March 29, 2024

Land of the Dead

April 12, 2006
   There’s nothing like walking through a Northern Michigan graveyard to put you in a reflective mood.
   Here, you’ll find the history of the region written one life at a time on the headstones of those who took their last carriage ride many years ago.  
   The sense of kinship and connection isn’t as heartfelt in a big cemetery.  In Petoskey and Traverse City, you’ll find cities of the dead in the form of large cemeteries planted with the town fathers and mothers.  Today, chances are your local necropolis is haunted by goth teens playing paintball or some role-playing vampire game at night; its avenues tended with scrupulous care by day.  There’s order in the region’s big cemeteries, and a sense that life goes on.
   To get the true flavor of Northern Michigan’s past, you must visit the old boneyards far off the beaten track -- the small, country cemeteries where long-ago stories of pioneers and lost dreams are etched thin in crumbling marble.
   On South Manitou Island you’ll find a lonely graveyard eroded by time and the Lake Michigan wind at a dirt road crossroads.  Its sandy field is planted with farmers, sailors, fishermen and soldiers for whom the Civil War was still a vivid memory.  The same is true of the resting place alongside the Old Rectory on Beaver Island.  Talk about lost dreams and great visions turned upside down by time.  Who were these people?  As you walk among the stones, you can almost hear the clatter of the parties, poker games and square dances they held at their remote farmsteads, making a new life on a tiny island at what must have been the far end of the world at the time.  It still is, in a way.
   Who were they?  You can learn a little from the stones.
   Often, they were children who died before the age of five.  The old country cemeteries are filled with little ones who succumbed to influenza, diarrhea, diphtheria, measles, smallpox, polio and a lot of other childhood killers that we no longer think much about, thanks to vaccines and public health measures such as clean water.
   “Here lies the infant son of G. & B. Rice -- March 21, 1932.”  That’s an inscription on a headstone in Joyfield Cemetery in Benzie County.  Right next to it is the “infant daughter of G. & B. Rice -- April 27, 1927.”  And next to their kids is the marker of George and Bernice themselves, who apparently had no other children.  What a sense of loss they must have felt in their lives -- what a tragedy.
   Reading the stones, you realize how fragile life was back then and how many people died young, such as:  “Alice A., 19 years 9 mos. -- Daughter of A. Jaquays -- 1869.”
   You get a sense of what a woman’s place was from the tale of two anonymous graves which mark all that’s left of the wives of the Cornell brothers:
   “Wife of C. Cornell -- 1879-1910” and “Wife of S.N. Cornell -- 1855-1898.”  No first name.  Their husbands didn’t even see fit to put their wives’ names on the headstones.  As women, they were known for whose wife they were and not for who they were as individuals.  There’s a lot of that kind of thing in those old country cemeteries.
   Poignant are the graves of veterans.  Walking through Joyfield Cemetery, I was touched to see that someone had placed plastic flowers on the stones of men who died the same year I was born during the Korean War.  Flowers on the graves of those who fought in World Wars I & II, and even the Spanish-American War back in 1898.  Who took such care to remember Charles A. Smith, 1920-1984, who fought with the Air Force in Korea?  I imagine it must be members of VFW Post 7544, tending to veterans’ graves long after the final relatives have faded from memory.
   Do you wish to be remembered someday?  Would you care to have your name picked out one letter at at time by some idle stroller in a cemetery 100 years from now?  Then carve your letters deep in the stone, Ozymandias, because the legends on most of these old gravestones are as faded as the faces on ancient coins, the words rubbed smooth by the wind, rain and ice.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said--”Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand, 
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, 
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, 
The hand that mocked them, and the heart
that fed; 
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

               -- Ozymandias
               By Percy Bysshe Shelley 
 



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