Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, October 31, 1995 TAG: 9510310066
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It is where I go, not to remember a loved one from the past, but to think about the present.
It's two months ago. I'm there, running my usual route, writing a sympathy card in my head for a friend whose brother has just died. I can't think of any real words of comfort, but rounding the curve at the west end I spot this perfect epitaph:
God gives us love, something to love he lends us.
It's 12 years ago. My father has just died, and my mother, I notice, develops a strange affinity for graveyards. Every day she leaves early for her job 50 miles away - so she can stop at the small country cemeteries along the way.
There are no relatives buried in them; my father is buried 30-some miles away - in the other direction. I begin to worry about her new fascination. I ask her why she wants to engage in something that seems so morbid and weird.
``I just like looking at the dates, comparing head stones,'' she tells me. ``You know, I like just wandering around.''
Some people pray or meditate. Others like to wander through places where people don't talk back.
It begins to make wonderful sense.
It's Monday of last week. I decide to dig a little deeper into the community of wanderers that frequent my favorite cemetery. I talk to Erv West, the man who digs graves at Evergreen Burial Park.
West, a ruddy-faced man with a copper beard, used to spend his days teaching English and history. Today, he has just used a backhoe to dig a five-foot-deep rectangle for casket No. 19,623 - one of the six graves he'll dig this week.
Soon, the burial service will begin and he'll leave, returning after the family is gone. Then, within an hour, the vault will be lowered, the tent broken down and the grave filled. A week later, Erv will remove the flowers from the grave.
He prefers the quiet rhythm of tending graves to teaching Tolstoy. ``It's much more peaceful,'' he says.
While West cleans out the backhoe, Everett Reed steadies his weed-whacker, trimming the grass around the season's last fading petunias. Squirrels flitter nearby - objects of desire for the three hawk families that nest in Evergreen's lofty old trees.
``You don't see them much, but you hear them; they have a real unusual call,'' Everett says of the city hawks. ``Sometimes the crows get in here and chase after them.''
In his windshield-shattered green Jeep, Reed drives me to his favorite gravestone, the monument for C.A. Jacobson (July 18, 1887 - Jan. 30, 1918). The granite marker is topped with a stone sculpture of N&W engine No. 1461.
``He was the engineer,'' Everett says. ``I looked the 1461 up in my train ledger book at home, and it's exactly the same'' as the stone replica.
``I don't think he ever married,'' he adds, pointing to Jacobson's six-person plot, which is empty except for the single grave.
Everett shows me the stones of some founding-family Roanokers: the Fishburns, Boxleys and Fralins. I wander around, choosing my favorite old-fashioned first names: Belle, Bertrum, Eustis and Mittie.
I notice a headstone in the shape of a birdbath, filled with the drink of a recent rain. It says: Your heavenly father feedeth them. Matt. VI - 26.''
The workers tell me the sweet routine of a man - a husband, a father - who comes to the cemetery every morning at 8, and again every afternoon at 4:30. He walks from his nearby house to remember his wife, who died a few years ago, and his daughter, who was struck down by a car less than two months later.
They also tell me of retired Air Force Cpl. Russell Peyton, a cemetery neighbor who has walked its meandering roads - daily, doctor's orders - since he had a heart attack in 1982. Reed describes him as ``Gen. Eisenhower in a baseball cap.''
``There's no traffic and the hills are just right,'' Peyton says. ``If you want a steep hill to walk, you've got it. ... And if you don't want any hills at all, you can stay on flat land.''
Peyton, 80, says the cemetery helps him ``to forget all my other thoughts.'' He even likes to inspect his own future plot on the south end, next to his wife's ancestors.
``When my grandson was 3, we were walking over there and he asked me where all the people were,'' Peyton remembers. ``And that kinda stumped me; I didn't know.''
Inside the Evergreen office, black-and-white photos of men pushing hand-powered landmowers tell the story of the cemetery's early days, when part of the mostly vacant cemetery was used for growing potatoes. When the Raleigh Court cemetery was created in 1916, Roanokers had to ride the street car to get here ``from town.''
``I've heard everything,'' says Don Wilson, general manager for the past 13 years. ``People tell me it was an orchard at one time, a racetrack. But our neighbor John Martin said it was always pastureland, that he remembered setting rabbit traps here as a kid.'' Martin died a few weeks ago - and was buried at Evergreen, near the spot of his old traps.
Wilson shows me the foot marker for Robert Leonard Little, the man who designed the Mill Mountain Star. It's engraved with a likeness of the star-topped mountain - ``his daughter was real proud of that,'' he recalls.
``I'll be buried right up there on top of the hill.'' Wilson points to the corner near Wasena Elementary where, every Memorial Day, his wife and children join him for a picnic lunch. It's an annual family tradition to eat on the site of their future graves.
Like my mom, the Wilsons know that cemeteries aren't just for the dead.
They're where you go to remember and recharge.
And, when you need to, just to wander.
by CNB