Lift that Barge, Tote that Bale Working Skiffs

Cove Cemetery (Cove, OR)
It’s tempting, when considering maritime motifs on cemetery markers, to hark back to our liquid origins and suggest that boats on tombstones recall ancient associations with the water, but I don’t think that’s the case. Certainly, burning bodies on the banks of the Ganges before floating them down river smacks of primordial memory, but I think that water-craft images on Oregonian tombstones are on a par with other vehicular images, which fall into two rough classes: occupational and recreational. You’re either working that boat, or you’re drifting around dreaming.

Tombstone vehicular images, whether of wheeled, water, or air craft, are almost invariably masculine symbols. Occasionally they’re shared with a spouse, especially if one considers RVs, but primarily they’re a man’s world. Women might engrave their monuments with flowers, pets, or a piano (guys get guitars), but men are more likely to carve an image of something that moved. There are occupational images of things other than planes, trains, and automobiles — loggers get represented out here often and I’ve seen a printing press on one stone once — but there’s something primal about boys and things that move, be it skateboards or jet planes. Maybe it’s testosterone: tombstone images of big pieces of equipment are a way for a guy to display his cajones to the world forever. But movement is important. You don’t see images of desks or sales counters or drill presses or labs or cubicles or die stamps on tombstones. It’s train engines, tractor-combines, bow picking gill-netters, or 747s. If it doesn’t move, it’s not worth telling eternity about.

Oaklawn Memorial Park (Corvallis, OR)
Working boats tend to require bigger water than pleasure craft. There aren’t a whole lot of working boats on inland rivers and lakes, save for guide boats and a scattering of minor occupations such as catfish noodlers and frog catchers. A lot of the working boats found on tombstones are military craft, which, I suppose, is a category all of its own. I’m no expert on naval ships, they’re all destroyers to me, though I’ve had two engravings of the aircraft carrier USS Lexington. Naval personnel, of course, are drawn from the entire country and I don’t know if there’s any statistically significant increase of personnel drawn from coastal versus inland communities, but I rather doubt it. In any event, one would expect to find engravings of military craft following normal patterns of personalization over the entire country. I would further suspect that tombstone personalization might be ubiquitous but not uniform across the country; although I have nothing upon which to base that presumption.

River View Cemetery (Portland, OR)
In the set of photos accompanying this post, therefore, there is nothing that geo-locates a tombstone image of a Navy vessel, and to a certain extant the same is true of most of the other commercial craft depicted on local memorial, although there are a few boats pictured which could come from few other places. They aren’t exclusive to the Oregon Territory, but they’re otherwise uncommon and restricted to specialized areas.

Offhand, I’d guess that commercial cargo ships and tankers, while theoretically drawing their work force from the entire country just as the Navy does, in reality share a degree of crossover with the fishing community. There is to an extent an oceanside community that enjoys connections among itself separate from the world a few miles inland, and members of which transfer from one type of vessel to another as opportunity arises. Or, perhaps, as prudence demands. That and the on again/off again, nature of the shipping business — one tends to work several months or years straight and then take several months off — means that it’s easier to maintain seaside employment if one lives close to the sea to begin with; and consequently one is more likely to find engravings of commercial craft in seaside communities than inland. Axiomatic, one might say.

Woodbine/Green Mountain Cemetery (Rainier, OR)
Of the pictured vessels, several are of interest and a couple are very place-specific. Woodbine cemetery, where the image of the tugboat is found, perches above the Columbia River at Rainier, OR, halfway between Portland and the coast, a highly likely place for a tugboat captain to live. Tugs ply both the Columbia River and the open ocean, dragging barges around the world; though I imagine that different vessels, not to mention crews, do different tasks, and it’s not a matter of one tug fits all. Unlike fishing boats, the miscellaneous cargo ships depicted on tombstones are probably not the ship owners proud portraits, as the stones are generally more modest than large ship owners might desire, and more likely represent career vessels. It’s hard to tell just looking at a stone.

Wind River Memorial Cemetery (Carson, WA)
The log tender from a headstone at the small river town of Carson, WA, though, is indubitably a place-specific working boat, evident from the scene shown along with the craft. The body of water is neither ocean nor river nor even a lake (note the leaping fish) but rather a mill pond where logs are stored until processed. Almost miniature little tugs push and pull logs and rafts around these pond, or at least did so in times past, when life was flusher; and that’s what’s memorialized on the stone.

Iman Cemetery (Stevenson, WA)
But it’s the image of the small steamer “Wasco,” in the tiny, eponymous Iman Cemetery on the edge of the river hamlet of Stevenson, WA, that is not only place-specific, but historic, as well. The Wasco was built by one Felix Iman (the eponym) in 1854 and was the third steamer to run between Cascade Locks and The Dalles on the Columbia River. I suggest that non-natives search Google Images for the “Cascades of the Columbia” and “Cascade Locks” to get an idea of what kind of country we’re talking about. The Columbia slices a gorge straight through a snowcapped mountain range here, the Cascades, beginning at The Dalles and ending at the outskirts of Portland. Cascade Locks is in the middle. It’s a world-class chunk of geography.

The first wagon train of immigrants came through the gorge in 1843, making the Wasco an early economic venture for the white population. Iman quickly sold the Wasco and went into the saloon business, from which he immediately exited, as well. Both Felix and his wife, Margaret Windsor Iman have modern markers with brief histories etched into the stones. Hers is particularly dramatic:

Born at Tippecanoe Co., Ind.
1852 Missouri to The Dalles on horse back
Carried motherless babe 500 miles
Took raft down river to Cascades
1853 met and married Felix G. Iman
Survived Indian War of Mar. 26, 1856
Indians burned home
Had 16 children, 9 boys, 7 girls

That was not the half of it. (Notes on her life from an oral transcript of, perhaps, c. 1915 are available on line.)

The Indian attack which she mentions was part of a general uprising in 1856 as a result of a broken treaty on the part of the whites (I know you may find that hard to believe). During the fray the Wasco came under fire from Indians collected where White Salmon is now, across the river from Hood River; but the river is sizable and their balls had no effect

Earlier this month (on the 11th to be exact) I wrote a bit about the Palmer/Bell grave site, on the Washington State side of the Bridge of the Gods (modest name, no?) Norman Palmer, who is buried there with his sister, perished in the same uprising.

Eventually, the Indians were subdued and nine of them hanged, including one who was, according to Mrs. Iman, definitely not guilty; but revenge is often not meted out to the perpetrators of a crime, nor is it necessary. Any Indian will/would do. Mrs. Iman wrote of the hanging that they were “hanged on a tree about one mile from where we lived. Some of them, when asked to talk, shook their heads and put the noose around their own necks. Others laughed at those who were hanging.”

In any event, with the Wasco pulling barges of troops from Portland, the whites won and the steamer subsequently returned to her trade, albeit for only a short period of time. By 1857 she was pretty much out of business on the river. A later newspaper advertisement, from probably the 1860s, offered passage between Bellingham, WA, and Seattle on the “fast and commodious” steamer Wasco for $1; although I can’t be sure it’s the same steamer Wasco. Good price, though.

Lift that barge,
Tote that bale;
Get a little drunk,
And land in jail.

Woodbine/Green Mountain Cemetery (Rainier, OR)

Down to the Sea in Crypts

Oysterville Cemetery
The mountains push down to the sea in Oregon. Beaches interspersed with rocky headlands muscle their way out of dense rain forests shagging their backs. Coves with no access are owned by sea lions whose roars can be heard miles inland. Time is measured by the long, slow moaning of a surf come from the center of an ocean that is anything but pacific. These mountains are low and hairy, twisted and broken. Logging road disappear into them forever, and too often the story is told of people who mistakenly drive into them in the winter never to drive out again.

Behind this range lies another range, the Cascades, taller still, whose peaks push above the tree line and hide glaciers in their crannies, but they are sparsely inhabited and given to logging and recreation. The loggers rake the Coast Range, too, but here the hidden valleys as often hide farms and ranches as well as gypo log outfits. There are tourists here, too, but other than fishermen in the rivers, most tourists turn their backs to the land and concentrate on the sea and the shore. There is one highway (101) tying the coastal hamlets together and most everything happens within a few miles of it on either side. The interior belongs to the locals.

As in most of America, the prevailing winds run west to east, and the clouds bulging over the Coast Range have to start dumping the loads they’ve gathered while drifting thousands of miles over the ocean. Rainfall in parts of the range can reach well into the triple digits, and rampant growth makes walking through the forest an impossibility. Cars, trucks, and whole houses can disappear within a few short years if left unattended, eaten up by vines. The closer one gets to the sea, the less distinct the boundary becomes between it and the land, and people who live too long by the brine slowly take on shades of sea life themselves.

Cemeteries are not exempt from the forces of Mother Nature. She doesn’t care if you’re dead; she’ll mow right over you, anyway. A cemetery on the Oregon Coast is as subject to being engulfed by blackberry vines and salal as any abandoned fisherman’s shack, and surely a large part of a sexton’s job here is holding the forest at bay. Which means that, if you’re looking here for cemeteries with a strong sense of place, you might have to look quickly before that place overwhelms that cemetery. That cemeteries do survive here for decades is testimony to perseverance.

Taft Cemetery
As noted here before, cemeteries, like golf courses and front lawns, tend to emulate certain characteristics of the English countryside, a legacy of the “rural” cemetery movement of the nineteenth century. A cemetery with a sense of place, on the other hand, blends in with its surroundings and makes of them a virtue. Which of necessity makes running a cemetery in a rain forest a bit of a compromise. One can’t simply let the forest go, or it will soon swamp everything. The trick is to maintain the sense of where you are without disappearing completely.

I’ve found three cemeteries which do that job particularly well (excepting that one of them is in Washington, but that state boasts the same clime as Oregon). They aren’t the only good cemeteries on the coast, and none of them is bigger than a nine-iron shot, and one is a bit tricky to find; but each is a little gem.

Technical Insert:

Precise location and driving directions (as well as more photos) to these cemeteries, as to all cemeteries in this blog, can be found at my Dead Man Talking Flickr site. Following the links will get you there.

Oysterville Cemetery
Of the three, Oysterville is the hardest to get to, simply because it’s further away from anywhere than the other two, but the rewards of driving up the length of the Long Beach Peninsula are many and amply repay the effort. If nothing else, it’s worth it to come up here to pay respects to the memory of the great wordsmith, Willard Espy, the town’s foremost erstwhile celebrity. If you don’t know who he was, more’s the pity to you. Espy’s memory is preserved in the Espy Foundation of Oysterville, “dedicated to advancing and encouraging the literary and visual arts.”

The Long Beach Peninsula is itself an anomaly of the coast. A good fifteen miles long, but no more than a couple wide, it’s essentially a big sand bar separating Willapa Bay from the Pacific; and the tallest hills on the spit are the hulking piles of oyster shells. What’s not given over to oyster shells or condominiums is consigned to cranberry bogs. Never has a place been so waiting for the master “oyster with cranberry sauce” recipe. (If it’s of any significance, I had the best scone of my life from a small wayside cafe halfway up the Long Beach Spit.)

There’s not really a there in Oysterville and the drive to the cemetery is just past the country store, announced by a sign with cutesy faux-old timey lettering. But let me reemphasize here the overwhelming desire of everything around here to grow rampant, so that any space not totally impenetrable has been made so by dint of human activity, and should that effort cease, the thicket would come rushing back in to fill the vacuum; hence open space here, and the space of the cemetery in particular, has the distinct feel of being surrounded by an enormous hedge through which the very light fails to fall. On the other hand, the liberated space has a sheltering feel, a place of peace on the teeth of the gale.

A gale had ripped the entire Washington and Oregon coast the winter before I made my sojourn to Oysterville, and whole swaths of forest had been leveled. In places it looked like the aftermath at Verdun. The damage was not uniform. Some place suffered only moderate destruction while other places were entirely obliterated. Fortunately, the cemetery was spared the worst of the ravages. What damage it did suffer was confined mainly to the edges.

What can’t be missed upon driving past the entrance columns is the large, wooden headboard over a grave outlined with gray rock and scattered with shells for Chief Nahcati (1826-1864). The board has to be 2’ x 5’ or better, and God only knows how long its been here. Surely not since 1864. The significance of the Chief to the place is unexplained, but someone is keeping his memory prominent.

Oysterville Cemetery
Past the Chief’s grave the cemetery winds between bushes and trees, so that only parts of it are visible at any one time, and turning new corners opens new delights, not the least of which is the stone for William Bonner Bailey (1937-1992). Looking somewhat like a massive gray potato rising out of a gentle rise covered with low native perennials, it’s carved with his name and the words:

the fish are rising
the children are laughing with joy
Bon’s free and at peace

In its way it is the perfect marker in a perfect cemetery that lives in the lungs of the sea. A land ruled by moss and wind.

It’s a long drive up the spit and the tsunami evacuation route signs offer no confidence. Still there’s no place like it in the Oregon Territory and the cemetery is not to be missed.

And it would make Willard so happy.

Taft Cemetery
Taft is the antithesis of Oysterville. If Oysterville is hidden and secluded, hunkering down against the constant might of the Pacific, Taft is resolutely bold, thrusting its chest at the brunt of the ocean, from a cliff high above the surf. Storm be damned! If Oysterville is cloistered, Taft is exposed. No room for sissies or dilettantes here; only those with the vision to see forever. I don’t know what the rest of the world is like, but there’s nothing like the Taft Cemetery anywhere between Coos Bay, OR, and Raymond, WA. There are other cemeteries with ocean vistas — Fern Ridge above Seal Rock, OR, comes to mind — but but none with the commanding view of Taft. Despite being right above a resort, one would never know it, the awesome nature of the view is too distracting.

Taft Cemetery
Taft expresses sense of place, not by becoming one with it, but by lording over it. This is the ocean lover’s cemetery and, even given its small size, has inspired a number of interesting markers, many of them homemade, the most impressive being that for Colleen Fletcher (1965-1992). Colleen was a sergeant in the US Air Force in Vietnam and her face adorns a large concrete pedestal topped with a statue of the Virgin Mary as if she’s maintaining a vigil over our shores, protecting us once again. We’ll never have to worry about a sneak attack from Hawaii because Colleen is on the job.

Carson Cemetery, the last of the coastal properties we’re looking at, is a whole other kettle of fish. It’s hard to believe anyone could actually be buried there. And it’s the hardest to find. Driving directions are to take Yachats River Rd. east out of Yachats. After 4.8 miles (according to my odometer) Carson Rd. enters from the north (left). Take that. The cemetery is up the first drive to the right (east) off Carson Rd. I don’t recall if there’s a sign at the road or not, but I think not. For pin-point accuracy, I recommend you visit my Flickr site, select a single photo to look at, and then following the map link.

But I’m going to cheat here. I wrote fairly extensive notes for the cemetery in 2005 and I can’t imagine too much has changed since then. And anyway, the Morgans deserve a little publicity. So, with no further ado:

Carson Cemetery
CARSON CEMETERY
Hwy. 101 is an ocean-side carney ride almost without let up from California to the Washington border. Any time of the year the traffic can be maddening, but in summer it’s insane. Tacky gift shops, smoked salmon shacks, and seaside resorts mixed with auto glass places, outlet shopping malls, and used boat centers line the highway for miles on end, broken here and there by jutting headlands. Four thousand cafes serving bad clam chowder. It’s awesome.

Whereas a turn inland down almost any road will find one in an oft sparsely settled valley dripping with moss and drained by fast running streams. A few cows in the stream bottoms constitute a farm. People here drive pickups and wear mud boots. They live unseen by the conveyor belt of people lurching past the mouth of their valley. People not even aware the valley is there. Not aware that people live in the hills behind the mist.

The Yachats River Rd. reaches into one such valley. Some valleys, like those of the Alsea or the Umpqua, have roads that continue further, opening up to the interior; but the blacktop up the Yachats disappears into the maze of forest roads which web the Coast Range. There’s not much call for anyone besides residents and log-truck drivers to wend their way along this minor river. Yachats, named for a now-extinct Indian tribe and perfectly charming in its intimate location, will always draw its share of visitors; but the river road behind it will continue to be a local pathway only, save for two lesser, if quintessential attractions. One is a covered bridge crossing the Yachats about six or seven miles from town. Turn left at the T and the bridge is another mile or two upriver. By this point, the road is down to a one-lane dirt road, so drive carefully.

The other attraction, reached before the covered bridge, is the Carson Cemetery. As mentioned, it’s off Carson Creek Rd.; but Carson Creek Rd. is used by hardly anyone—even less than the Yachats River Rd.—so the chance of one accidentally running across the cemetery are practically nil. There is a sign for Carson Creek Rd., which runs north off Yachats River Rd., but I missed it on the ride up and didn’t see it till coming back down the road, after stopping for directions at a bed-and-breakfast run by Sam and Baerbel Morgan. Once you’re on Carson Creek Rd., the cemetery is the first drive to the right.

Asking at the bed-and-breakfast was the key. I was given directions by a pleasant and obviously knowledgeable lady with a slight accent, who I took to be Baerbel Morgan. At the entrance to the cemetery a sign explains that contributions to its upkeep can be sent in the cemetery’s name to the Yachats Lions Club (Box 66, Yachats, OR 97498—feel free), and that the caretaker is one Sam Morgan. Ah ha! the plot thickens.

It thickens further when one notices that a new and unusual stone marks the grave of one Sam Morgan (1938-1999). I would imagine it’s Baerbel, now, who does the maintenance. At least someone is keeping the brush at bay and providing the plastic flowers in this what looks for all the world like a Hobbits’ graveyard. It climbs a steep hillside through an uncleared forest and it doesn’t look like there’s room enough for whole bodies at most grave sites. At least not whole human bodies. While the underbrush has been replaced by rhodys and boxwoods, the forest floor is still a a tangle of roots that surely gives any gravedigger fits. The majority of the graves have either handmade markers, funeral home tags, or none at all. The cement, hand-lettered stone for James Ingram is typical. He was “born 1821 Tenn.” and “died 188[?]/ near here.” S. Traves has his name—no dates, no nothing else—held up by a curved length of rebar. Zanta Clarno’s (1888-1950) “A Saintly Lady” on metal plating set in black stone is an exception.

One feels that, were it not for the Morgans, this cemetery could well have been lost by now. Instead they’ve maintained a cemetery unique in our experience: one being built into the existing forest rather than having it cleared first. There’s a picnic bench and a couple of plastic chairs off to one side, and one has no doubt that social occasions obtain here from time to time. A white, quasi-bird house containing a glass-covered copy of Longfellow’s “God’s Acre” centers on a sunny spot in this magical cemetery:

Carson Cemetery
GOD'S ACRE

I like that ancient Saxon phrase, which calls
The burial-ground God's-Acre! It is just;
It consecrates each grave within its walls,
And breathes a benison o'er the sleeping dust.

God's-Acre! Yes, that blessed name imparts
Comfort to those, who in the grave have sown
The seed that they had garnered in their hearts,
Their bread of life, alas! no more their own.

Into its furrows shall we all be cast,
In the sure faith, that we shall rise again
At the great harvest, when the archangel's blast
Shall winnow, like a fan, the chaff and grain.

Then shall the good stand in immortal bloom,
In the fair gardens of that second birth;
And each bright blossom mingle its perfume
With that of flowers, which never bloomed on earth.

With thy rude ploughshare, Death, turn up the sod,
And spread the furrow for the seed we sow;
This is the field and Acre of our God,
This is the place where human harvests grow!


Pull up one of the lawn chairs and sit here in the evening. Make no sound and slow your breathing to a sigh. Wrap a blanket around your shoulders and wait for the little ones to come out. I’m sure they will. It’s that kind of place.

Carson Cemetery

Claim to FameOld Carson Cemetery

Old Carson Cemetery
What follows is the introduction to my Old Carson Cemetery set on Flickr. Most of my introductions don't merit blogging, but this story seemed a little more interesting than usual.

Old Carson Cemetery
If Carson has any claim to fame, it’s that the mother of my twins lived there briefly as a child.

Other than that, it’s hard to fathom why this unincorporated hamlet with a couple thousand people scattered up the valley should merit four cemeteries, but it does. This is the granddaddy of the public ones. It’s not but an acre big, and half of that was covered with a crust of snow when I visited. It has uprights, like a decent cemetery should, and a comfortable cover of older trees and bushes, which when I visited were in the process of being cleaned up after the winter’s winds. It’s not by accident that the cemetery across the road is called Wind River Memorial.

Carson’s larger claim to fame is the location of a hot springs, which was developed by one Isadore St, Martin, who the Home&Abroad Web site describes as “an entrepreneurial pioneer and local guide”; though he obtained his deed to the property via the Indian Homestead Act of 1875, the purpose of which was “to encourage Indians to engage in farming” and “provided 160 acres to the 21 year old, head of household, provided ‘that he has abandoned his tribal relations and adopted the habits and pursuits of civilized life.’”

Absolutely, that! We don’t want any unrepentant Indians stealing our land.

But I would venture that by his last name Isadore was not a local Indian but rather a Métis, and he probably came here as a trapper rather than what we think of as a “pioneer.” I’ll wager he came in no wagon train. He may well, though, have been a guide and he certainly was entrepreneurial. He also left a cemetery, q.v.

Old Carson Cemetery
And I’ll toss in a further “could be.” This cemetery also contains the remains of one Mary Roemaine, whose epitaph claims her as a “descendant of/ 1st settler of Oregon Territory/ Etienne Lussie & Felicite Niute”; and without getting into the boast of being “1st settler” or whether it was Lussie or Niute (my money’s on Etienne), I’ll further guess that Etienne was also a Métis and most likely connected to St. Martin in some manner; and I’ll go one step beyond and speculate that both men could have been refugees from French Prairie after the fateful vote was taken to join Oregon to the United States instead of Canada. Once that vote was sealed, the appropriating of the Métis lands began in earnest and their exodus from the farms they’d wrested from the wilderness was ordained. Isn’t democracy grand?