my friends, the dead - #10

Communing with the underground.

The graves have a way of finding you here.

I took Cooper for a walk the other day, and I try to take a new trail every time. Trails branch off at random, sometimes old mining roads, sometimes game trails well-traveled enough to dupe a novice and tempt a regular. But this one branched past an old dilapidated cabin, windows smashed and guts covered in dust and leaves. Just past the rotten home, maybe 20 feet into the woods, there was a wooden post sticking some three feet up from the ground. It had the usual marks of man — straight, smooth, standing erect. I stepped through the deadfall to get a closer look. Every other piece of planed wood was either collapsing into the cabin or already ground-bound, rotting back to its mother. At the base of the stud were rocks piled in a pyramid of sorts, holding it in place, and beside the rocks, two moss covered statues the size of small rabbits. Beneath their soft, green blankets were two angels, kneeling by the post, one with their stone hands clasped looking up, the other with their hands on the ground, staring into it.

A marker read, “You were so much STRONGER and BRAVER and SWEETER than I will ever Be. I’ll miss you. Love Peter”

In lettering lost in time, you can just make out the name: Henrietta.

Just up the dirt road from our house is the cemetery, unfenced and unkept. There’s a swing strung between two old aspens, and you can kick your feet high above the handful of graves below. One gravestone shares two names — both children, laid to rest more than 100 years ago. In the center of their grave bed, a massive pine has splintered the stone with her roots made of bones and breath. Even with a cemetery in town, there are graves everywhere. Marked or forgotten, along the town’s edges, on the mountain, and in the mountain where men and burros were held hostage and held forever in the mines. There are two memorials right now in a town with fewer people than my graduating class in rural Ohio. One waves with prayer flags on a grassy knoll overlooking the old part of town. Beneath the flags, a photo of a girl my age, riding horseback through town. The other is in the cemetery, a mound dug and buried the day we moved in. As we unpacked our moving truck on a warm July day, cars with license plates from up and down the Rockies parked along our street to pay tribute. On the gravestone hangs the collar and tags of the man’s dog. He was 42.

I can’t walk by or even near Henrietta’s grave without talking to her, the peculiarity of which is heightened by the fact that it’s hard to tell if Henri was a girl or a dog. Either way, the conversations are the same:

“How’re the woods today? Any good visitors? Anything you’d like me to see?”

In the chance there’s some connective tissue between now and every then, I’m following the golden rule. I personally would like people to talk to me, to be curious, to be revenant. How fast do you think I could trip someone with a well-placed root if they were one of those people who carried speakers into the woods? How deeply could I infect their psyche if they defaced my resting place or hurt an animal?

Thus far, if Henrietta seems anything, it’s suspicious. Which is fine. I would be too. But she’s not the only one I’m talking to. In a deeper canyon, six miles by foot from the house, you can feel the enormity of time. A box canyon closing in on you with a swampy bottom, talus fields, waterfalls, and a scree climb to the ridge. Something that feels pulled from Land Before Time or referenced for some untouched world space saga. Alone on a misty trail run, I felt safe enough from the eyes of judgment that I knelt on the ground, my bare hands on the soil, and shared my intentions with the Earth: her kingdom is my gift to hold tenderly and her right to take quickly. I stayed on my knees until I forgot how it might look to someone coming, and I stayed a little longer after that until the connection loosened and I felt the dirt in my fingernails.

I dusted off my knees and my hands and carried on running. Around the next bush, I came to a quick halt — there in the middle of the path was a porcupine, as startled to see me as I was her. Nature, providing an offering and a test. Are you a good steward? Can you see this moment for what it is? I stepped back and spoke softly until the porcupine waddled deep into the brush. I carried on with that feeling of earned reverence in my heart, talking mostly to myself.

As we approach Halloween, the town has yet to unveil any inherent spookiness beyond the reality of death. Hard work and hard loss are etched in, but there’s no unease. And maybe there never will be if I keep talking to all the dead people and animals, the dying trees, the creatures long absorbed into the ground.

Several people asked me if I feel safe here, especially out in the wilderness on my own. Some people don’t know any better. They never learned the animals are mostly harmless. They never read the research that you’re much more likely to die at the hands of your partner than at those of a stranger. They never knew I already escaped those hands anyway. They never learned to read the sky and the mountain. Never learned to read me.

But whatever I am safe from here, I think more about what I am safe to be here: odd. Solitary. The kind of woman who kneels, palms in the soil, to feel time and purpose crawl up her spine vertebrae by vertebrae like a wooden roller coaster, hoping to stay in the moment long enough to feel the freefall of getting lost in time.

Whatever strange, backwoods habits this town enables, it also draws you in from the deathly calls of the winter wind with emails like this:

On Sunday, meet in the town square at 5pm in COSTUME for the parade, pizza, and the photo. Trick or treating starts at 6pm on the old side of town. Ryan will transport the kids to the other side of town and back at night. Add Town Hall to your trick or treating to meet the new Town Manager, John. 

You want me to… wear a costume? To take a town photo? And meet the new town manager? Guys there are 150 people here. If you stand outside your house for longer than 5 minutes, you’ll meet the new town manager.

But that’s small town life. And I bought Halloween candy weeks ago to prepare for our first-ever trick’or’treaters. Hopefully after a few years of talking to ghosts in the pines, I won’t need a costume. The local kids will be scared enough as is.