Tag Archives: 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: 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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Weekly Photo Challenge: Juxtaposition

Posted on January 26, 2014 | 5 comments
Broken bud

Broken bud

This week’s photo challenge is to show two things side by side that comment on each other.  I like the juxtaposition of the broken rosebud on the gravestone beside the lovely pink rosebush behind it.

Broken buds like this one are often found on the monuments to Victorian children.  It’s hard to imagine a more perfect illustration of a parent’s shock and sadness when faced with burying their child, the sense of the beauty and potential cut short.  I couldn’t imagine what that kind of loss would feel like until I had an irreplaceable bud of my own.

I took this photo on a blisteringly hot afternoon in Sacramento’s Old City Cemetery. The Heritage Rose Group of the Friends of the Cemetery carefully tend the antique roses.  The cemetery’s website has this wonderful quote on it: “Many of these antique roses were brought across to California in the holds of ships or carried in wagon trains by early pioneers… Because roses are propagated by taking a piece of the original to start a new plant, they are, in essence, the same plant.  Therefore, roses in a Mandarin’s garden in old China or Empress Josephine’s famous 18th-century French garden are now planted in Sacramento’s Historic Rose Garden” in the cemetery.

I love the idea of these immortal flowers blooming and fading and blooming again over the centuries, thriving atop the graves of people who are gone to bloom again in another garden.

***

My other posts about the Sacramento City Cemetery:

A lamb on another child’s grave

Do not bury me in the cold ground.

Interview with one of the tour guides.

Upcoming tours & garden events in the cemetery.

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Masterpiece

Posted on July 28, 2013 | 5 comments
Death and the Sculptor

Death and the Sculptor by Daniel Chester French

The thing that drew me first to cemeteries was the artwork.  From the six-foot-tall limestone tree trunk in the graveyard near my parents’ house to the angels in Highgate Cemetery, I loved to see the sculpture best of all.  It draws me out in all weather from drizzling rain to humid summer sun, in the icy January breezes and in the high desert glare.  I’m well-known in my household for begging to see “just one more” sculpture.

I’ve seen some amazing things in my travels:

Angel of Grief001The original Angel of Grief by William Wetmore Story (in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery) is small, compared to the copy at Stanford University, but it may be even more lovely for being human-sized.  The “Angel of Grief Weeping over the Altar of Life,” Story’s last work, was made to mark the grave of his wife Emelyn in 1895.  Before Story’s sculpture, angels were always joyful emissaries, secure in the knowledge of Heaven to come for their charges.  A grieving angel, overcome by loss, struck a chord that echoes in cemeteries across the world.

Detail of Crack the Whip

Detail of Crack the Whip

Then again, Italian cemeteries are full of one-of-a-kind artwork.  It’s rarer to see in Midwestern cemeteries, but one of the most striking sculptures I’ve ever seen is in Sunset Hills Cemetery in Flint, Michigan. “Crack the Whip” is a collection of eight interconnected children running in a semi-circle. Sculpted by J. Seward Johnson, “Crack the Whip” is comprised of an Asian girl, two African American kids, a Native American, and four white kids, each distinct and individual. They are dressed in cleats and baseball shorts, a headband and a basketball jersey, a pinafore. The Asian girl has lost her Birkenstock sandal, which lies in the grass nearby.

The piece that blows everything else away for me is Forest Hills Cemetery‘s “Death and the Sculptor” by Daniel Chester French, the image that opened this post. Death is a stern-faced matron dressed in Grecian robes and a large-cowled cloak. She has wings, but doesn’t carry a scythe or hourglass. She merely reaches her shapely arm out to touch the sculptor’s chisel.

More than any other artwork I’ve seen, this one speaks directly to me.  I’ve always had a personal sense of how limited my time here is, how much work I have to do before I die.  Even though I am surrounded by a friendly community of other writers, I know I am the only person who can tell the stories I’ve felt called to tell.  I dread to be stopped in the middle of my masterpiece, as French’s sculptor was.

Father Time at Cypress Lawn

Father Time at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park, Colma

The clock is ticking, as Father Time reminds us. Time flies and no one knows the day or the hour.

Time to get busy.

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Color

Posted on April 10, 2013 | 3 comments
St. Mary's Cemetery, Oakland, California

St. Mary’s Cemetery, Oakland, California

Tonight is my mom’s last night in San Francisco, so I’m going to hold off on writing this week’s Cemetery of the Week until tomorrow.  I have a plan, but it requires research to do it justice.

Instead, I offer this photo, taken last January, while I roamed around Oakland, California with my friend Dorian.  The picture serves as my desktop background.  I love it because it combines the complicated blue of the sky with many shades of green and the various colors of stone.

Of all the elements in a graveyard, I’d say the colors are my favorite.  There is something so restful about the combination of sky and foliage, whether it’s the deep verdant lawns in Michigan or the golden meadows of the California coast beneath the spectrum of white that makes up clouds or the unbroken cerulean of sky that stretches from horizon to horizon.  Sky blue is my favorite color, but emerald green is a very close second.

Of course, I love this photo because it captures the steepness of St. Mary’s Cemetery and the crazy lean of the old stones.  It’s not often that I can sum a cemetery up in one photograph, but this one does a good job of capturing St. Mary’s, which lies beside the wealthier and better known Mountain View Cemetery at the end of Piedmont Avenue.

Some cemeteries don’t need their own Cemetery of the Week to be enjoyable.  This one is lovely and worth a visit, if only to absorb the colors of sun and sky and stone.

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