetery in the country became a lawn cemetery. Thousands of little stone forests became surrounded by low, lumpy fields. New cemeteries were inevitably named “memorial parks” and were lined with Christian gods and demigods. Landscaping was rarely unified or thoughtful. The tradition of elegance begun with Père Lachaise was abandoned for the streamlined hucksterism of Southern California. Only the Veterans Administration with their necklace of National Cemeteries has invested heavily in dignified landscaping. There is no American standard of good cemetery design, and furthermore, it’s not a topic of public discussion. How could one possibly influence cemetery design? Isn’t that like asking how could one influence car design? Or bridge design? Or rocket design?

Park design?

Woodland
Photo: danielvirella
Three years before Hubert Eaton showed up in Glendale, Sweden announced a competition for the design of a new cemetery for the City of Stockholm. Two young Swedish architects, Gunnar Apslund and Sigurd Lewerentz proffered the proposal for what became in 1994 a World Heritage Site: the Woodland Cemetery, Skogskyrkogården. Unlike the disjointed American lawn cemetery divided into discrete, unrelated “gardens” designed to pull ones thoughts away from death, Woodland Cemetery was conceived of as an aesthetic unity whose scale, elements, and plantings are constructed to guide the mourner through the reflective stages of the circle of life. Trees lining the path to a chapel change from birch to fir as the passage darkens and ones thoughts condense. Woodland celebrates death with a Nordic sobriety, but it doesn’t shy away from it. It does not deny death.

Woodland
Photo: Johan Rubbestad Lilja
It is, perhaps, unfair to compare Forest Lawn with Woodland which has more in common with the VA cemeteries, as they are both public entities, they don’t have to make a profit. Even a non-profit has to turn a profit, unless it has a tax base. Woodland makes use of its largesse by incorporating expansive lawns that really are lawns, they don’t contain graves. Those are mainly confined to the woods proper where uprights are welcome. Headstones here are not uniform, but they are all of a modest height and design; the theory being that there is equality in death. And while the private expression of religion is acceptable, despite Lutheranism being the state religion of Sweden and despite the open entry sward being dominated by a massive granite cross, Woodland is officially non-religious. Its pocket guide says the cross “is not intended to represent a symbol of faith, but rather a symbol of the circle of life and death.” Works for me.

Woodland
Photo: Roy van der Zwaan
One of the more dramatic and photogenic features of the cemetery is a “meditation grove” atop a gentle rise in the center of the entry sward. A stairway ascending to the grove is slowly rendered into lower and lower steps to ease the climb. In typical Scandinavian thoroughness and with a refined sense of line and proportion, literally no step is left unplanned. As much as any cemetery in the world, Woodland is the leading example of what can be done to a cemetery. Woodland proves there can be death with dignity.

Woodland
Photo: j.meunier
Fast forward to 1994, the year Woodland Cemetery joined UNESCO’s World Heritage List. Far to the south of Stockholm in the countryside of Catalonia, a cemetery by another pair of architects, Enric Miralles and Carmen Pinós, also winners of a competition, opened after ten years of construction: Igualada Cemetery. It hasn’t been named a World Heritage Site, yet, but it’s young. Its day will come.

Igualada
Photo: jgeis
Named for a nearby village, Igualada exposes Catalonian sensibilities and reflects the Catalonian landscape. This is definitely not Sweden; the harsh aridity of the climate is not mitigated by moistening fogs and persistent drizzles. The deep pile and verdant vistas of receding greenscapes and somber forests are replaced by walls of loculi and gabion. Instead of ascending hills, one descend into valleys. Instead of trees, the entrance is guarded by cor-ten beams rusting askew. Interiors have the sense of having been carved out of the mountain rather than enfolded in the forest. It is a more strident nature than Woodland, yet it’s in the Woodland mold of using nature to express its purpose.

Igualada
Photo: marcteer
Burial customs differ from Catalonia to Sweden; the Mediterranean speaks a different language than does the Baltic. The dead are not interred permanently in the ground, but are instead stored in walls of loculi five tiers high, which are leased in renewable, usually, leases; but which, again usually, are, eventually, allowed to expire, after which the bones are removed to an ossuary and the loculi are reopened for leasing.

Igualada
Photo: Velcro
The dominant materials of Igualada are stone and concrete. Sometimes, as in the slanting loculi walls, the concrete is amazingly ephemeral; whereas interior spaces have the cool depth of massive blocks and shafts of light. Using gabion walls to define landscaped space was an interesting choice. Gabions are walls made of wire mesh enclosing rock, broken concrete, etc. Their life span is dependent on the integrity of their wire mesh. One is tempted to imagine a Mayanesque future of crumbled gabions sliding through ruptures in the wiring like rock rivers pouring from the mountainside. The cemetery is designed to pull the visitors through the natural environment and cause them to contemplate the circle of life. In that it repeats the goals of Woodland.

Igualada
Photo: marcteer
How different from Forest Lawn whose very purpose is disguised as a theme park. How appropriate that Forest Lawn should be brought to us by the land that brought us Disneyland. Most likely Igualada, like Woodland, is a municipal cemetery. One can hardly imagine a commercial cemetery lavishing that much attention and cost on landscaping. Cemeteries used to be a civic prerogative in this country, but it’s been a long time since any town I know sponsored one. We can’t even count on the Mason or the Odd Fellows, anymore. Ah well, we still have the VA.

But what if next time the city decided to put together a new park, it doubled as a cemetery. Might even help pay for it, no? Just a thought…

Igualada
Photo: Velcro
Coda
My thanks to my fellow Flickrdicks for providing the evocative photos of Forest Lawn, Woodland, and Igualada. Feel free to use my photos of, oh, say, Milo Gard. Or what the heck, Logtown.

Fried Egger

I’m perhaps two-thirds through doing an inventory of interesting markers at Lone Fir Cemetery, the major pioneer cemetery here in Portland. Yesterday unearthed these two gems. The carving of the drowning man is easily the second most famous carving in the cemetery after the relief carvings of the Stephens. It’s pretty well known.


Fried Egger, on the other hand, was new to me. Hear tell his brother was a poacher.

Last Writes

The following is draft 1, section 1 of an extended piece I'm doing on epitaphs. We've had a publisher sniffing around about publishing Mad as the Mist and Snow, which has prodded this effort. Keep watching. Hopefully, we'll test out more sections in the future.

Getting in the Last Word
It’s your last chance. Your absolutely last chance to say anything to the world. Amazingly, many—perhaps most—chose to ignore it; they say nothing. Not just the people who cremate themselves and get stuck on mantles or dumped into rivers, but many people who opt for cemetery burials are happy enough to settle for names and dates only, please. To be sure, lawn cemeteries and columbaria limit the opportunity for expression, but even folks purchasing uprights are often as not satisfied with “Never forgotten.” Oh yeah? Then how come there are no flowers on your grave, huh? So, thank God for all those folks who take one last chance to get in a piece of advice, a bon mot, or a simple little flippancy.

Epitaphs come in all shapes and sizes dependent upon whim and financial wherewithal. They cover the gamut of human expression. They have changed through time. As in all phases of cemetery adornment, the epitaph has undergone a great expansion in its role as a reflection of the deceased. I haven’t in this initial parsing selected for historical distribution of epitaph styles—I’ll leave that for another time—but even so I ended up with eleven categories; and that’s with leaving the vast majority of the collection undistributed. I have mostly ignored, for example, home-grown poetry and poetic allusions. No “professional” category. No tributes. None, in other words, of the categories which hold the largest number of exhibits.

Of the resulting categories, some I fairly well ignored, but of what was left—the easy pickings, as it were—there were plenty of nuggets. The Bible, needless-to-say, provided a good number of epitaphs. Certainly no other book is in the running. Shakespeare as a lump comes in a measly second place; although, all in all, more people choose non-Biblical quotes than Biblical for their tombstones (42 to 30, in this case), not including six for the Bard.

A few categories should be wiped out or merged, but the big ones stick out like ill-packed suitcases with all manner of wardrobe trailing from their seams. If one surfs the Net in search of epitaph collections, one finds there are, essentially, only two categories out there: celebrities and humor (if humor can contain the bizarre). Rodney Dangerfield’s “There goes the neighborhood” is a classic example of a tombstone covering both. What differentiates people who write amusements on their headstone versus those who offer uplifting advice or tout their glories is well beyond this humble researcher and appears to present some research difficulties. In this glance at the last writes, we’ll cast a broad net.

Indeed, one of the first difficulties is in determining who wrote an epitaph: the deceased or the survivors? In some cases, such as where the erection of the tombstone precedes the death of the future occupants, it’s usually evident that the epitaph is the choice of the pre-deceased (can I say that?). Likewise, monuments erected long after a person’s death are usually inscribed with words of the monument erectors, not the person being glorified. In between are a lot of gray areas. For the most part, though, I think people choose their own epitaphs. At least the ones in this collection; and I suspect this collection would be mimicked across most of the country. I think people like to feel they have at least a little bit of their death under control; that it’s their death and not that of an unknown undertaker or priest. All of us, I think, feel a touch like William Hurt’s mother, Claire Luce (1923-1971, Fort Harney Cemetery) , whose sarcophagus reads: “Don’t coddle me into the grave. I’m/ Going to march into it. I’m a man,/ After all.” We want the memory of dignity.

Whoever writes an epitaph, it remains a way for the deceased to speak from beyond the grave, to maintain contact with the living. Once a sentiment is chiseled into stone, one can have reasonable hopes of it surviving for a couple hundred years, whether it makes sense or not. If you have something to say, this is the time to say it.

A small word of warning:
The epitaph database doesn’t stop at the Oregon border. For that matter, neither does the photographic database, but we won’t get into that. But when I sifted the database for epitaphs fitting the categories of interest, I just took them as they came sans regard for origins, provided they came from the Oregon Territory; I’ve eschewed Texas and Wisconsin. I didn’t think you’d want to miss a side-slapper just because it came from Weiser. Think of it as a nod to the cultural unity of the Territory.

Die Laughing
The line between humor and inexplicability is thin. It’s hard sometimes to tell if one is laughing because an epitaph is funny or because one is wondering, “What the hell?” (Which is precisely what Glen Meyers [1980-1999] of the aforementioned Weiser, Fairview Cemetery, ID, said: “What the hell…?,” which he preceded with “Where the sidewalk ends…/ True life begins.” Mr. Meyers was fond of ellispses.) Humor can be intentional—“Gone for the bait” (Mildred Long, 1931-1993, Cliffside Cemetery); inadvertent—“Stan Shattuck was/ hung by mistake” (IOOF Cemetery, Coburg); or ambiguous—“They said she was too different/ and she wrote too many tunes” (Alice Spear, 1923-1989, Coos River Cemetery). It can be gentle—“Raised four beautiful daughters/ with only one bathroom and/ still there was love” (Theodore, 1931-2008, & Nedine, 1932-1997, Barnhouse, Mitchell Cemetery); or irreverent—“I’m going to miss me” (Porter Payne, 1921-2005, Union Cemetery, Union).

In some cases it takes two to make a joke. Couples coordinate their epitaphs. Herman (d. 1986) and Agnes (d. 1992) Baxter, buried in Mt. Calvary Catholic Cemetery, joined their thoughts in death:

His: “On the Highway to heaven”
Hers: “Drive like hell and you’ll get there.”

The Lehmans of Havurah Shalom, Seymour (d. 1990) and Edith (d. 1994) supplied their own couplet:

His: “You’re on your own”
Hers: “Not any more”

Sometimes funny borders on patronizing. What are we to make of Mary Ogden (1920-2000, Odd Fellows Cemetery, Dayton) who leaves us with “It’s your mother”? Don’t we feel she’s still standing over us watching our every move? Is our curfew still in force? Surely she’s friends with the anonymous person in Coles Valley Cemetery, who pontificates, “Blessed are those who clean up.” Avoid their coffee klatches on Monday mornings. In such cases, the epitaph slumps towards the kvetch. Consider the lament of Edith Porter (d. 2000, Kesser Israel Cemetery): “I have three wonderful sons, It’s too bad you couldn’t keep me a little longer.” Guilt from the beyond. Or the more general observation from Gertie Bunnel (1912-1983, Estacada IOOF Cemetery): “Who should live so long”? Or the anonymous grumble from Lone Fir, Portland, “This wasn’t in my schedule book,” which isn’t dissimilar from Jan Peckam’s (1946-1999, Union Cemetery, Cedar Mills) irritation: “It’s always something.” How about the light-weight puffery of Patricia (1928-2003, Lone Oak Cemetery, Stayton): “I’d rather be shopping at Nordstoms”? There are two other “I’d rather be shopping[s],”—no Nordstoms—in the database. Tombstones mentioning corporations are uncommon but not unheard of. Robin Boon (1913-2004, Aumsville Cemetery) brings us another example: “With the Lord, enjoying a good cup of Yuban.” Does Yuban know they have this free advertising? And is Robin so sure she’s drinking it with the Lord? There may be more hot water elsewhere.

One of the more entertaining and quizzical “corporate” epitaphs doesn’t even mention the company or product. All it gives us is the first line of its advertising jingle, one that has already disappeared from the media world long ago. Eino Kangas (1932-1994, Union Cemetery, Union) keeps Alka-Seltzer alive with:

Plop plop
fizz fizz
Oh what a relief it is

Advice doesn’t necessarily come in the form of a kvetch. The Dohrns of Ocean View Cemetery Richard (1940-205) and Colleen (b. 1941) urge us that “Life is uncertain, eat dessert first”; and Mathew Beecher (1952-2001, Tualatin Plains Presbyterian Church Cemetery) quotes Yogi Berra, who opined, “Always go to other people’s funerals. Otherwise they/ won’t go to yours.”

Epitaphs are, of course, as much a reflection of popular culture as anything else. Just because one is going to be dead forever doesn’t mean their sentiments can’t be topical. Arguably, the currently most popular epitaph flippancy, “I told you I was sick,” can be found in our locale on Gloria Martin’s (1926-2002) grave in Robert Bird Cemetery. Indeed, the catch phrase is a popular resource for epitaphs. Charlo (love that name) Dick (1953-2006, Brainard Cemetery) uses a line I’ve seen attributed to an atheist, although I wouldn’t go that far: “All dressed up and no place to go.” Dawn Vocé (1954-2004, Stearns Cemetery) leaves us with the amusing but ambiguous “You put your right foot in”; while Kristie Pergin (1976-1992, Woodville Cemetery) assures us that “The phone must be for you.” What do all these people mean? If you want ambiguous, ponder Barbara Lockwood (1944-2007, Joseph Cemetery): “Barbara stopped here.” Timothy Wilke (1973-2004, Finley-Sunset Hills Cemetery) summed it up best: “Don’t cry Mom/ I’m fine/ It’s only money.” And in case you think you escaped, Arthur Conrad (1947-198, Mountain View Cemetery, View, WA) leaves us with a cheery, “See you soon, maybe tomorrow…”

Patriotism is rarely amusing, but loyalties can put a smile on ones face and they certainly speak to regionalism. David Williams (b. 1922, Phillips Cemetery) may be buried in Portland exurbia, but his heart remains “For God, Country, and Old Wazzu”; Wazzu being the affectionate handle for Washington State University. Other epitaphs evoke the spirit of place indirectly. The epitaph for Claude (b. 1922) and Frances (1923-1998) Friend in Scottsburg Cemetery could have come from anywhere, but its sentiment is surely rural and even forested: “Tried to leave the woodpile a little higher than we found it.” Trees come into play in the epitaph for Jim Everts (1940-1999, Aumsville Cemetery), whose epitaph, “Tree hugger/ ‘left town’ 1999,” implies a conservationist bent. And this anonymous epitaph from Long Creek Cemetery which covers place, profession, and family

Here lies a town girl who became
a ranchers [sic] wife and right hand
A passionate mother. A lover of
family
A promoter of womens [sic] education
and a shopper
Knew I would be asked
Yes Honey I will get the gate

I’d be remiss if I finished this section without mentioning another anonymous soul, this time from Condon Cemetery who moved right into the denial stage: “Do not disturb/ Taking a nap”; unlike the realist Fred Barnes (1913-1993, Ridgefield [WA] Cemetery) who admitted:

I have made many trades in my life,
But I think I went in the hole on this one.

Yet if one wanted regionalism, ambiguity, poetic allusions, and humor all in one package, one could do worse than visit Edward Nielsen (1961-1997, Bay Center Cemetery, WA) whose epitaph reads, “On the edge of passing days”; yet continues on the back of the stone to read:

I rather thought Paradise would be like a library

Times Arrow
Decendant [sic] of Chief Huckswelt
Weelapa Tribe of the Chinook’s [sic]

Death will always come out of season

Movies You're Dying to See

This is a quick in-and-out.

Ha! You thought I was dead. Unless, of course, you follow me on Flickr. I'm still putting up pictures. I haven't been doing much writing of late, but that may change as a publisher has come sniffing. In the meantime, a resumption of a couple columns I did in the past listing movies containing cemetery scenes. This edition of the list starts a little over two years ago and is in the order of seeing them, oldest at the top. The most recent movie on the list, The Sicilian Girl, has an extensive night scene in a cemetery beautifully lit by candles.

Transsiberian
The Woodsman
The Edge of Heaven
Moving Midway
Twilight Samurai
Genghis Blues
Tailor of Panama
Walt with Bashur
Sin Nombre
The Last Enemy
Cherry Blossoms
Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Unstrung Heroes
Bus 174
The Bad Lieutenant: New Orleans
Eyes without a Face
Young and the Dead
Never Forever
Cloud Nine
Lilian's Story
Paris
Shutter Island
Amores Perros
On a Clear Day
Common Ground
Lars and the Real Girl
Winter's Bones
Metal: A Headbanger's Journey
As In Heaven
Thin Red Line
Welcome
Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia
The Parking Lot Movie
The Girl Who Played with Fire
Lomax: The Song Hunter
Jar City
Welcome to the Rileys
The Tillman Story
Which Way Home
The Sicilian Girl

Break out the popcorn!

Visions of Lone Fir

Kay and I were among the last people to secure plots in Lone Fir Cemetery. If we’ve discombobulated our lives, at least we got death right.

Thanks to an intersection of forces and interests, Lone Fir is returning to what cemeteries were supposed to be about in the first place: edification and entertainment. When cemeteries were first proposed in the early 19th century, the idea was that glorious monuments in a park-like setting would induce people to high-minded civic behavior. And for a time, cemeteries did just that: they enticed people out of the cities to stroll through the trees and monuments to, if not always civic leaders, at least rich people. They were known as “garden cemeteries” or “rural cemeteries,” on account of their being plotted far into the countryside (long since engulfed by urban growth everywhere). They were so popular that towns like Portland and Eugene built streetcar lines specifically for them. They were so popular, in fact, that towns eventually began building cemeteries without any bodies in them, at all. They called them “parks.”

What an idea! And as the park movement spread, people forgot that they were supposed to go out to the cemetery for a good time. Indeed, in early New England, cemeteries were often the only place in town big enough to hold all the living people, forget about the dead ones. Cemeteries tried to recoup by making their new cemeteries look like the new parks: big expanses of flat lawn, only they didn’t encourage picnicking or frisbee. They succeeded in making them look like parks, but they killed off the reason for visiting them: what’s to see?


In the meantime, many traditional, now urban cemeteries languished from neglect and vandalism. Lone Fir was lucky: it didn’t languish. It held on as neighborhoods grew around it and the city pushed miles beyond. The lone fir was joined by a veritable arboretum, which now sports its own guide. It was lucky in that it held enough quirks and oddities, beginning with the almost life-size relief carvings of the founding couple, to keep up a continual flow of traffic. True, the war memorial lost its statue, half the heritage roses in the rose garden had disappeared, the mausoleums were crumbling, but still it hung on in the hearts of Portlanders. Maybe it languished a little.

It was the hearts of Portland, though, that spurred the revival. Lone Fir is back and it’s better than ever, thanks to the citizens of this town who have an inordinate love of the burg going beyond all reason. They admit that there are other nice cities in the world, ones dripping with sophistication—Paris, say—but, ah, they sigh, they aren’t Portland. Which, no matter how you look at it, is true. I can guarantee you, Paris is not Portland. Nor the other way around. But the first force to resurrect Lone Fir was the general citizenry of the community. Portlanders simply like the place and are willing to put their wallets where their hearts are.


One way that manifested itself was by the formation of an advocacy group, the Friends of Lone Fir, which has taken a vigorous lead in preserving and promoting the civic space. They are the people who have put on the shows, lead the tours, and personally gotten out there and spruced up the place. Without their active and watchful eye, perhaps none of this might have been accomplished. What’s truly amazing is that they aren’t a group of octogenarians keeping watch over their future home; they’re young people (okay, okay, there are some elder statespeople there) who have already caught the Lone Fir fever. There are seriously delirious people in that group. Portland is blessed by being a magnet, not only for young people, but a magnet for a particular class of young people: the I-can-do-that creative kind. Not only have they crept into the Friends of Lone Fir, but they’ve tapped community creativity to, among other things, produce a CD of songs written specifically for the cemetery by a bevy of local musicians (not to mention a comic book). And we have seriously delirious local musicians here, as well, as you might imagine. Lone Fir was lucky in being born in what was to become at the turn of the 21st century the locus of Portland’s youth infestation, the Eastside.


A Lone Fir quirk that particularly delights Eastside denizens and which has provided a impetus for the cemetery’s reemergence is the popularity of an historical vignette, concerning one Dr. Hawthorne, who is buried there, along with many of his patients. It’s helpful to know that Hawthorne Ave., not too far from Lone Fir, was the epicenter for the gentrification of the entire Eastside and which has now engulfed the entire city. This was where the hip, young kids moved to after the Alphabet Blocks got priced out from underneath them. Hawthorne was, and still emotionally is, their street.

But that’s just the half of it. The other half is that Hawthorne Ave. used to be named Asylum Ave. after an insane asylum at its eastern terminus. The good doctor was the head of that asylum and his patients were buried in unmarked graves along with him. It’s just the sort of story that young goths would like. How could they not love Lone Fir?


Not all the unknowns were asylum inmates, though. They were joined by transfers from earlier, more centrally located cemeteries and by scores of Chinese. The local Chinese community has provided the second big push to renovate the cemetery, even though most of the Chinese remains have long since been returned to China, at their behest. What China didn’t behest were the bones of the women and children; they weren’t important and could be left bereft in foreign soil. It is the modern, local Chinese community (in the form of the Chinese Benevolent Association), whose sensibilities have grown with the times, that has pushed for greater recognition of the Chinese contribution to our culture and to Lone Fir, and wants to honor those women and children who are still here. And is, perhaps, a touch sad that the men aren’t here still, too.

For a long time the denizens of Block 14, where the Chinese and asylum patients are buried, was under the footprint of a three-story office building housing the agency, Metro, which oversees the local pioneer cemeteries, as well as a host of other responsibilities of, arguably, greater importance. Fortunately, the spawning of Friends of Lone Fir and the awakening interest of the local Chinese community coincided with a need for Metro to find more space and vacate the building. Once they were out and the building gone, planning could begin in earnest for a memorial at Block 14 for those once-forgotten communities. We’re in the middle of that process right now.


Part of the process was to have Block 14 blessed by the priests of a local Buddhist temple, which occurred on a recent July Sunday, along with the dedication of three “heritage trees,” and the showing of two documentary films, one of them about the Chinese workers and their families. That plus a little music. Wouldn’t be Portland without a little music.

It was a beautiful late afternoon. The temperature was kissing 90, but it was cool under the tall timber (the lone fir still stand, if no longer alone). I’d guess there were better than two-hundred people there at its busiest and it was comforting to see them wandering among the gravestones and laying their blankets out on a gentle slope down to a temporary stage in the Firemen’s section. It felt like home.

I had to get up early the next day, so I skipped out before the twilight showing of the films. As I was leaving, people were still trickling into the cemetery. Coming to the last crossroad before the exit, I happened to glance at a stone in one corner. It was from 1918, so I’d walked past it uncounted times. Delicately carved in a rustic tradition of rough-hewed stone, peeling signage, and ivy leaves, it’s small and unobtrusive. Not a stone that commands attention. One would hardly notice that it carries an epitaph, which isn’t carved into the face of the stone, as is common, but into the face of the pedestal upon which the small stone stands. Furthermore, the epitaph is hard to read without paying close attention and probably just says, “Too well loved to be forgotten,” anyway. The sort of stone you can pass by forever without really seeing it.

Nonetheless, once I noticed there was an epitaph, I was compelled to decipher it. Mind you, I’m having cataract surgery next month and everything is somewhat of a blur right now, so simple things like reading weathered epitaphs have become a bit of a chore. I had to crouch down and get close, which in itself is a chore, for a good look. The deceased was young Jess Nudsen (which Kay points out was probably “Knudsen”) who died in 1918 at the age of nineteen. I’ll probably never know how Jess died, which is just as well, knowing might remove some of the mystery; and part of the deep attraction of cemeteries is the wide sense of wonder one is so often left with upon viewing a particularly poignant marker. As it is, I was left with one of the most haunting epitaphs in my entire collection:

Some where, some time,
We’ll understand.

The Cemetery Dog Barks

Drewsey Cemetery
Ah, the speed at which things come and go.

My wife brought home from a trip a guide book to Colorado cemeteries published by the august house, Caxton Press of Caldwell, Idaho. Before I got a chance to thoroughly study the book or write down its particulars (like the author’s name or the title of the book), she shipped it back to the friend from whom she’d borrowed it. But that’s not essential to what I have to say.

Some years back when I first had visions of writing a guide to the cemeteries of Oregon, Caxton was the first publisher to which I turned. I got a brief letter back from them saying, thanks, but I didn’t have any stories about who was buried in the cemeteries; that’s what they wanted.

Oh.
Juntura Pioneer Cemetery 1888

The book Kay brought home bore that out. Their guide to Colorado cemeteries was in reality a collection of stories about some of the people buried in some of Colorado’s cemeteries. Other cemeteries were lumped together in lists, sans addresses. There were driving instructions to the highlighted cemeteries and usually a short description before plunging into the stories. They certainly accomplished what they set out to do, if their letter to me was any indication. They got their collection of stories. But it’s as if someone set out to write a guide to the famous buildings of New York and ended up talking about the tenants. It’s a fine collection of little vignettes, but it tells one hardly anything about the cemeteries. A guide to them it definitely is not.

And it was practically without photos. Which, I suppose makes sense, if you’re really interested in local biographies, but is less than helpful in a purported guide to particular landscapes. I can accept that a publisher isn’t interested in cemetery guides, but it’s more disturbing when they sell a product whose contents don’t jibe with its title. Simply because one has arranged a batch of local histories by cemetery location, does not make the stories a guide to those cemeteries. I don’t think Caxton Press is being disingenuous by falsely titling their book; I sincerely think they don’t understand the difference.

It’s a slippery point. Not many people appreciate the difference between the cemetery and who’s buried in it. One is not the other. History is no substitute for place.

The point gets blurred, though to a lesser extent, in the pages of the AGS Quarterly, “The Bulletin of the Association For Gravestone Studies,” and their annual journal Markers, as well. As their name implies, they concentrate on the stones themselves, though they’re not above dipping into the local history vat. They, too, rarely give much consideration to the cemeteries themselves and overweight their entries with discussion of stone design, history, etc. The geography and societal place of cemeteries is seldom broached.

Except here, of course, where we plod along building up the database so one day someone can come along and say, “Holy Cow! Where did this mountain come from?”

From the cow.
Riverside Cemetery (Payette, ID)