Category Archives: Photo Challenges

WordPress’s weekly photo challenge, aka postaweek.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Converge

Posted on November 30, 2014 | 4 comments
Tour of Cloverdale Cemetery, led by Susan Bennett

Tour of Cloverdale Cemetery, led by Susan Bennett

October was a whirlwind of writing about cemeteries and talking about cemeteries and touring cemeteries.  You can believe I was in heaven.

Mountain View Cemetery tour, led by Arthur Kay

Mountain View Cemetery tour, led by Arthur Kay

The month started with my speech at the Death Salon about how the graveyards were removed from San Francisco. That led to a very small group tour of Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, led by Arthur Kay.  He helped me find a gravestone I was looking for, as well as the grave of one of the last Romanoff princesses and a whole lot of other locally important people.  The day was incredibly hot and I was sick with a bad cold, but it was worth making the effort to get out in the sunshine.

Cypress Lawn Cemetery at sunset

Cypress Lawn at sunset

A week later, still sick with that stupid cold, I managed to see Douglas Keister’s photos of graves in the Holy Land at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park.  That was immediately followed by his gracious and fascinating hands-on seminar on how to take cemetery photos.  The warm gold light spilling across the cemetery made me feel so much better.  I wish I’d taken more photos.

I took the weekend of my birthday off — mostly because there weren’t any cemetery tours I wanted to attend that weekend and I was still sick. The final weekend of the month, I was spoiled for choice.  I wanted to go down to Gilroy, California to see Old St Mary Cemetery, since it’s only open on days when the Historical Society leads tours, but I wasn’t sure I could make it by 10 a.m. on the day after my family had been out trick or treating.

The Carquinez Strait from Alhambra Cemetry

The Carquinez Bridge seen from Alhambra Cemetery

Instead, I dragged my daughter and husband up to Martinez to see the amazing Alhambra Cemetery.  The cemetery overlooks the Carquinez Strait in the northern part of San Francisco Bay. The Historical Society held a tombstone scavenger hunt for the kids, which entertained my daughter while I read the historic signs and marveled over all the lovely tombstones.  We’d never been to Martinez, so afterward we treated ourselves to a Thai lunch and poked briefly through the antique shops before getting one of the best iced mochas my husband has ever tried.  It was the perfect family outing.

Finally, on November 2 — All Souls’ Day — my friend Samuel came up to the northern tip of Napa County with me so we could tour Cloverdale Cemetery.  Susan Bennett led the tour in character as Gravedigger Tom.  The tour group was enormous, which did my heart good to see.  We learned about the history of Cloverdale and its surroundings through the lens of the California Gold Rush and the farming era that followed, through the days of the spas and summer camps and religious splinter groups.

Old St. Mary Cemetery represents the southern tip of my ongoing research for the Pioneer Cemeteries of the San Francisco Bay Area book.  Cloverdale is the northernmost boundary.  It would have been something to see them both in the same weekend, 161 miles as the Google maps, but I’m happy with what I was able to accomplish.

November 3 dragged me out of cemeteries and back to real life. I had to dive into revising the first book of the space opera trilogy I sold to Night Shade Books in February.  I’d been waiting for the book to come back from the editor all year, so of course it arrived in the middle of my cemetery madness.  It’s turned in at last and the book is in press now, for release next summer.  There are more details here, if Hong Kong-style revenge science fiction is your kind of thing.  I’m very proud of it.

Long story short, it’s been a while since I blogged on Cemetery Travel, for which I’m sorry.  I’m still trying to figure out how to juggle everything.  The second book of The Dangerous Type trilogy is due soon and I need to toggle back and forth from being a cemetery historian to a science fiction writer.  It feels strange to have both sides of my life converge at last, but it’s an exciting place to be.

Rhoads_Cloverdale_1725More blogs using this week’s Photo Challenge as a jumping-off point can be found here: http://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_photo_challenge/converge/

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Contrasts

Posted on June 28, 2014 | 6 comments
I know I just used this photo the other night on the Yokohama Cemetery of the Week, but I wanted to talk a little more about it.

I know I just used this photo the other night on the Yokohama Cemetery of the Week, but I wanted to talk a little more about it.

One of the goals of my trip to Japan was to visit the Foreigners’ Cemetery in Yokohama. Because I wasn’t sure what the status of the wifi would be in our air b’n’b apartment,  I did my research beforehand.  I discovered that the cemetery was only open on Saturday and Sunday afternoons between noon and 4.  Since we would only be in Japan across one weekend, that was when we’d have to make the trip.

My husband Mason is a firm believer in doing the one thing you really want to do on vacation on the very first day possible.  By that logic, we should have gone on Saturday, but we absolutely needed to do laundry. And they predicted rain. And my legs ached from a bad fall in Kyoto the day before.

So we put the trip off until Sunday — and woke to rain.  One of my sources said the cemetery would be closed in bad weather, but I hoped a gentle rain wouldn’t be considered bad enough.

I lost that gamble.

All that way to Japan, then the walk to the station in Tokyo, then the train ride to Yokohama, and the hike up the hill to the graveyard: only to find the cemetery paths blocked with chains.

I would have cried, but since none of the cemetery volunteers were in evidence, that wouldn’t have done me much good.  Instead, we visited the Tin Toy Museum nearby, which was highly entertaining, and went to a waffle restaurant for lunch.

The cemetery never opened, so we shot what photos we could over the fence.

I really like the photo above, since it shows the variety of monuments in the cemetery.  There’s the old mossy green tablet stone, more modern granite monuments (several of which look like books), and the tall upright Japanese square column.  I suspect the Westerners received full-body burials with a service performed by a Christian or Jewish authority, while the Japanese were cremated and their ashes interred beneath their monuments by Buddhist priests.

Maybe contrast isn’t the word I want so much as spectrum.  I love the cross-cultural spectrum of the Americans, English, Scots, French, Germans, Russians, and Japanese all lying together on the same hillside — and that only includes the languages I read on stones I could see from outside from the walls.

Despite the viciously hungry mosquitoes, the cemetery visit gave me a sense of peace.  The cemetery was an oasis away from the frenetic neighborhood where we were staying in Tokyo.  I’m disappointed I didn’t get to walk the paths, but without insect repellent, the trip would have been curtailed anyway.

I’ll go back some day — on the first possible day of my trip — but I’ll go back armed with bug spray.

***

This post was inspired by the WordPress Photo Challenge of the Week: http://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_photo_challenge/contrasts/

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Spring

Posted on May 5, 2014 | 7 comments

Letty Lent’s gravestone at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Tarrytown, NY

In the spring of 2002, about this time of year, I took one of the best vacations of my life.  My husband Mason and I flew into Boston and rented a car, then we proceeded to visit 17 cemeteries in the next 11 days.  It was heavenly.

Boston was humid and bright.  We rested in the Central Burying Ground in the afternoon, watching squirrels chase each other with sticks.  The next day, on our way out of town, we stopped by Forest Hills Cemetery, where the forsythia bloomed in thickets.  Spring was coming, but it was early yet.

The Aylsworth family monument

The Aylsworth family monument

From Boston we drove to Providence.  One of the hills in Swan Point Cemetery burned with bright yellow daffodils. In addition, Swan Point had the most magnificent flowering trees I’ve ever seen.  To this day, I’ve seen nothing to compare with this weeping cherry.

Some cemeteries we visited were fascinating, if not especially pretty.  Gettysburg’s Soldiers National Cemetery seemed too macho to trouble itself with celebrating the season and breaking out in flowers.

That was not the case in Sleepy Hollow.  The perfumed air chimed with the songs of birds.  The river chattered to itself nearby, surrounded by trees bursting with vivid green leaves.  Spring made everything glad to be alive, especially me.

While I grew up in Michigan, spring felt like something you earned.  After the long gray winter, you pined for spring.  You celebrated every warm day, even if there were still snowdrifts in the shadows of the hills.  Every narcissus shoot and tulip stalk was worthy of celebration.  Spring was glorious, ephemeral, juicy and sweet.

In San Francisco, spring can be subtle.  In a normal year, the hills green up with every rainstorm.  The trees bloom in waves: the cherries, then the plums, then the apples.  Often a hard rain knocks the petals to the sidewalks before the beauty peaks.  The magnolias open their spectacular flowers, followed by the rhododendrons, the flowers singe in the sunshine — and then the show is over for another year.  The hills turn brown, the fog rolls in, and summer is long and cold.

My East Coast trip gave me almost two weeks of nothing but graveyards in springtime in the company of my husband.  Every moment was piquant and delicious and I savored them like you do the season’s first strawberries, bursting with sweetness and spring.

Here’s the challenge that started me off: Spring.

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Letters

Posted on April 29, 2014 | 3 comments
Broken headstone in the Alamo Cemetery, Danville, California

Broken headstone in the Alamo Cemetery, Danville, California

This headstone caught my eye on Saturday as I toured the Alamo Cemetery.

Last week was a rough one, as I dealt with the collapse of my cat Morpheus’s health.  At 17 months old, he’d developed crystals in his bladder — after suffering all his young life with an immune disease that had attacked his teeth in February.  I left the Mare Island Cemetery a week ago Saturday to take him in for emergency surgery.  By Friday morning, he’d relapsed.

In the midst of Friday morning’s rainstorm, I took Morpheus to the SPCA and asked them to take him back.  After a year and a half of emergency vet visits, tiny bags of expensive cat food, and more medicine than I take as a grown woman, I had to face that I could no longer care for him.  I’d lost hope in February that he would ever be well.  Last week, I finally grasped that I was no longer even able to make him comfortable.

Still, the SPCA counselor said that none of his health issues appeared to be life-threatening.  That was the breaking point for me:  if it had been a matter of caring for him through his final illness, I might have been able to stick it out.  This roller-coaster could go on for years.

I’m a travel writer. I have a full schedule of travel ahead of me this summer.  I couldn’t board Morpheus, because his fractured immune system couldn’t handle the vaccines he’d need.  When I went to DC earlier this month, I enlisted a family member to care for him, but after the bladder trouble, he would need closer monitoring.  I’d need to find him a live-in nurse.

I cried through the intake paperwork at the SPCA.  I cried through saying goodbye to him in the SPCA hospital.  I had to sign something saying that I understood that they might have to euthanize him, if he’s not adoptable.  I will never know, though.  My part of Morpheus’s story is over.

When my last cat died at the ripe old age of 17, I had him cremated.  I keep his ashes in a silver sugar bowl on my dresser.  I think I understand now how important it is to have a gravestone or a niche or a sugar bowl on which to focus your grief.  I have nothing of Morpheus left but his favorite toys — and the foolish hope that someone, somewhere, with medical skills and a large disposable income is looking for a project cat to love.

*

This was inspired by this week’s photo challenge: http://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_photo_challenge/letters/

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Abandoned

Posted on March 3, 2014 | 13 comments

Bodie-grave001

I had wanted to go to Bodie ever since I first heard of the place.  It’s a Gold Rush ghost town that lingered into the modern era, a place of gambling halls and fancy girls, murders in the street and four graveyards — a place that lived long enough that it has gas pumps and some electric wires, but is so inaccessible and isolated that people walked away, leaving everything behind.

Even with modern transportation, Bodie is a long ways away.  We left San Francisco early in the morning, drove up and through Yosemite, and came down on the eastern side of the Sierras.  We’d waited to go until September, when the oppressive oven heat had died down somewhat but the passes hadn’t snowed closed yet.  Our campsite, near a little creek, was shaded by aspens turned to gold.  It had a water tap and a pit toilet.  We had the place all to ourselves.

We waited to make the rest of the drive into Bodie until morning, unwilling to face the washboard road until we were sure we’d have enough time to see everything.  The State Park Service oversees the ghost town now, making sure the old buildings don’t fall down.  There is much to see: roulette wheels and crystal chandeliers, striped cotton mattresses and coffins for sale.  The church. The rusted-out old cars.  The horse-drawn hearse.

I poked around the graveyards while my friend Samuel toured the old mine.  In its heyday, Bodie dug out $30 million in gold, $1 million in silver.  The stamping mills worked around the clock, crushing the quartz stone to extract the precious metals.  Bodie would have been loud then.  Now all I could hear was the wind.

Elizabeth my Wife

Elizabeth my Wife

I knew Bodie had been as wealthy as it was dangerous, but I was shocked to see how much remained in the graveyard.  There were plenty of graves marked only with boards, but there were also ornate metal fences, wrought or cast iron, shipped from back east or carted over the Sierras.  There were plenty of marble gravestones, too.  Those would have been heavy to drag over the mountains before paved roads were built and yet the survivors felt strongly that their griefs required permanent monuments, ones that stand decades after the town was abandoned.

Who was Elizabeth?  She had no last name on her marker.  Did she lie there alone or were her children with her?  Was her husband there, with no one to buy him a stone to remember his name?  Or had he loaded all he could on a mule or into a wagon, into his pickup or his car, and left her and all they’d shared behind?

Here was a love that left stone flowers to brighten her grave, but left no last name to keep her memory alive.

I wondered if she knew all the songs the wind could sing.  Did she sing them to herself when the wind fell silent?  Did those left behind in the graveyards keep each other company at the end of the day, when the tourists left and the rangers locked up and the fat full moon rose over the desert?

I was glad when Samuel returned from his tour, when it was time to get back in our car and head back to our campsite.  We may have been alone there, but it didn’t seem as lonely as Bodie.

***

Bodie’s Wards Cemetery was a cemetery of the week.  It also appears in Wish You Were Here, the book of my cemetery adventure essays.

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