Transcript
Hi, I'm Dan Slone.
This is Bits & Peaces, coming to you from Dan's Tiki Bar. And this is part two of a two-part series, on thinking about cemeteries. Part one ended up kind of being at A and B because it got a little too long.
We left off in Ireland, where Martha and I were staying at a castle. One day, I wandered off and found this cemetery on the grounds of the castle. It's a pet cemetery. Non-human animals are buried here - ponies, bulls, cows, favorite dogs. And it's interesting that through the course of this pretty old cemetery, you find that people had a lot of the same sentiments toward their animals that they do today. Toward the front, there's a gravestone for a cow, Eugenie, who died in 1967. She had 17 calves and gave over 100,000 gallons of milk. One of my favorite tombstones though is this one of Sting, who died in 1912 - Faithful Beyond Human Fidelity.
Those of you who listened to my stories about living on the farm know that, while we were on the farm, we learned how to bury ponies and horses. When anything died on the farm, we pretty much buried it, but that wasn't always the way things had been handled on the farm. When Martha and I first bought the farm, we were walking in the woods and found all of these skeletons of cows. And we wondered why, why were there these skeletons of cows all piled up in the woods? And so, we called, Jim, the former owner and he told us that he'd had an entire herd that was out in a lightning storm and a thunderstorm and had been hit by lightning. He didn't want to spend the money to bury them. So, he dragged them off in the woods - sky burial, very traditional way.
When we moved to the suburbs, so we moved from 43 acres to about a quarter of an acre, and my daughter’s had gotten to an age where they needed more elaborate funerals for creatures that died. The nature of our funerals changed dramatically, and we would bury birds and fish and a cat, carefully laying them on a towel and putting them in Tupperware. The last thing that we buried on that particular lot was a collie. It was a very big collie. I dug four feet down and dug a hole that was about four feet by four feet. And Martha and I have often wondered what would happen over time when the subsequent owners of this suburban lot began digging in their backyard and found these bones and found Tupperware containers, and we very much believe those containers will be there 100 years from now. The contents may not be as recognizable as it was when we put it in the ground, but we think it'll probably be an odd sight for a subsequent owner.
Humans have also had more elegant approaches to the end of life than I've been exploring in these previous cemeteries. The pyramids of Egypt, the churches of Italy, the Taj Mahal, which the emperor built to house the remains of his favorite wife, as well as his own. In 2007, the Taj Mahal was declared one of the new Seven Wonders of the World. They actually declared an honorable mention as well, so they declared eight wonders. And amongst the other wonders was the Giza Pyramids, which were the burial chambers of royalty; The Great Wall of China, which is said to have entombed a large number of the workers on it; and Petra, which includes tombs and a king’s mausoleum. So, of the eight Wonders of the World, half of them involve some kind of burial.
The US has elegant cemeteries as well and beautiful burial monuments. They aren't necessarily the most fun. We've done late night ghost tours in Charleston. We've done the historic celebrity tours in Boston’s cemeteries, and we've done the queen of cemetery tours in New Orleans. The New Orleans Cemetery embodies the essence of New Orleans, both beautiful and decaying simultaneously. It's made more colorful by being the resting place of voodoo royalty. Crypts in New Orleans are privately owned. And the way I'm told they work is, a body is interred and about a year goes by before they move that off the shelf that it's sitting on, let it fall down with the other bones that are there in the crypt and can put another body in there. Families have to pay for the maintenance of these crypts year after year. And if a family runs out of money or abandons paying for the crypt or moves away, the crypt can be sold to somebody else. And there's some controversy and sometimes lawsuits that are involved in those sales. The new owner has the right to erase all the names of the families that were buried there before. It's considered bad etiquette, but it's done periodically.
New Orleans was not my first encounter with voodoo in a cemetery. That was in Guyana. I'd gone to Guyana with a partner of mine. My partner's grandfather was buried there. His grandfather had been a gold miner, done pretty well, but then spent it and became a diamond miner in Guyana. John and I went back into the jungle. Our boat driver, and this was this little boat, very narrow with bags of rice piled up in the front and two great big Mercury outboard motors on it. Our boat driver called himself Marquis the Bushman, and he was indigenous to the tribes there in the center of Guyana.
And we went up the river to a town called Bartica. Bartica was a town that was designed for receiving the miners when they’d come down from the mines and sell them whatever they wanted. So, there were prostitutes and drugs and alcohol, whatever you wanted, you could get in Bartica. So John and I get off the boat. Marquis won't even set foot in Bartica. He says he has business up the river and he won't even stop. We just jump off the boat. We’re there and it's quickly apparent that we are going to be carved up and sold for parts. We go over to the police station because John says he thinks that that's where they're most likely to have a ledger of the people who are buried in the local cemetery. And the police immediately suspect us of being drug dealers come to town, and they quiz John, and they keep asking him questions until they discover that John is Guyanese. His mother was from Guyana, and so then all of a sudden, we are welcome, like returned children, and they assign a sergeant to escort us through the town to the cemetery, so we'll be safe.
We go to the cemetery, and the sergeant, who was a very nice man wearing a t-shirt with a great big marijuana leaf on it - I wasn’t quite sure how that happened - but okay. And we’re at the cemetery, John's walking around looking at the graves for a little while, and the very nice sergeant let’s him do that for a while before he asks him gently “Was your grandfather a wealthy man?” And John said, “He had been when he’d struck gold in Alaska, but he'd spent it and so, no, by the time he was in Guyana, he was not a wealthy man,” and the police officer nodded and said, “Well, then he would have been buried in the paupers’ cemetery and that's over there. And you only got a wooden cross when you were buried in the paupers’ cemetery. And that cross would rot within a couple of months here at the edge of the jungle. John goes over to that part of the cemetery to look around, even though he's fairly confident he's not going to find anything.
While he's walking over there, I look at this tomb, this above-ground tomb that's next to me, and the end of it has been broken open. And there's a shoe, an obviously worn shoe lying there at the edge of the tomb and the police sergeant sees me looking at it and he says, “Yes, voodoo. They steal the bodies here.” John finally gives up and we're leaving, and the police officer starts telling us how wonderful it would be for us to bring our families back to Bartica and to bring them for two weeks of tourist holiday. And that was one of the many times in life when my tongue got a little ahead of my mind and I'd been thinking about, I wonder where the crocodiles are around here. So, I asked him “Are there crocodiles in the river?” and he got a look on his face like I was perhaps intentionally stepping on his tourist pitch, and he says, “Yes, we have crocodiles in the river and caimans, and we have bull sharks that swim up the river. And we have giant anaconda that will pull you beneath the water and squeeze the life out of you.” This is a man that, a few moments ago was telling me to bring my daughter's there to vacation.
Marquis came back now, without bags of rice in the front of his boat and we went back down the river. Now, the boat being very light, was zooming along the surface of the river and there were all of these logs in the river. And it started raining, raining so hard that even with glasses on, I couldn't keep my eyes open. John, whose mind went exactly where mine did on this, leans over and he says, “When the boat turns over, I've decided I'm going to stay here with the boat. There's enough traffic on the river that I'll get picked up. And me thinking about the crocodiles, bull sharks, and anaconda, I say “When the boat turns over, I'm going to walk on the surface of the water over into those mangrove roots and in sit in the mangrove roots until somebody picks me up.”
The New Orleans cemetery that we visited was called the Saint Louis Cemetery Number One, and it has a range of landmarks. It's a beautiful cemetery. There's also run-down cemetery. One of the newest tombs there is Nicolas Cage's nine-foot-tall pyramid mausoleum, which is the only one like that. There's nothing like that in the cemetery. It's completely out of keeping with the architecture of the surrounding mausoleum, and it had developed a custom. People would kiss it with red lipstick on, and so there are all of these lip prints on it. You might think that, because of that sort of jarring difference from the ones around it and this sort of history with the lip prints, that one might think a little less of Nicolas Cage, but they told us a story. The guide told us the story that actually left me kind of impressed with Nicolas Cage.
When they were building the pyramid, his workers, which were independent contractors, so Nicolas Cage wasn't responsible for what they did. His workers damaged a couple of the adjoining tombs. They were very poor, rundown, barely maintained, but they damaged them. And when they were contacted and asked to fix the damage, they declined. They said no. They denied any responsibility for it. Well, Cage apparently heard about this, found out about it, and he not only had the damage repaired that the workers had caused, but he restored the adjoining tomb so that they were actually very good looking again. And so, I thought that that was pretty interesting that Nicolas Cage was a good neighbor before he’d actually moved in.
They told us a contrasting story of Peter Fonda, whether apocryphal or not. When Fonda was there filming scenes in 1969’s Easy Rider, and the scenes in the cemetery were of them dropping acid and cavorting with a couple of prostitutes and then kind of freaking out there in the cemetery. And Fonda claims that they actually didn't take any LSD your while they were there but they were alleged to have damaged some of the statues. There's actually a head missing from one of the statues. And there's no actual evidence that they did that. But apparently, whether the damage was their responsibility or not, they certainly damaged the sensibilities of the Catholic Church, which owns that cemetery. And the Catholic Church subsequently banned people from coming into the graveyard without guides. And unless you're buried there, no one can come except your family to visit your there. But the film went on to iconic status and another story was left behind for a very famous cemetery.
My daughter asked me what my wishes were for my remains and I told her that I wanted to be cremated and used for kitty litter so that I could be useful one last time. She's a little nervous that I might be serious about this. She's asked her mom a couple of times to whether this is actually written in my will, but I think my favorite idea for burial in the US now is to be buried in a sort of organic shroud. The mushrooms thing is a little too creepy for me where they put mushrooms on you, and they eat you as they grow. But I’d like to be dropped in a simple grave and an oak tree planted over me, a small oak tree that will grow into a great oak and provide all of the food and shade that comes along with big oaks. I just think that would be great, and since I believe that it's unlikely that after my daughter's generation, anybody will actually remember me or care anything about coming to see my grave, you can put a little simple brass name plate on the tree that commemorated that I'm buried there. And after a generation, it just becomes a nice park to be in, another beautiful tree and that seems to me to be that, right now at least, probably the most environmental burial that one could achieve. I'm not really much for the sky burial type of vision, which may be more environmental, but I'll at least, you know, feed the bugs under the under the ground.
So many cemeteries become sterile places. They’re designed for easy mowing, so all of the tombstones are gone. They have these little vases for flowers that can be taken out so they can mow everything. And I think that would be like the worst curse for me is to be buried in such a place. I just think that we shouldn't turn these places into places that even the living don't want to visit. I like the old style of them being in the community and a part of the open space of the communities.
Thank you for joining me on this journey. I know it's a little bit of an unusual journey, but I love these pictures, and I love the way humans have tried to deal with our passing and what happens to our remains along the way, so I hope you at least found this journey interesting.
I'm Dan Slone.
This is Dan's Tiki Bar, and this is Bits & Peaces. Please come back for the next episode.
See you soon. Bye.
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