Graveyard Field Trips: A Memoir

Idyll

My husband Mason and I rolled into Glen Rock, Pennsylvania about 4 o'clock. The village folded into a water-carved valley between two close-rising hills. We hoped to find an ice cream parlor, but instead saw only the gas station, two antique shops, a pizza restaurant, and an historic tavern boarded up and for sale. Every face we saw on the street was white.

Four in the afternoon was too early to go to Tim and Alison's house. They weren't due from work until after 5 or 6. Instead, we meandered through town, hoping to come across a grocery store, if nothing else. It had been a long drive from Sleepy Hollow, New York, and we wanted refreshment.

We were nine days into a trip that would ultimately encompass twenty-two cemeteries in seventeen days. I was writing a column about graveyards for Gothic.Net and wanted to fill in the historical gaps in my knowledge on the topic. Tim and Alison had offered us a personal tour of Gettysburg, America's first national cemetery, in the morning. We hadn't believed them when they said they lived in a tiny little town.

Mason bypassed the turn onto Water Street -- back into the tiny heart of downtown Glen Rock — for a long sloping drive out of the valley. He didn't tell me at first that he'd seen a sign for a park.

At the top of the hill, before we reached the park, we found a graveyard. It didn't seem to have a name. Perhaps the stone pillars that stood sentry beside the drive once held an ornate iron sign, but now they merely prohibited trespassing from dusk to dawn.

Even though it was still afternoon, dusk seemed to be drawing on quickly. The eastern sky had the ominous blush of a fresh bruise. When the sun slipped past the ranks of clouds in the west, sunbeams struck the trees in a way that looked artificial. Their spring leaves were so vivid, they could have been made out from green silk.

Without comment, Mason turned the rental car onto the gravel drive. Between the gravestones, wildflowers starred the grass. Violets I could name, but the bright wash of mauve flowers was unfamiliar. Little buttercups and some sort of gray-green shepherd's crooks also flecked the lawn. The place was comforting, homely, without pretensions. I'd gotten so used to seeing cemetery lawns tortured into chemical verdure -- or patches of dry grass stretched over bare dirt -- that this meadowland touched me.

Monuments here fell into two camps: marble or granite. Sweitzer had signed the marble. Birchall signed the granite. I wondered if the two men were competitors or if they owned a shop together.

Mason lay in the grass at the top of the hill to fight off a headache. I ambled down toward the road, looking over the monuments. I didn't plan to take notes or photographs. For once, I just wanted to enjoy a cemetery without studying it or trying to wrestle a story out of it. This was simply a pleasant place to kill time until we could meet our friends.

Beyond the ridges of Pennsylvania hills, thunder rumbled. One of the things I miss most, now that I live in San Francisco, is storms. We get weather, if you count rain or winds or fog. I long for a good old-fashioned electrical storm. I found out later that Glen Rock has a third greater than U.S. average incidence of tornadoes. I'm glad I didn't know that while I was standing on the hill that day.

Mason and I had driven through a lightning storm on our way through Harrisburg. Winds dashed petals from the cherry trees and flung them onto our windshield in pink rain, while bolts of lightning flashed down in the distance. In Glen Rock's cemetery, I always turned too late to see the lightning, but thunder continued to grumble. I looked up to Mason and the rental car, parked at the crest of the hill.

When I rejoined him, he shrugged off my concern. "I don't think the storm is coming in. Anyway, I'm under a tree."

"That's how people get killed," I replied.

Mason remained convinced there was little danger. He promised to watch the storm, as I loaded some film and went back down the hill to document the little village burial ground after all.

The monuments sported a lot of upward pointing fingers. Not a surprise, really. Pennsylvania was founded as a religious colony. Amish and Mennonite country wasn't far away. One of the gravestones addressed the "sacred grave," asking it to care for the precious form entrusted to it. One epitaph beseeched, "Fold her, O Father, in thine arms..." Another dispensed with an epitaph by saying "TEXT" and referencing a Bible verse, as if you took the Good Book to the graveyard so you could read along.

As I was happily sitting in the grass to copy things down, Mason called, "I think the storm is getting closer!"

"Do you want me to come back?" I called plaintively. I felt as if I'd just gotten started deciphering Glen Rock's permanent history.

"I'll move the car and meet you at the bottom to the hill."

Sighing, I put away my notebook and concentrated on filling a roll of film before we left.

Some of the most interesting gravestones in the little cemetery turned out to be modern. Throughout our trip, I'd been determined not to look at any granite stones carved past 1930, but these stood along the road on my path back to the car. First I came across markers where the colors rubbed into the stones brought vibrancy to the bland redbrick color of the granite. A sprig of lilac on one stone was honestly lilac purple. Another held a river scene with a green tree and beautiful blue water. The color brought liveliness often lacking from modern monuments to the headstones.

Also along the path hulked a stone inlaid with a series of badges. The "Chief" had served as Chief of Police for many years before being elected Mayor. It was wonderful to see the man's possessions shared with passersby. I wished more graveyards could display things their inhabitants had collected in an open-air museum.

As we drove away, I realized that not only did I not know the graveyard's name, I couldn't guess the street on which it was located.

We saw a lot of grand, gorgeous, historic graveyards on our trip, but the afternoon in Glen Rock -- when I was on vacation from my research and nothing remarkable happened -- was one of my favorites. Perhaps I don't always need to be terrorized when I travel in order to enjoy myself.

We stopped at a gas station to get ice cream sandwiches out of its cooler and let them drip over our hands in the humid afternoon. The rainstorm never came.

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This essay was originally published on CemeteryTravel.com on July 5, 2011.