Memento mori

J was the one to spot “my” grave during our stroll through Newton Cemetery this afternoon. As much as I enjoy exploring cemeteries, today was the first time I’ve ever encountered a tombstone with my name on it. As far as I know, I don’t have any relatives living (or once living) in Newton, Massachusetts, so I’ll assume “DiSabato” is more common a name than I knew. Still, it’s a bit creepy to turn around and see a carved-in-stone reminder of your own mortality. There eventually go I, and you, and all of us.

I don’t normally find cemeteries to be creepy places…and yet, I occasionally see memorials that stop me cold, offering as they do a tangible reminder of the mortality we all share. Tombstones marking the graves of children always give me pause, and today, J and I saw several graves that were adorned with Valentine’s Day hearts and flowers, a sign that the Dearly Departed really are dear. After seeing the usual His and Hers grave markers with the name of a still-living widow or widower next to the birth and death dates of a deceased spouse, J talked of visiting his grandfather’s grave with his grandmother, her name chiseled alongside her husband’s. I suppose there’s a certain amount of comfort in knowing where and with whom your ultimate resting place will be,visits to your own (eventual) grave being one way of getting to know your (eventual) neighborhood.

Both J and I grew quiet when we approached a field of war dead, that portion of any cemetery always seeming too large. But the memorial that stunned us both into silence was this one, the death date (September 11, 2001) explaining why this particular loss happened far too prematurely:

After we got home, J went online find the face and story behind the stone. Some souls continue to be mourned even by those of us who never knew them in the flesh.

 

The sphinx’s riddle

Riddle me this: why is there a sphinx in the middle of Mount Auburn Cemetery?

On Monday my friend A (not her real initial) and I met in Cambridge, Massachusetts for a cemetery stroll before heading to nearby Watertown for the best pancakes in town. I’d never been to the Deluxe Town Diner; A had been to Mount Auburn Cemetery only once before, and then only briefly. It seemed a fair trade for me to show A around my favorite garden cemetery (and the nation’s first) before she initiated me into the culinary wonders of sour cream and buttermilk flapjacks and New York style potato pancakes. After all, we’ve made something of a tradition walking off potato pancakes, so it seemed only fair to broaden our horizons by finding another establishment that serves up the tasty goods.

But back to my initial question. In Greek mythology, the sphinx asked passersby a riddle, and those who could not answer were subsequently strangled. So, why is there a sphinx in the middle of Mount Auburn Cemetery?

Mount Auburn’s sphinx sits directly facing Bigelow Chapel: apparently, this is a Christian creature, not any sort of Greco-Egyptian pagan. And instead of commemorating anything remotely Greek or Egyptian, Mount Auburn’s sphinx is actually a Civil War memorial commemorating the Union dead. If you’re still missing the connection between sphinxes, the Civil War, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, you’re not alone: I wanted to show A this particular memorial precisely because it makes no sense. And where else in Massachusetts would you be able to ask your own questions of a sphinx before heading out for potato pancakes?

Truth be told, the reason there is a sphinx at Mount Auburn Cemetery has more to do with 19th century style than it does with the Civil War itself. Mount Auburn Cemetery was founded in 1831, and by the time its entry gate was rebuilt in 1843, Egyptian Revival was all the rage. When sculptor Martin Milmore was commissioned in 1871 to construct a memorial to the Union’s Civil War dead, he followed the prevailing style of the day and produced an impressive (but today, woefully anachronistic) monument. Whether or not there is any connections between sphinxes and the American Civil War, 19th century Victorians would have been impressed with a memorial that was both epic and monumental. It matters only to purists, I suspect, that Ms. Sphinx looks particularly Anglo, like any conventional 19th century American beauty.

Like any sculpture park, Mount Auburn Cemetery says a great deal about contemporary taste, the trend toward garden cemeteries marking a move from the bleaker spiritual vision of earlier cemeteries. Garden cemeteries such as Mount Auburn were designed to sooth the souls of mourners through park-like landscaping and beautifully sculpted memorials. Many of Mount Auburn’s more impressive monuments reflect a Neoclassical style that evokes a mood of tranquil serenity. Mary Baker Eddy’s memorial, for example, looks calmly reassuring whether contemplated across Halcyon Lake or viewed from below.

That being said, though, part of the fun of strolling a garden cemetery lies in the element of scavenger hunt: who can find the most ostentatious, unusual, or exotic memorial, and what things can you find during this visit that you haven’t noticed in the past? On Monday, both A and I simultaneously remarked about a stone I don’t recall noticing before: the weighty marker for Manton Eastburn, the 19th century bishop of Massachusetts whose grave marker struck both A and me as looking exactly like a butter dish.

Once you’ve moved from Civil War sphinxes to ecclesiastical butter dishes, you’ve moved from the ridiculous to the even more ridiculous. By the time A and I made it to the ground-hugging gravestones on the grassy knoll overlooking Willow Pond on a (successful) search for the grave of B.F. Skinner, it was only natural we’d almost literally stumble upon the world’s most bloggable tombstone:

Bloggable grave markers notwithstanding, on Monday I spotted the creepiest cemetery stone ever: an anonymous Memento Mori which asks the sphinx-like riddle, “Who’s next to die?”

 

As good as old

Remember the old stone bridge that was damaged in last year’s flood and subsequently covered with a protective tarp? Well, Old Stone’s in the process of receiving a face-lift, and here’s how she looks these days: almost as good as old.

In August, crews erected a wood scaffold under the crumbling portion of the double-arch stone bridge off Route 9 near the Antrim border in Stoddard, New Hampshire. With the help of this scaffold and piles of reinforcing gravel, workers have successfully re-pieced the largest of the tumbled stones, re-assembling a centuries-old structure whose only modern use is as a backdrop for scenic pictures.

It’s nice to think that some of our tax dollars here in tax-free New Hampshire are lending a hand to a fallen friend. With Old Stone standing securely again, the only thing keeping this scene from its pre-flood glory are the piles of gravel re-routing the Contoocook River around the damage. I’d like to think that by the time our fall foliage reaches its peak brilliance around mid-October, Old Stone and the river that runs through her will be in picture-perfect shape for the annual invasion of Leaf Peepers.

 

We meet again

Apparently you can’t teach an old photo-blogger new tricks, or maybe my taste in imagery hasn’t changed at all over the past two years. How else would you explain why yesterday I snapped a nearly identical photo of the same pile of rocks I’d blogged the last time I was in Bar Harbor two years ago?

 

Silver

By way of follow-up to Wednesday’s post on Inishmore’s Black Fort (D�n D�chathair), here’s a shot–taken to give a sense of scale–of two tourists resting within its wall. Since these adventuresome tourists have varying shades of silver hair, this is my submission for today’s Photo Friday theme. Come to think of it, D�n D�chathair’s gray stones, when viewed at close range, look more silver than they do black…

 

Walking on the moon

Approaching the craggy Black Fort (Dún Dúchatair) on Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands off the coast of Galway, feels a bit like walking on the moon, the landscape underfoot being almost entirely stone.

The first time I visited Ireland, I was surprised by two seemingly contradictory things. First, the Irish countryside was just as green as photo postcards suggested, something I always thought was a tourist-luring exaggeration: the landscape equivalent of the mouth-watering photos you see on packages of instant foods that inevitably disappoint. The Irish countryside, though, was just as green as I’d seen it, which was greener than I thought possible, never having seen the likes of Vermont in spring.

The second thing that surprised me on that first trip to Ireland seemed to contradict the first: for all her verdure, Ireland was much rockier than I’d imagined. Looking at photos, I’d imagined that Ireland was an island of earth sprinkled with stone. What I learned as an undergraduate careening across the countryside in a minivan, though, was that Ireland (at least on her craggy western coast) is predominantly stone with only a thin layer of velvet green to cover her. The Emerald Isle is emerald not merely in color but also in consistency: a landscape chiseled from stone.

Inishmore, the largest of the three Aran Islands in Galway Bay off Ireland’s west coast, is liberally studded with stone. Like their counterparts here in New Hampshire, Irish farmers de-stone their fields by piling the rock walls that crisscross every conceivable inch of acreage…except Inishmore rocks are as angular as New Hampshire stones are round.

The road to the Black Fort is too narrow and bumpy to allow busses, so few tourists brave it on bicycles. When you get tired of rattling your brains on a increasingly rocky road…

…you abandon your bicycle and set off on foot on a stone-strewn route where crowds of bus-tourists fear to tread.

After crossing a veritable field of stone, you come to the cliff where crashing waves remind you that only water can wear away rock.

Along Inishmore’s outermost edge, irregular stone walls look natural, mirroring as they do the contours of earth and sky.

Like water, time too can wear away stone, for only the hand of history can rupture a wall made of rock.

At first sight, Inishmore’s edge seems too stony for souls: how could any living creature abide a landscape that looks as barren as the moon? And yet, within her rocky crevices, even Inishmore harbors fecundity.

The unnamed ancients who built Dún Dúchatair were fortifying themselves against invaders, of which Ireland has had many. In A Book of Migrations, Rebecca Solnit suggests that tourists are the latest invaders upon Irish soil, Ireland being a place both frequently attacked and often visited. On the outermost edge of Inishmore, Ireland seems both impenetrable and entirely inhospitable: a hard-scrabble, inscrutable place. And yet even here, vegetative invaders find creases and crevices into which to settle their invasive root-hold.

Life on the rocks is a shallow, tenuous thing, the ephemeral existence of plants and insects merely scratching the eternal surface of stone.

Plants can’t grow on the moon, for you can’t set down roots in a world without gravity. On Inishmore, Iron Age warriors left their mark not by setting down agricultural roots but by piling up edifices of stone.

Instead of carving their place in history, the builders of Dún Dúchatair piled up time, heaving muscle against stone to create a sinuous black curve hugging a sheer rock cliff. (Click on the image below for a panoramic view.)

With no warriors left to defend her, the Black Fort is now easy to breach: having made the walk from your abandoned bike, you surmount her side then descend a regular stair of meticulously positioned stones.

What awaits you at the end of this rock-strewn way is the Emerald Isle herself: a spot of God’s green earth hidden on the edge of an almost lunar landscape. (Click on the image below for a panoramic view.)

Click here to see Gary’s version of our trek to Dún Dúchatair.

 

Postcard from the edge

Today I taught my first fall semester classes at Keene State and submitted the latest batch of end-term grades for SNHU Online: the official end of my summer vacation. How odd it is to realize it’s been less than two full weeks since I was perusing weathered tombstones on Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands off the coast from Galway. Today’s classes, gradebook, and day-long drizzle seem very far indeed from the partly cloudy verge of sea and stone.

 

Circle

One of the highlights of my recent trip to Ireland was a trip to Monasterboice, where Gary and I admired (and took many pictures of) the 10th century high crosses there. Long ago as an undergraduate, I wrote a research paper on the iconography of Irish high crosses, so it was a thrill to visit several outstanding ones, including Muiredach’s High Cross, which is generally agreed to be the finest example in all of Ireland.

I’ll have much more to say (and show) in a future post about the high crosses of Monasterboice. For now, though, I’m using today’s Photo Friday theme of Circle as an excuse to share this image of the east face of the Cross of Muiredach, which depicts God standing in judgment above the scale where the souls of the dead are weighed. (Click on the image for larger version.) In Muiredach’s cycle of life and death, souls enter the world and then exit it, being weighed by the scales of judgment according to their earthly deeds: a sober story captured in a circle of stone.

 

Covered

New Hampshire has long had many covered bridges, and now it has at least one blanketed bridge. Last night, during another getting-to-know-you drive in Miss Bling, Reggie and I visited the old double-arch stone bridge on Route 9 near the Stoddard-Antrim border, which I’d blogged both before and after last October’s devastating floods.

In the months since I’d last seen Old Fragile, someone has covered her ruined side with a sandbag-weighted tarp, presumably to prevent further erosion.

I don’t know if there are plans to repair this old bridge: she no longer carries vehicular traffic, so she’s not useful to anyone except camera-toting tourists (and an occasional blogger) who pull off Route 9 long enough to snap appreciative photos. Still, it’s comforting to know that someone is keeping the patient comfortable even if she’s suffering from a terminal case of Gravity. Old relics die hard, and they deserve the decency of a respectful passing.

 

Fragile

I’m sad to report that at least one of the old stone bridges of Hillsborough County didn’t survive our recent floods unscathed. (Click on any of today’s images for an enlarged version.)

This past Saturday I drove NH Route 9 from Keene to Concord: the first time I’d driven this road since October’s flood. The portion of Route 9 that crosses Otter Brook in Sullivan had been swept away, and I seldom have business in Concord. But by Saturday, Route 9 had been repaired, and a social gathering in Concord beckoned. And so on Saturday I found myself driving the once-familiar road which wends from Keene, where I work and now live, to my old home in Hillsborough: a portion of winding, scenic road I used to drive in all times and temperatures, a portion of highway I once knew like the back of my hand.

You mustn’t think me a raving sentimentalist when I admit that my eyes filled with tears when I saw the chuck of stone and soil that had been ripped by floodwaters from the old double-arch stone bridge that spans the Contoocook River near the Stoddard-Antrim border, leaving a semi-circular ring of keystones jutting from the earth like jagged stone teeth:

This centuries-old structure was fragile to begin with, no longer strong enough to withstand vehicular traffic and thus set aside like an anachronism with an attendant historical marker and parking lot: the object of curious tourists’ photos. When I pulled into that parking lot on Saturday to snap these hurried pictures, another car was parked with nobody near: in the fall around these parts, a sure sign that hunters are afoot.

The last time I visited this bridge, Reggie raced over to explore the other side, and I followed more slowly, snapping pictures along the way. Now, this old bridge is closed to even pedestrian traffic, the remaining stones that support one half of its double-arch being of questionable stability while a gaping, dangerously eroding hole nibbles its edge.

Here in the Granite State, we feel strongly about stone, seeing rock as emblematic of our own hardy selves. The last time I visited Stoddard’s old double-arch, Reggie sniffed out two long-dead, road-flatted beavers that had freeze-dried over a long New Hampshire winter. Life in northern New England is rough, and no one (wild or tamed) gets out alive. Even though we solace ourselves with the presumed stability of stone, even granite erodes, cracks, and eventually crumbles, the river of Time always reigning supreme.

It seems senseless to cry because here Nature finally reclaimed one of her own, there being nothing more unnatural than the sight of stones arranged to arch over air. Now in November, nothing is more apparent than the passage of time as birds head south, leaves fall from trees, and bears and other mammals disappear for a long seasonal sleep. And yet, here in New Hampshire, we like to think that we’re like stones, solid and unmoving, planted for centuries while weaker souls flourish and then flounder around us like water-tossed weeds.

Ultimately, though, the force of water is like the pull of gravity and the tug of time: slow and inexorable, it always (inevitably) has the last word.