Cemeteries

I belong to a minority of people who see cemeteries as parks for the living as well as the dead. Funny, my criteria for cemeteries and parks share one condition: a marked lack of people. Most of my excursions are indeed solo, and the less people I come across, the better.

My interest in cemeteries started during a exploring mission on the shores of Lake Geneva when I was knee high to a grasshopper (some contend I still am, but they have been made sorry for saying so). Circling the lake is a public path, unmarked other than where the grass has worn from use. At my young age I did not know this but followed the path as others had before me. Some of the homes on the lake are huge, looming and old, and I had just crossed onto the yard of one when I saw a small collection of gravestones nearby. Nothing sinister, just something that you don't see every day. Even in my young mind I understood that families sometimes buried their own, and that is what creeped me out.

Many years later, while traveling in the UP looking for waterfalls we came across the Cliff Mine Cemetery (Keweenaw Cty,MI). When we were there it was completely overgrown, and the aire it lent was one of loneliness;of history discarded, abandoned. This was on the heels of traveling through some of the poorest country I have ever seen and that is what shaped my perspective.