Memory is water in a stainless steel bowl, we cannot carry it long without spilling. We slosh along, from place to place, from face to face, clumsily trying to refill it with fresh epiphanies and clear-cold declinations for our lives. We'll always find places to quench our thirst. We will wildly drink and spill until our deaths. We only hope our memory will trickle into another's bowl, mixing memories for some sort of advice on the things to come.
* * *
In Seldovia, mostly during the summer months, I developed a habit of frequenting the graveyard. The walk to the graveyard from my house, atop the hill with the Orthodox Church, is about a mile. The highly compact dirt and gravel road arches past Susan B. English School with its shabby baseball field. At the far end, a craggy rock face abruptly juts-out, ceasing the grassy field. Years ago someone climbed up its crumbling face and spray-painted a white bullseye. I've never seen anyone hit it yet, though plenty have claimed they have. No witnesses, of course, can attest to these assertions.
After passing the school, a gentle hill eases down towards Seldovia's slough. During the late summer months this constantly whirling, rising and falling salt water river teems with Sockeye, Chum, and Humpies. Each of them look for their birth places so they can spawn, die and rot in the fading autumn light.
I used to wade barefoot in one of the fresh water creeks that feeds the slough. The salmon runs were so thick I could literally bend over and toss them onto the nearby embankment. Pick and choose. Most of their bodies, by that time, were soft and darkly watermarked from their fresh water exposer. After a lifetime spent swimming Alaska's gyre, it's back home, where they waver weakly, letting their flesh rot slowly, until they simply succumb to the currents they fought so fiercely. Most become food for the greedy seagulls, capitalizing crows, and curious ravens. Each are usually an arm's length away, cackling all the while. I wonder what manner of curses their cacophony of squawks and screeches contained for my invasion of their kitchen table. I'll never know, but I am positive they were not pleasant.
The rushing slough continually cuts away at the road's sloping pile of dirt and gravel. Water is unceasingly at the work of sculpting. We model our societies on its work ethic. Gnarled little alders and luscious clumps of wild Indian celery cling to the slumping embankment. They live on the brink of being cast into salty water - a certain death.
I fancy that the wild celery is pretty pissed about this arrangement. In stories passed down among Native cultures, not my own, wild celery could actually run and walk until it insulted the creator Raven, who banished it to immobility. Now herbivores and omnivores of every persuasion break and nibble at its juicy shoots. All the while, wild celery curses itself for the idiocy of insulting the creator.
Just past the snaking slough slithering by Seldovia's little gravel landing strip, a rounded ridge, crowded with mountain ash, salmon berry thickets, thriving alders, and sharp pinnacles of Sitka spruce and western hemlock, takes shape. Modernity has cursed it with a menial namesake - TV Tower hill. I imagine that this series of rolling hills that forms the bridge to summit Graduation peak in the far off distance, once boasted a more worthy name. The lively ridge line probably scoffs at being named after the device that imprisons so many. Few are left to traipse through its wooded playground.
It was on one of this ridge's psychotically steep hills (or what I thought was steep), dubbed suicide hill, that a friend of mine broke his leg in a high-speed rubber-inner-tube accident. On his birthday no less. His name is Chance. Fate dealt him a crappy card that day. We laugh at the irony.
I went back to the site of the fateful crash recently, to relish in nostalgic childhood memories. But the magic just wasn't there. For some reason suicide hill, once so imposing, had grown incredibly small and almost demure in its gentleness. I wished for a youthful imagination again, when the world was wild and infinite. When places were more than passive matter, but living breathing webs of possibilities.
Near Seldovia's cemetery, with its chicken wire fence, squats what used to be a home. Today, most would consider it a one room dilapidated shack. Our oversized prefabricated homes teach us this. I once conceived of this dwelling as a place where souls, waiting to go to heaven, would slumber. They ensured that the nearby plot of graves was a place of mourning and prayer. Twice I had worked up the courage to mount its rotting steps and place my hand on its rusty iron door handle. The creaking of my shifting weight always put my heart into a madding beat, ricocheting off my chest cavity.
Only once did I force open the rotting door. Little piles of dead grass and unknown fuzz balls littered the floor – nomadic heaps built by shrews. The small dirty window casted an eerie gray on rusting coffee cans and metal implements. Its musty overtones and crumbling walls were foreboding. By entering, I knew I would either be killed instantly or violate the most holy of holies. I never wanted to find out which. Closing the door slowly and shutting it firmly, I leapt back onto the roadside, my body full of electricity, hoping I didn't wake anyone.
I imagine now that this simple home housed a character much like Shakespeare's gravedigger. Always smirking at peoples' aversion to death and poking fun at the shallowness in which we live. Sadly he's left. He recognized the futility in trying to reveal our blindness, to uncover the petty affair we are all caught up in. I wonder, who was his Hamlet? And, where can I find this man for a talk? I fear his silence.
* * *
It wasn't until recently that I found the wisdom of Epicurus's philosophy, and I wish I would have known about it much earlier to save me the confusion. While the crux of Epicurinism focuses on distinguishing good and bad by looking towards pleasure and pain as the ultimate judge (which in latter years would be used by pleasure junkies to justify sexcapades and mass orgies - Epicurus would not likely have approved), his most famous of quotes passes on a kagger of wisdom.
"Thus, that which is the most awful of evils, death, is nothing to us, since when we exist death does not, and when there is death, we do not exist."
All we come to know is through our life and the memory of the lives that came before. There is no wisdom in death. Anyone dead that has managed to record the experience, hasn't figured out how to mail the manuscript to Scribners. Perhaps they will. I won't hold my breath. I didn't understand this during my visits to the graveyard those years ago, but on reflection, I had an inkling.
* * *
This fascination with death and Seldovia's graveyard was forged at a young age from the stones of dogma and the waters of spiritual beliefs. In the 4th century AD, a group of Christian Bishops gathered to write the Nicene Creed. It was a statement of faith written in hopes of unifying an already fractioning and growing Christian sect.
Passed down from those dead spiritual leaders whose names are lost to me, I grew up repeating and singing their convictions, which eventually became my own. Towards the end of the Nicene Creed, those forgotten Bishops ask us to recite: "I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come." Growing up, I envisioned this resurrection as something physical and inevitable. My dreams saw it and my waking thoughts were consumed and obsessed with its implications. Where is this line between life and death? Who has made it? What does each side have to teach us? Who's winning?
Raised in Seldovia and other rural Alaskan villages, elders and others ingrained the idea of a special and unbreakable spiritual connection between us and our dead ancestors. Their way of life and the land they occupied has somehow transcended time and invested something in us. In me. Their memories in today's modern society are fading shadows. Growing up, I physically forced this connection. I sought after it. I wanted to understand. To feel the ebb and flow of all the tides that catch us.
I would take the little black book of the liturgy, with all of its prayers and songs, and read aloud for the dead. I was awaiting the resurrection - waiting for these overgrown graves to break open and whisper the wisdom captured in death. Sitting below the largest Orthodox cross, I would mumble prayers, talk randomly of life's confusing bits - what it all means, where we are all supposed to be going, why I had to stand so long in church.
If the day was warm enough, I'd lay back. And dream.
These were fanciful dreams. Giant red salmon swam through the spruce trees on the edge of the cemetery. I dog paddled into the sky looking for a golden chain-link fence. St. Peter stood and the entrance to the heavenly garden with a checklist. I want to ask him something. Why blind skepticism? Where is the cocks crow and the complicated route from here to there?
On waking, taking in the blue hazy light of drowsiness, here in a place regulated for the dead, was a mess of life. Wild flowers of every kind - poppies, columbines, lupine, forget-me-nots - ferociously casting their colors to the sky, desperately trying to strangle out the beauty of the next. Bumbling bees, eagerly greeting the nectar of its sweetness. The green hopeful arrow heads of grass, poking through last year's long dead stems splayed in every direction from the winter's heavy snow. Resourceful salmon berry bushes sprout their early sticky leaves, cuddling up to the loose soil Christ's wooden cross has made in the ground.
Birds of every pecking; the sorrowful golden crowned sparrow whistling its tune of blues "Oh. Poor. Me." Cocky mag pies demanding treats, swooping from crucifix to head stone, gargling unfathomable demands. Worrisome dancing Dippers pause nearby, looking for water and food.
And there, surrounding the plot, wise and stately, Hemlock and Sitka spruce trees, steady in their evergreen growth, let their beards grow, tiresomely wavering in the breeze, avoiding this spring time chaos. They acknowledge the coming sunny days with short stubs of soft rich green needles. A gesture of piousness , as they slip on another yearly ring.
* * *
Where are the dead in this necropolis? Where are the solemn, respectable spirits, who ramble on about the wickedness of life and sweet, sweet death? The red tailed squirrel has nothing to say in this regard. He's busy darting around, hiding food and forgetting where he's put it. Green minuscule aphids and fattening caterpillars take no mind either. They mosey to their own tune, happy for a morsel. A delicate flower spider, stumbling around like a crab in nature's floral chalices, pays no mind to the epitaphs about dead mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. Their's is the curiosity and impulses of life. I could more easily learn about the animal kingdom's culinary arts, here at the graveyard, than the first thing about death.
It's dawned on me since that the nooks and crannies of the world always have a thing or two to say about history and life. The dead remain silent. It's the chaotic places, full of life and flight, that carry the memories of the dead. Our memories and metaphors are bound to the earth of which we will ultimately return.
Tarrying and dreaming with the dead is an act of life - not of death. The burial sites of the dead are living places. An anecdote for the cycle in which we all are encompassed - life, hunger, and song, from the rich fertilizer of rot for new spring flowers. To forge new life, ever evolving, out of the tatters of remembering. All is a tangle of frenzied growth and a constant march of dying, putting birds to flight and beetles scurrying for their lives. Of hunger and searching.
Someday I'll get back to Seldovia and ask the city council and village tribe if I can scrawl a message over the entrance to its graveyard – in much the same way that a sign hung welcoming guests to Epicurus's garden. I would only change one word. It would read:
“Stranger, you would do well to tarry here, for our greatest good is life.”
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