Weekend Water A Gallery of Pleasure Craft Tombstones

Havurah Shalom Cemetery


Wisner Cemetery


Oswego Pioneer Cemetery
I promised long ago to complete my trio of boat monument posts; the first two, you’ll recall, covered fishing and working boats. That I have less pleasure craft than working boats in my collection might be due to my preferences as well as luck in what I find. In the archetypes I chose to accompany this post I notice, just for example, no kayaks (not to mention surf boards) or pontoon boats. Lack of pontoons might be a regionalism, but we have a lot of kayaking in the mountains.


La Center Cemetery


Crescent Grove Cemetery (Tigard, OR)


Pioneer Cemetery (Pioneer, WA)
Regionalism pops up in other ways. The small lakes of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, for example, don’t lend themselves to large sailboats; whereas the high-prowed McKenzie River boat is designed to ride over rocks in steep mountain streams. The small outboard fishing boats are universal as are canoes, speedboats pulling water skiers, and small cabin cruisers. There are no propeller propelled punts here.


Bilyeu Den Cemetery


Mt. Calvary (Eugene, OR)
I’ve thrown in two examples of the same stock design, a single fisherman in a small row boat, being used on two different stones conveniently rendered in complimentary colors. As far as I can tell, they’re essentially identical (slightly different water rendering) except that in the red version the fisherman has a pipe in his mouth. Ah, the personal touch.


Hayes Cemetery


Park Hill Cemetery (Vancouver, WA)

Flicker Files

Antioch Cemetery
I feel it’s a form of cheating to use my Flickr set introductions as fodder for this blog, but what can I say? I’m lazy.

Yet sometimes a cemetery is worth noting, and I’m not inclined to write the same stuff over and over again. At least not until I forget that I’ve written it in the first place. Antioch Cemetery has an unusual, if not unique history. One worth noting in passing by. What follows is what you’ll find on Flickr, minus most of the photos. Come visit do.

Antioch Cemetery
Antioch Cemetery: Unearthed
The story of Antioch Cemetery is a window unto the psyche of Jackson County. What happened at Antioch and in the surrounding neighborhood (i.e. White City) put its stamp on the region forever.

With 5500 people, White City is one of the largest urban concentrations in the state remaining unincorporated. It’s also been a center for poverty, domestic violence, drug abuse, and related social problems, all because of its curious history, which has left it a community in limbo for decades.

White City is a new city dating from 1941 when the Army commandeered 43,000 acres of the Medford Valley for a World War II training facility and built Camp White overnight. Besides training upwards of 100,000 soldiers, the town also housed a major hospital and, for a while, a German P.O.W. camp. Pretty much as soon as the war ended the Army packed up and disappeared, leaving this sprawling, unincorporated town of thrown-together buildings ripe for people who couldn’t be or weren’t too choosy about aesthetics. White City was born.

The Antioch Cemetery grounds were part of the lands commandeered by the Army; which in itself would be justification for telling the White City story, but what happened to the cemetery is pretty amazing. The cemetery was located smack-dab in the middle of the gunnery range and was constantly being bombarded by live shells; which, as you can imagine, is not good for tombstones. Or much else, for that matter. But, to the Army’s credit, they mitigated the damage by laying all the tombstones flat and burying them under six feet of sand, where they remained for the duration of the camp; and when they picked up and skeedadled, they took the sand with them and returned the uprights to their proper locations. What a sweet bunch of guys, no?

Antioch Cemetery
The lingering effects of Camp White are not restricted to White City, though. Jackson Country remains a bulwark of patriotism to this day, not only because the residents are grateful that the Army once dispensed largess upon them—a form of modern American cargo cult—but, I suspect, because when the Army left, it left behind a certain number of personnel who thought the valley would make a good place to settle down; a thought that may equally have occurred to tens of thousands of other people passing through the camp; some of whom may have come back here to retire. There are great flocks of ex-military birds in the area.

And Camp White is surely the reason Eagle Point National Cemetery is close by.

Antioch Cemetery
I was told the story of the Army and the sand by a very pleasant grandmother of four who volunteers as a groundskeeper for the cemetery. She jested that she was “a little concerned that [she] might yet run across an unexploded shell.” She did grant, though, there would be economies of efficiency by being blown up in ones own graveyard.

Whatever it was that spurred the volunteers to recover this fairly sizable cemetery, it’s been working. It’s not immaculate, by any means, and no one’s watering the place, but the grasses are kept at bay and it’s dotted with oaks and laurels and rhodys, et al. It actively being used and is quite lively for a cemetery of its kind. A fair amount to read and a good excuse to while away some time.

After which you can drive Hwy. 234 to Rock Point; that’s a pastoral trip.

Antioch Cemetery

Mr. Gaiman Came to Play

Jacksonville Cemetery
When I began visiting graveyards, I would worry about which way the headstones faced. Did they face over the grave, or away? It was important because I was concerned about walking on the graves as a matter of respect. Was it respectful to march all over someones grave? Enough visitations and it became a practical matter to not worry, because how else was one going to read a headstone without standing in front of it; and if that meant standing on a grave, then so be it.

A more important consideration turned out to be the feelings of the residents. As far as they were concerned, they were happy anyone came by at all. Eternity, after all, is a long, long time; and a visitor now and again is the most one can hope for. Family’s nice, but anybody’s better than nobody.

So, that’s a role I play: ol’ better-than-nobody.

Jacksonville Cemetery
It takes time to get comfortable in a graveyard. Scarlett, the female protagonist in Neil Gaiman’s, inspired fantasy, The Graveyard Book, states the graveyard case succinctly: “I want to sit here and think.” She exclaims how Mr. Frost (another character) “thinks they can be the most peaceful places in the world.” Gaiman credits his son Michael for inspiring the book, when as a two year old he would “ride his little tricycle between gravestones in the summer, and I [Gaiman] had a book in my head.” Which he then took “twenty-something years to write.”

It was worth the simmering because the result is a small gem of a novel aimed at the early-teen years, but worth a delve at any age. It’s an English cemetery and the cast of characters is decently British (and earlier), but they’d be recognizable, accents apart, in any cemetery. Different sorts inhabit different parts of the graveyard, the paupers and witches, for example, holding court in their own unkempt corner, and each holds to the language, manner, and knowledge of its time. And as their store of information is only added to by the addition of new residents, their knowledge of the world is ancient, if incomplete.

The nuances of a good graveyard are well tended to. Consider this paragraph:

One grave in every graveyard belongs to the ghouls. Wander any graveyard long enough and you will find it—waterstained and bulging, with cracked or broken stone, scraggly grass or rank weeds about it, and a feeling, when you reach it, of abandonment. It may be colder than the other gravestones, too, and the name on the stone is all too often impossible to read. If there is a statue on the grave it will be headless or so scabbed with fungus and lichens as to look like a fungus itself. If one grave in a graveyard looks like a target for petty vandals, that is the ghoul-gate. If the grave makes you want to be somewhere else, that is the ghoul-gate.

The essence of the tale, a murder-mystery, if I can spill that much without letting the baby slip away, is of a child brought up by the denizens of an English graveyard. Gaiman displays a sure hand in keeping the story moving swiftly and engrossingly along, with each sentence riding to its destination with comfortable assurance. He credits Kipling as an influence, which is never a bad place to start, but I also detect notes of Tolkein in there as well, echoing the complex English love affair with language. The words are simply fun to read. Aloud would be even better.

The damps, drafts, and underplaces of a large and overgrown cemetery are lovingly sketched in this quick read of slightly over 300 pages. Characters are often introduced with their names followed, in parentheses, by their birth and death dates and epitaphs. It’s that attention to small detail and the ambiance of a cemetery which speaks to the years spent absorbing them. Gaiman has done his homework well, and the tale unfolds effortlessly. If a few details are glossed over, well, it’s a novel, after all.

A previous Gaiman novel, Coraline, was recently turned into an animated, 3D movie by a local shoe salesman here in Portland, although I assure you I have no connection with either. But I wouldn’t be surprised if this made it to the big screen, too. I’d go watch it.

[My copy of The Graveyard Book was published in 2008 by Harper-Collins and weighs in at 312 pp.]

Jacksonville Cemetery

Del Norte Photos of a Dying Tradition

Hilltop Cemetery
In my lifetime Mexico has transformed itself from being an exotic country down there somewhere, to being the neighbor that moved in to stay. The folks caught up in the anti-immigration and English-only movements more and more appear like King Canute ordering the tide to halt. Good luck, guys.

Hilltop Cemetery
And hang in there on the picket line. You won’t starve. A taco wagon will be by at any moment.

Hilltop Cemetery
Like your part of the world, the Mexican-Americans have transformed mine. Taco wagons are only the most visible benefit of having an admixture of people from south of the border. Having the opportunity to begin to learn and use in real time another language is perhaps even more important. Not to mention that we’ve been able to enrich our holiday traditions with the additions of Cinco de Mayo and Day of the Dead. Any culture that can talk the whole nation into celebrating two new holidays — take that, St. Pat’s Day — has a strong grip on the popular imagination.

Why, it’s as big as pizza!

Hilltop Cemetery
The first Mexican-American grave we noticed was that of Roger Santanus at the quintessential, Western cemetery, Lone Pine , on Smock Prairie outside the tiny hamlet of Wamic, OR. I’m sorry I don’t have a picture of Roger’s grave, but it was a long time ago. We noticed it, though, because it was the most colorful grave in the cemetery, which was otherwise a typical somber graveyard. Roger’s grave, on the other hand, was festooned with gaudy faux fleurs that drew your eye immediately. I only had to see it once to know that those people had a whole lot more fun at the cemetery than my folk did. We were satisfied with a sprig of flowers or a tiny flag, but the Santanuses were not content with such modesty bordering on forgetfulness. Roger was definitely not forgotten and was evidently still a part of their world.

Hilltop Cemetery
Ever since Roger, I’ve had my eye out for the gaily bedecked grave and have in particular sought out Mexican-American graves, hoping for the same exuberance the Santanus Family demonstrated. Alas, I have not often been rewarded. In the spirit of disclosure, I’ll confess to never having been south of Santa Cruz, CA, so I’ve never seen a Mexican cemetery live, but I’ve seen enough photos to know that, as a rule, Mexicans lavish a lot more attention on their graves than do Americans. Day of the Dead itself in Mexico is spent celebrating in the graveyard. As previously noted, I was hoping to run into more Mexican-American graves on my swing through central and southern Oregon, those regions being home to big agriculture and lots of immigrant labor, but was disappointed there, too. One finds, of course, the graves of many Mexican-Americans all through the state, but for the most part their graves aren’t especially distinguished from those of their neighbors, save for names and occasional writing in Spanish.

Hilltop Cemetery
The one major exception to that rule is Hilltop Cemetery outside Independence, OR, in the heart of the Willamette Valley. For a long time I wondered how come no other Oregon cemetery contained an extensive collection of Mexican-American folk grave memorials; but as it appears that truly none other does match Hilltop for its collection (I haven’t visited most of the cemeteries in the far eastern part of the state, but I’m running out of options here), the question is not why don’t the other cemeteries have them (folk memorials), but why Hilltop does?

Hilltop Cemetery
For that I have no answer. Someone’s going to have to dig up relatives of the people buried there and ask them.


Hilltop Cemetery
In any event, if you want to get a taste of a Mexican cemetery, however attenuated, here in Oregon, Hilltop is your answer. That may even hold true for Washington, as well, though I haven’t begun to comprehensively cover that state.

So, don’t lose faith; we still have Yakima.

Hilltop Cemetery

Grave Torpedos

Last night’s (7/9/09) History Detectives on PBS had a segment sure to pique the interest of any cemeterian: Grave Torpedoes.

It turns out that in the latter half of the nineteenth century, largely due to the demands of medical schools for dissection subjects, the grave robbing, not for artifacts but for the bodies themselves, was a lucrative business. To deter would-be grave robbers, a variety of grave “torpedoes” were designed to blow said robbers to smithereens. A devise similar to the one exhibited was patented by a Thomas Howell in 1881, the year the law was changed to allow medical schools to use unclaimed and donated bodies, which effectively put an end to the torpedo business.

“Torpedo” in those days didn’t mean an underwater missile, as it does today, but instead included many sorts of explosive instruments. This torpedo was essentially an iron ball filled with gunpowder and a trip-hammer trigger to ignite it, should it be disturbed. Such as by a grave robber digging nearby.

The flaw, of course, was that it would also blow up if a legal grave digger happened to dig nearby.

The torpedo segment in the show is titled “Grave Alarm” rather than “Grave Torpedo,” because the current owner of the object thought that that is what he had, until research proved otherwise.

Update

And a note to Deez. I'm still having technical difficulties and can't email you or leave a comment on either your stuff or my own stuff, but, hopefully, this will get published, and, if you see it and could send me an email address that I can actually see, I'd write to you about eh banner proposals, which I enjoyed a lot. There are technical question, such as how to employ it, but that can wait until I've got myself operating smoothly. I'm looking to buy a new computer soon and will wait till that's up and running before I get on to refinements.

The photos have been saved — Thank God! — but it will be some time before they get organized and posted on Flickr. I visited 30 cemeteries on my swing through the Siskeyous. Two were posted with "no trespassing" signs and three were lawn cemeteries for which I did minimal drive-by shootings; but the other 25 produced some 900 photos.

Technical Difficulties

A quick note to let you know I’ve been busy, have lots of stuff which may never make it out of the camera; which is a pity. I have some 900 new photos (maybe 25-30 cemeteries) from a swing through southern Oregon, including the magnificent Jacksonville Cemetery and two Native-America burial grounds. But they may be lost due to technical glitches.

Shoot me.

But I’m still here, and when I save anything — if I do — I’ll send it on to you.

A Little History

I found what follows stuck in a folder in my computer. I'm no longer quite sure why I wrote it, but it's not a bad summary of the situation.

Cemeteries are, first and foremost, living spaces. Like any other cultural artifact, be it school, factory, town, library, shopping center, state, what-have-you, each cemetery has a life of its own. Living cemeteries are those still in use. They are not static. Their changes may be slow and subtle, but they continue all the time.

Dead cemeteries tend to disappear through neglect, forgetfulness, or conscious removal or destruction. Forgotten cemeteries continually reappear in the process of digging for foundations, road cuts, pipe lines, etc., while other dead cemeteries are among the best preserved, and best known, structures on the face of the Earth: the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, and Stonehenge come quickly to mind. To be sure, given the considerable length of time humans have been here, most cemeteries have long been irretrievably lost. Nonetheless, long lost burial grounds are constantly discovered. In rediscovered cemeteries, aside from the bodies themselves, the most important findings are the trappings left with the corpse, the grave objects. One can often make the case that the single best window we have unto an ancient culture comes through through its grave offerings. Without them, our knowledge of the past would be much less full. And certainly when it comes to our most famous cemeteries, said Pyramids, etc., the cemeteries and their attendant objects far outweigh the bodies in importance. King Tut’s okay, but it’s his paraphernalia which really excites and informs us.

But there’s a disconnect between how we view ancient cemeteries and how we view our own, although the disconnect is not uniform across our culture. The disconnect is more than academic; it’s led to enormous changes in our burial practices which in turn are having a commensurate impact on the cemetery industry. A headline in The Oregonian from August 5, 2007, encapsulates the problem: Oregon cemetery plots go begging. The problem, author Anna Griffin contends, is that “more and more, particularly on the West Coast, consumers are choosing cremation over burial.” In Oregon, Griffin says, the cremation rate is now 65%, which corresponds to Portland Metro’s data of 67%. Just forty year ago the rate was 5%. The problem affects virtually all the state’s major cemeteries with the notable exception of the Veterans Administration cemeteries, which are constantly looking to expand; but their reason is simple: they give away their plots and pick up the burial tab. It’s an offer veterans and their wives find hard to refuse. Even in non-VA cemeteries, the incidence of government supplied markers often dominates the graveyard, but even that hasn’t stemmed the drain away from using the major cemeteries servicing the cities of the region. The stark truth is that cemeteries are now competing for a severely shrunken market. It’s bad enough that only 35% of people now opt for burial, but many of those left come from cultures which frown upon not being able to have upright, visible grave markers and hence shun the major cemeteries, which are invariably lawn cemeteries.

But it is a mistake to think that cremation is the cause of the cemeteries’ problems. The cemeteries’ problems are self-inflicted and cremations are a response to the problem; at worst they’re a symptom. There is nothing that prevents cremains from being buried. The problems are related to the disconnect, and much of the secret lies in the cultural response that requires some people to have upright monuments versus flush memorials. What might seem a minor cultural eccentricity affecting a small minority of non-assimilated Americans is in truth symptomatic of an underlying yearning of many people that is not being satisfied in conventional lawn cemeteries; a yearning that drives potential customers away from cemeteries and paradoxically towards cremation. What author Griffin failed to notice is that there is a whole class of cemeteries largely unaffected by the switch to cremation, ones right under the nose of the problem, as it were: the vernacular cemeteries.

Cemeteries for the most part can be divided into two classes: designer and vernacular, the difference in which is fairly self-explanatory and contained within their names. The designer cemetery appeared in Paris in 1804 under the name Père Lachaise. It’s still there and contains, among other luminaries, Jim Morrison. It was the first time anyone had tried to place the dead in a landscaped park designed especially for that purpose. (In fact, the idea for parks came out of cemetery design.) The intention of such early cemeteries was that the dead would have edifying monuments built over them which would be instructive to the masses who, hopefully, would come to visit them, bringing art and culture, as it were, to an artificially tamed landscape where the teaming masses can be enlightened in the open air. The first such cemetery built in the United States was Mt. Auburn in Cambridge, MA, in 1831, and it and many early similar ventures were started by horticultural societies. And they were extremely successful with thousands of people streaming to visit them on fine weekends to such as extent that traffic rules often had to be promulgated to contend with the throngs, with sometimes only plot-owners allowed to bring horses or carriages onto the grounds. The Eugene Masonic Cemetery, for example, had a city trolly come to its front door.

Two things happened to stem that tide of popularity: one was the invention of parks per se drawing the throngs of cemetery visitors to them instead. That invention, though, might have altered the use patterns of cemeteries, but wouldn’t alone have significantly affected the primary role of the cemetery: that of memorial ground had not cemeteries gone through further design changes that drastically altered their function.

By 1855 Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati had begun the process of consolidating management of the cemetery under one person, in this case Adolph Strauch, who introduced the idea of clustering large monuments on the side of open lawn areas, the size of which he also increased. The process reached its apogee some 58 years later when Hubert Eaton opened Forest Lawn Memorial Gardens in Glendale, CA, doing away with family uprights markers altogether and turning the entire operation into a lawn cemetery with stones flush to the ground for ease of maintenance. Eaton was following the time-honored American tradition of streamlining his business, making it more profitable, and cutting costs. But he took his idea one step further, one that exacerbated the problem begun with the implementation of the flush marker. Neither Eaton nor Strauch knew that in their efforts to maximize their profits and minimize their costs they were sowing the seeds of their own destruction.

Eaton eliminated, not only the monuments to death that dominated the early designer cemeteries and which can still be seen in cemeteries such as Portland’s Lone Fire or Cottage Grove’s Fir Grove, but he tried to eliminate the very idea of death itself, as witnessed by the name change. “Cemetery” carried too much the burden of death with it, so he opted for “memorial garden” which immediately became the code for the new style of cemetery, to such an extent that sometimes older cemeteries changed their names to adopt the new nomenclature, such as Rest Lawn Memorial Park outside Junction City which is a pioneer cemetery that subsequently adopted the “memorial garden” tag. You can be sure that any cemetery you find with the name “memorial garden” attached will be a lawn cemetery. In cases such as Rest Lawn, and in many other vernacular cemeteries, one can see land developed prior to and after the invention of the lawn cemetery. Many pioneer cemeteries mistakenly adopted this approach and in many a charming wooded spot now sits next to a barren open plot.

Eaton didn’t stop their, though. Instead of shroud-draped statues and lamentations for the departed, Eaton erected his own monuments that avoided any mention of death, most often classical reproductions or Christian statuary. Eaton’s goal, essentially, was to chase death from the graveyard, and in this he pretty much succeeded. But in the process, he chased away his raison d’être. He could call his place a “memory garden,” but if there was nothing to remember, why end up there? Slowly, as memorial gardens spread, more and more people took up cremation. It’s not that they necessarily preferred cremation, but given the exorbitant cost of funerals, what’s the point if there’s no place to go remember your loved one? One flush stone next to another in a limitless lawn is hardly conducive to visitation and rumination. The very reason to visit a cemetery was largely eliminated. That was coupled to a cost explosion resulting from the American post-Civil War predilection for embalming and the sales insistence of the funeral industry into more and more expensive coffins. The bottom line became that traditional funerals and burials became exceedingly expensive while the product offered was in equal part diminished. It was a lot of money for something people didn’t use much, and subsequently they began pulling out of the lawn cemeteries altogether. Unless, of course, they were free.

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)

Mothers & Children

Belle Passi Cemetery

A Bit of Housekeeping:

I suppose I should have done something for Memorial Day, but I didn’t. I worked that day.

Too bad, too, as down at the local mausoleum they have a locked family room containing two coffins and a stained-glass window, which is open once a year for an hour and a half each Memorial Day. There are no known survivors to the two people entombed there, so it’s unexplained why the room should be secreted away. I suppose I could ask.

Saturday prior to Memorial Day we stopped to eat lunch (from a taco wagon in Brooks) at one of our favorite cemeteries, Belle Passi, outside Woodburn. I write a little bit more about Woodburn and its surroundings in the intro to the cemetery on Flickr at Dead Man Talking (hit link above), should you be interested.

Woodburn is an old (for here) town in the center of the Willamette Valley, which is the agricultural marvel of the Pacific Northwest. Belle Passi was a whilom town near Woodburn. The core of downtown Woodburn is Mexican these days, offering some of the best Mexican food in the state in a scattering of restaurants and bodegas. Throw in the Russian True Believers, who haunt the outskirts of town, and you have one of the most interesting burgs in the region. And it’s got an outlet mall and a drag strip to boot. What more could one want?


Belle Passi Cemetery
But back to the cemetery: The three photos accompanying this post were shot that Saturday before Memorial Day. There’s no significance to or connection between the three other than that I was struck by the pathos exposed in them. Children’s graves are often the hardest to absorb, but their poignancy acts like chili powder for the soul: it’s painful, yet we can’t walk away.

Not only are these children’s graves, but they all appear to be of children who didn’t survive birth or much beyond. From the tombstone alone, it’s impossible to tell if Susanna Cravens was stillborn or died shortly after birth, but she evidently didn’t survive for a second day. Carole Ritzenthaler was eight months pregnant when she and her baby died, although we don’t know the specific causes. Then there’s the sorrowful anonymity of the stone chiseled simply “Mother/Baby.” Given no other information, it’s hard to avoid thinking that mother and child died together at childbirth.

I have felt the pain.

And I feel so much better.

I’ve never been to war so I can’t say this from first hand experience, but I’ve read often enough of the great sense of relief that some people feel on the battlefield when a person next to them has just been killed; the sense of relief coming from the uncontrolled and very real relief of not having been killed themselves, of having dodged the bullet, very literally. I’m aware, naturally, of the guilty pain many people suffer from having had that involuntary reaction. In trying to figure out why I, myself, one, likes going to graveyards, I’ve come to suspect that part of it comes from the relief of still being able to go visit them, period. And perhaps unconsciously, the added pain of a child’s grave gives one the added burst of relief that it didn’t happen to them or their loved one. (And if it did, God bless them.)

Belle Passi Cemetery
More Housekeeping:

A quick “hello” to all you new duly registered “followers” of this blog (what the heck, hello to you old ones, too), and let me say how grateful and amazed I am that anyone finds this of interest. My wife and children don’t read it, trust me; so I’m delighted that others find entertainment and their own relief with these walls.

Our turn is coming. Let’s whoop it up while we still can.

Hollywood Forever Redux

A little over a year ago, April 9, 2008 to be exact, I ran a column—regulars will remember it well, I'm sure—listing movies I'd seen the previous year that contained at least one cemetery scene. It was so easy, I did it again: kept another list.

Who said dying wasn't chic?

The List

Brave One
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
The Real Dirt on Farmer John
Harold and Maude
Gates of Heaven
Down by Law
I'm Not There
Charlie Wilson's War
The Prestige
The Kite Runner
Things We Lost in the Fire
Under the Sand
When the Levees Broke
Simple Life of Noah Dearborn
I am David
Goodnight, Mr. Tom
Lemony Snicket's a Series of Unfortunate Events
Wag the Dog
Taxi to the Dark Side
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
King Corn
Sounder
Ocean's Twelve
The Reader
Kinky Boot Factory

Go now to a cinema and ponder.

One a YearLong-Liners: Fishing by Hand

Ilwaco (WA) Cemetery
Old Man Petersen slouched in the booth and stared across the blacktop at the plant bearing his name: Petersen’s Seafood. He didn’t take his cap off, but there wasn’t much to cover, anyway. His face was dark and furrowed from years of standing up to hard weather. His hands curled around a cup of coffee.

“Lost one a year for every year of my life, on average,” he said. That would be more than seventy fishermen; almost all men. He laid it out as a fact, like last year’s catch. “Every year someone doesn’t come back.”

Toledo Cemetery (Toledo, OR)
“More coffee?”

Now a-days we get updates from Shortman on who’s died in the past year, but now it’s from cirrhosis or cancer or heart attack or suicide, not from a slide into Davy Jones’ locker. A couple years ago when Roger Fisherman (as distinguished from Roger Treeplanter) took himself out of the race they blew his remains off into the South Slough with a canon. Third person they’ve done that way. Around here Hunter Thompson would just be one more guy. One who didn’t fish.

Back then, there were still fish. Back then, the harbors were stiff with boats and the docks lined with processing plants. Corporations and sea farming and overfishing had not yet crashed the business and it was still dominated by little guys. One owner to a boat; one boat to an owner. An extra hand or two and you’re off to catch the wizard. It was a romantic, if deadly business. A man’s boat could mean the world to him; just ask his wife. It may have her name on the side, but the boat was in his heart.

Peaceful Hill Cemetery (Naselle, WA)
They are the classic fishing boats that these engravings illustrate. These are the kinds of boats I went out, ever so briefly, on. These are long-liners. Those tall poles sticking up from the side of the boats are just what they look like: oversized fishing poles that trail behind them hundreds of yards worth of fishing line set with hundred of hooks spaced evenly apart. The fisherman’s job is attaching bait to each and every hook and, God willing, removing fish from the same. And gutting the fish and throwing them down the hold and packing them in ice. In a storm. In a raging sea. With water walls sweeping the decks.

“Don’t fall overboard,” the skipper advises.

Roger that.

Eureka Cemetery (Newport, OR)
The poles also might have flopper-stoppers attached to them, which are steel plates secured to the poles by steel guy-wires. The plates race along side the boat a few feet below the surface, with their flat side parallel with it. The difficulty of pulling the plates out of the water broadside to are what make them effective in slowing down the rolling of the boat, hence the name. Should one of the flopper-stoppers actually escape from the water, God forbid, duck, because it’s going to come crashing through the cabin wall on the opposite side of the boat in a split-second.

Five of the six engravings shown here are of classic boats, all except the boat from Peaceful Hill (which looks more like a gill-netter) with the reflection in the water, which I threw in because of the unusual nature of the illustration.

Ocean View Cemetery (Warrenton, OR)
One engraving includes the Astoria Bridge, which crosses the Columbia from Oregon to Washington at that point. One can’t get much more place-specific than that on a tombstone.

The most dramatic of the engravings is that of the Northern Prince breaking the waves, poles lowered, the bow hidden behind the crest. It’s the only engraving that hints at what it feels like out there when “the minutes they turn into hours.”

The last Blogging a Dead Horse covered bowpicking gill-netters from the Columbia River. Long-liners ply the open ocean. One look at this collection and there’s no doubt: we’re not in Kansas, anymore.

Peaceful Hill Cemetery (Naselle, WA)

Butterfly SunsetBowpickin' Gill-Netters on the Columbia

Greenwood Cemetery
It’s axiomatic to say that occupation is intimately tied to place. While telecommunications have theoretically liberated many fields from their locations, still, to be a fisherman, one needs water.

Boat images on tombstones, of course, are not limited to working boats, and pleasure boats are harder to geographically pinpoint than commercial craft. You may need water for sport boats, but you don’t need much. Commercial fishing requires big water. While some commercial fishing does obtain in fresh water, the vast bulk of it draws from salt water. In the Oregon Territory there is one great fishery not located in the ocean, that of the Columbia River; and while they catch a variety of fish in this mighty river, the bulk of the catch is salmon of one form or another; and the most efficient way to fish salmon in the river is via gill nets. Gill nets, as the name suggests, catch fish by entangling their gills in a net. Nets are designed of specific dimensions to catch only a certain size fish, while letting the rest escape, and at that they’re fairly effective.

Prairie Cemetery
(A word here on spelling: A boat that employs a gill net — or a gill-net, as the case may be — is known as a gill netter, a gill-netter, or a gillnetter. There seems to be no standard, even within a given publication.)

Gill-netting is an ancient technique probably predating our diaspora from Africa. It’s probably not coincidence that all hominin finds were originally laid down in moist conditions, with the only notable exception being a double set of footprints found in a then-fresh volcanic deposit. And it’s probably not coincidence that the diaspora appears to have been made via the shore of the Indian Ocean at such a speed and over such large aquatic distances that boats are a much better explanation than whole families swimming or being blown along on log jams. There’s probably a reason that invasions of new territory happened along river channels and not savannas or woodlands. There’s a reason why it’s now being considered that shell tools may have predated stone ones. There is a reason why people are known as the “beach monkey.” For that matter, we still all live at the beach, with our running water, and all.

Prairie Cemetery
In any event, The knot was undoubtedly one of the first serious human inventions/understandings that allowed us to explode as a species, as not only did it allow us to make clothes and fashion weapons so that we could finally extend our range off the confines of the beach, but it led, probably quite quickly, to making nets of all kinds; and it wouldn’t have taken too much fishing with nets to find out which size mesh worked best for which fish. Unfortunately, any materials used in making any but the most recent nets have long since vanished, so it’s currently impossible to date the origins of gill-netting, but suffice it to say it goes back a long, long way.

It’s most likely that gill nets were first employed along streams and estuaries without the assistance of boats, where they are still used by both commercial and indigenous fishermen. The advent of suitable craft allowed the fisherfolk to extend their trade into bigger and bigger waters, including the Columbia.

Ocean View Cemetery
The early post-invasion gill-netters on the Columbia were a colorful lot. Rowed to the fishing grounds and either powered or stabilized by sails, pictures of them show what looks like a flotilla of butterflies floating on the river surface. The current crop of motorized netters isn’t nearly as picturesque, but the more common style of Columbia River gill-netter, the bowpicker, is still a distinctive enough vessel and one that shows up on headstones much more often than the generally larger sternpicker.

The names describe how the net is pulled aboard the boat; and seeing as one has to be dragging a net towards them while reeling it in, it behooves the boat to be moving away from the net during the operation, which mean a bowpicker reels in the net while puttering backwards. Putting the net up front also lends the boat a distinctive appearance by moving the wheelhouse to the back rather than its more usual forward position.

Ocean View Cemetery
The Columbia gill-netters are generally small boats operated by one or two persons. At this point in time they are essentially an overlooked throwback, a once enormous industry now marginalized and whose greatest service to society is no longer the production of food but the retention of folkways. The headstone carvings shown here represent — can we say it? — a dying breed. They’re part of what makes life on the Columbia different from life on, say, the Mississippi (after all these years I can still remember how to spell that word). Similar boats, of course, are found over the entire world, but not uniformly distributed. Here they’re a beloved nuance of the Oregon Territory mostly restricted to the Columbia.

Prairie Cemetery
I may have missed a boat or two from my collection, and my collection holds photos of by no means all the boat carvings on headstones in the Territory, but the eight here are certainly a good selection of what’s available. They all emanate from cemeteries close to the river. And just by looking at them, I’d venture that six (I actually have one more that couldn't be downloaded) of the eight were fashioned by the same artist. Only the stained-glass representation in Cathlamet and the boat riding on a stylized sea of pointy waves from Ocean View look as if they’re done by other people. The remaining six look suspiciously alike. And, without being too harsh an art critic, the remaining six are intimidatingly simplistic in their execution. Notably so in an industry that generally does very fine work. It’s as if a folk artist snuck in for this tiny niche.

Stewart Creek Cemetery
What’s particularly nice, though, about this artist’s series of engravings is that, considered as a whole, they illustrate some of the high points of the job. Two of them show nets in the water; one of which shows the direction the boat is moving vis-à-vis the net, while the other shows a person working the net. Another shows a stabilizing sail unfurled, and another has two people sitting in the stern.

I might point out that the boat riding the stylized waves displays Washington State registration numbers, although the cemetery is in Oregon. It and the stained-glass memorial (the only depiction of the boats from a frontal view) reflect the generally higher industry standards of design; nonetheless, this artist’s contribution to the local headstone scene is significant and worth keeping ones eye out for. And I should note that this industry concentrates in the lower reaches of the Columbia, just before it enters the Pacific. The netters have never reached as far inland as Portland.

Ocean View Cemetery