“For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be earthquakes in divers places, and there shall be famines and troubles: these are the beginnings of sorrows.” Mark 13:8
March 27, 1964 - Good Friday - "the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake...And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose." Matthew 27:52
When the earth shook on the feast day of Christ's Resurrection, the rocky coast of the Kenai Peninsula and Prince William Sound were cast into the sea - dropping 3 to 6 feet. In Seldovia, Alaska, towards the southern tip of the Kenai Peninsula, notorious for its white washed boarded walk along the shore, most was drowned. Resident shops and homes were flooded. In time, people rebuilt, new homes erected, white washed boardwalks reestablished - memories of the rumbling faded into history as a quint suggestion of people's hardiness and the unfathomable courses that nature decides to take. In all, history is a type of forgetting, a death which cannot be resurrected.
My father recalled that he was playing on the beach that day around 5:30 PM. He'd shoved a stick into the beach gravel to erect as part of some child's imaginative theater. Almost directly after planting the monument to imagination, the ground awoke rocking and rolling violently, hitting 9.2 on the Richter scale. He would always remember that day, as the one in which he started the 1964 earthquake. Out of fear and panic, my father removed the stick from the ground and quickly covered up the hole. Still. The earth shook. He ran home screaming and crying, trying to explain to his grandmother that he didn't mean to make the land so mad.
In the mist and aftermath of all that abrupt chaos, I imagine that she just laughed and laughed. The joke was lost on my father.
In my own childhood fancy I would visit Seldovia's graveyard nearly every week during the summer months. Wild flowers of every kind grow ferociously in the unkempt lot. Orthodox Crucifixes are over run with thick grass and sticky prickly balled plants with little yellow flowers - beguiling the annoyance of their damned prickly balls. Animals and plants, it seems, will do anything to procreate.
In the afternoon heat, the air radiated off the ground muggy and moist. It hung placid and lazy with the unmoving dead. The buzzing of bees, bumbling along from forget-me-nots, to poppies, to dandelions, to wild roses was constant those summer days. They drowned out any voices that might be heard. That I was trying to hear.
Chickadees and birds of every persuasion ambled about through the overgrown lively dead plot. A ruby crowned kinglet could always be heard in its self pity, ringing out softly "oh. Poor. Me." A friend of mine, years later, once crassly remarked that; "No. No. You got it all wrong. What they are actually saying is 'Oh. Fuck. Me.'" I would whistle in response, never quite getting the right pitch. Red breasted Robbins, hopping cautiously, peck around for seeds and beetles. A cocky Mag Pie screeches, perched atop a cross, waiting for the mother load of munchies. I read somewhere that Mag Pies on Monday's are the devils signature - I think they are just hungry brats, like any child late for lunch and a nap. They just never grow out of it. Indeed, some kids don't either.
I was waiting for the resurrection of the dead. Growing up, I would repeat that phrase again and again - "I believe in one holy Catholic and apostolic Church. I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins. I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come." Elders and others spoke of the deep connection with our shared ancestry. That their stories, lives, and memories were, are, critical to the continuation of culture and a good life.
In childhood, I envisioned this connection physically. I would take the little black book of the liturgy, with all of its prayers and songs, and read aloud for the dead. Waiting for their overgrown graves to either break open or 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 slump over and dream.
Fancies of giant red salmon swimming through the spruce trees as I dog paddled into the sky looking for a golden chain link fence and St. Peter with a check list. I want to ask him something. Why blind skepticism? Where is the cocks crow and the complicated route from here to there?
But all is fantastic rhetoric. All is illusion.
Sleeping and dreaming with the dead is an act of life - not of death. Like attempting or succeeding to kill ones self - it is a mode to get from one understanding to another. To get what we need or think we need. The burial sites of the dead is a living place. An anecdote for the cycle in which we all are encompassed - life, hunger, song, and the rich fertilizer of rot, to spring new flowers. To forge new life, an ever evolving one, out of the tatters of remembering. All is a tangle of frenzied growth and a constant march of dying. Their baritone drum beat echoes throughout the winds of life - putting birds to flight and beetles scurrying for their pathetic lives of aimless searching.
The connection is not physical. It is not even really fathomable. I've only come to this realization through morbid and idyllic reflection. When waking from dreams or vacant stares, lost in random contemplation, the world seemed anew. A hazy twilight blue, with the feeling of spinning and weightlessness. I'd stand up, gripping the big white cross, lightheaded - confused of the time and why I was even there, in the field of the dead.
Walking the mile home from the graveyard was an exercise in remembering what might have been said. What might have been communicated. But memory is water in a stainless steel bowl, we cannot carry it for long without spilling. So we fumble 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 will always find places to quench our thirst, but 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.
Getting home in the early evening, my mother would ask "how was your day? Where've you been?"
"Good. Just with some friends. Talking."
March 27, 1964 - Good Friday - "the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake...And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose." Matthew 27:52
When the earth shook on the feast day of Christ's Resurrection, the rocky coast of the Kenai Peninsula and Prince William Sound were cast into the sea - dropping 3 to 6 feet. In Seldovia, Alaska, towards the southern tip of the Kenai Peninsula, notorious for its white washed boarded walk along the shore, most was drowned. Resident shops and homes were flooded. In time, people rebuilt, new homes erected, white washed boardwalks reestablished - memories of the rumbling faded into history as a quint suggestion of people's hardiness and the unfathomable courses that nature decides to take. In all, history is a type of forgetting, a death which cannot be resurrected.
My father recalled that he was playing on the beach that day around 5:30 PM. He'd shoved a stick into the beach gravel to erect as part of some child's imaginative theater. Almost directly after planting the monument to imagination, the ground awoke rocking and rolling violently, hitting 9.2 on the Richter scale. He would always remember that day, as the one in which he started the 1964 earthquake. Out of fear and panic, my father removed the stick from the ground and quickly covered up the hole. Still. The earth shook. He ran home screaming and crying, trying to explain to his grandmother that he didn't mean to make the land so mad.
In the mist and aftermath of all that abrupt chaos, I imagine that she just laughed and laughed. The joke was lost on my father.
In my own childhood fancy I would visit Seldovia's graveyard nearly every week during the summer months. Wild flowers of every kind grow ferociously in the unkempt lot. Orthodox Crucifixes are over run with thick grass and sticky prickly balled plants with little yellow flowers - beguiling the annoyance of their damned prickly balls. Animals and plants, it seems, will do anything to procreate.
In the afternoon heat, the air radiated off the ground muggy and moist. It hung placid and lazy with the unmoving dead. The buzzing of bees, bumbling along from forget-me-nots, to poppies, to dandelions, to wild roses was constant those summer days. They drowned out any voices that might be heard. That I was trying to hear.
Chickadees and birds of every persuasion ambled about through the overgrown lively dead plot. A ruby crowned kinglet could always be heard in its self pity, ringing out softly "oh. Poor. Me." A friend of mine, years later, once crassly remarked that; "No. No. You got it all wrong. What they are actually saying is 'Oh. Fuck. Me.'" I would whistle in response, never quite getting the right pitch. Red breasted Robbins, hopping cautiously, peck around for seeds and beetles. A cocky Mag Pie screeches, perched atop a cross, waiting for the mother load of munchies. I read somewhere that Mag Pies on Monday's are the devils signature - I think they are just hungry brats, like any child late for lunch and a nap. They just never grow out of it. Indeed, some kids don't either.
I was waiting for the resurrection of the dead. Growing up, I would repeat that phrase again and again - "I believe in one holy Catholic and apostolic Church. I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins. I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come." Elders and others spoke of the deep connection with our shared ancestry. That their stories, lives, and memories were, are, critical to the continuation of culture and a good life.
In childhood, I envisioned this connection physically. I would take the little black book of the liturgy, with all of its prayers and songs, and read aloud for the dead. Waiting for their overgrown graves to either break open or 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 slump over and dream.
Fancies of giant red salmon swimming through the spruce trees as I dog paddled into the sky looking for a golden chain link fence and St. Peter with a check list. I want to ask him something. Why blind skepticism? Where is the cocks crow and the complicated route from here to there?
But all is fantastic rhetoric. All is illusion.
Sleeping and dreaming with the dead is an act of life - not of death. Like attempting or succeeding to kill ones self - it is a mode to get from one understanding to another. To get what we need or think we need. The burial sites of the dead is a living place. An anecdote for the cycle in which we all are encompassed - life, hunger, song, and the rich fertilizer of rot, to spring new flowers. To forge new life, an ever evolving one, out of the tatters of remembering. All is a tangle of frenzied growth and a constant march of dying. Their baritone drum beat echoes throughout the winds of life - putting birds to flight and beetles scurrying for their pathetic lives of aimless searching.
The connection is not physical. It is not even really fathomable. I've only come to this realization through morbid and idyllic reflection. When waking from dreams or vacant stares, lost in random contemplation, the world seemed anew. A hazy twilight blue, with the feeling of spinning and weightlessness. I'd stand up, gripping the big white cross, lightheaded - confused of the time and why I was even there, in the field of the dead.
Walking the mile home from the graveyard was an exercise in remembering what might have been said. What might have been communicated. But memory is water in a stainless steel bowl, we cannot carry it for long without spilling. So we fumble 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 will always find places to quench our thirst, but 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.
Getting home in the early evening, my mother would ask "how was your day? Where've you been?"
"Good. Just with some friends. Talking."
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