A view from the high hills

The only official national cemetery in Portland is down in the deepest Southeast, home of the New Copper Penny and every third you-pull-it junkyard in the metro region, so it was to there that I sailed down I-205 on a sunny morning to have the drink with the dead I share on this day.

 
Like every military cemetery I've every walked in Willamette is overwhelmingly tidy, dominated by the dress-right-dress-and-cover-down orderliness that we're taught in our training, as if by the sheer force of design and construction it can overwhelm the bizarre and random nature that has been what happens every time people have met each other with deadly force since the first homo erectus picked up a rock.

Willamette is perfect for that peaceful illusion. It sprawls high over the northern slope of Mount Scott, and the wooded hillside lifts you far above the workaday grime of the Southeast. 

Especially on a gorgeous early summer Monday the hillside really is perfect; shining green grass curving away with the tiny forest of red-white-and-blue flags (interrupted by the white service banner of the Coast Guard - for some reason the Coasties have sent their flag-planters out to set their dead apart from the uniform ranks and files of flat stones around them) disappearing into the dark green firs that shade the older subdivisions that surround the field, and beyond that the skyline of Portland under a bright blue sky.

Up on this shining hillside there's no fear. No hate, or boredom, no frustration, or anger, not even the exaltation of rage and the power of holding life and death in your hand that war can bring. None of the things that make war what it is, so great and terrible.

There's nothing but a sort of unreflecting quiet, where the hiss of tires and the sound of the wind that stirs the thousands of tiny flags are only passing thoughts.

I've parked at the bottom of the hill, and my knees are bitching at me for that as I climb between the rows of stone.

The remnants around me are almost all from my parents' generation.

That's the thought that follows me up that green, green hill; how many people buried here lived through the last Big War. No wonder we're still followed by their unquiet ghosts, even today. 

They're all "veterans", though. Survivors. The dates end in the Eighties and Nineties and Oughts, the time of the dying-off of the generation that saw so much war; Europe and the Pacific in World War II, Korea, Vietnam.

The war dead of our small wars are tucked away in Sections X, Y, and Z, lost amid the crowded memorials of the older generations. They seem to have more flowers and other mementos of living grief, raw and unassuaged. The families walking among them are younger, with only the occasional middle-aged father or mother to remind us that the tragedy of war is that, soldier or civilian, American or German or Iraqi or Vietnamese, fathers and mothers bury their sons and daughters.

Maybe it's the oppressive orderliness. Maybe it's just me; maybe I've lived too long with the weird not-war warring my country has waged that makes me feel so hollow and unmoored. I share a whiskey with my dead brothers, but I don't feel the connection I usually do to them this day. My pledge seems empty.

I trudge slowly back down the hill wondering what it means, this day, to my country, to me.

What does it mean? To die in a war that your own people don't understand, that to the vast crowd of them is no more than a noise just below the range of human hearing, a fire far away that is no more than a sullen glow on a dim horizon, utterly distant from the shining green hill and the blue skies dreaming over the peaceful city below?

 
I'm troubled, because I just don't know.

It's still a lovely morning all the way back up the freeway and then the busy side streets back to North Portland. There are lines at the Starbucks and wheelbarrows creaking through the rock and gravel store, and mattresses on sale, and the busy life of a big city goes on below that shining green hill and those tiny bright flags stirring softly on the warm breeze that carries me home.

As always on this day: this.

Down Among the Dead Men

So on Memorial Day I ended up in the old Civil War cemetery at Poplar Grove.

It's peaceful and pretty and very manicured, very much in the tradition of the more modern military cemeteries, a sort of pocket-Arlington.

Until you look at the rows of stones, and realize that way more than half of them aren't "headstones" at all but simply stone blocks with a number carved on them.

These were the remnants of soldiers that lacked any sort of identity; nothing marked their original grave - or, it it had, was gone by the time the graves registration parties reached it - and nothing was left, if there had been anything, of a tag or scrap of paper with a name on it.

There was just some bone, and scraps of cloth, and probably some less savory remnants, to be gathered up and put back in a hole with a stone with a number on it for the following hundred-plus years. An empty chair at a table, an empty peg on a wall where no coat was hung, an empty house to which the scraps of bone and cloth never returned.

Perhaps even more grim were the separate files where the men of the U.S. Colored Troops were buried, still put apart from the white soldiers, still separate and unequal in death as in life.

All in all a very unsettling sort of day, one that raised more spectres than laid them.

Cristilla Pioneer Cemetery

I passed by this little cemetery today; beautiful, deserted spot.



It's located on the side of a small hilltop east of what used to be a town called "Happy Valley", now a sprawl of subdivisions in northern Clackastan (as we urban hipsters refer to Clackamas County).



Here's a brief description of the place, from the Happy Valley historical page:

"From the very beginning the settlers needed a place to bury their dead, and such a place was found near the summit of a neighboring knoll now called "Scouters' Mountain." The first to be laid in it was an unknown man who had arrived in the same wagon train with the Deardorff's and who died in 1852, shortly after reaching the valley."

(My guess is that this guy's name wasn't "Covered Wagon Pioneer" and that Deardorffs or whoever planted him knew that name. But the original grave was probably marked by a wooden plank; that's the best they had at the time. By the time anyone bothered to lug a stone up this hill the old plank - and the poor bastard's name - had long since rotted. So there he is today, nameless forever.)

Anyway, to continue:

"John M. Deardorff donated five acres of his land on the mountain for the cemetery, only one acre of which has actually been used. This is where twenty-seven graves, mostly of the Deardorff's and their relatives, are found in a fenced off area surrounded by a wilderness of tall trees, and adorned by clumps of wild flowers in springtime. Most of the headstones have been restored; a few had to be replaced by newer ones. The first grave is that of the wagon pioneer, the last is that of Edith Guidi, 1932. Twelve of the graves are of children and infants. Prominent, old fashioned headstones mark the resting places of the original pioneers: Christian and Matilda Deardorff, John M. and Rachel Deardorff, John Bennet and Clara Deardorff. The cemetery has been closed since the burial of Edith Guidi. It can be reached by means of a trail leading down from the Boy Scout Lodge on top of the mountain and by another trail from the approach road to the lodge."

Mind you, the old lodge is long since gone, and the place has been taken over by the regional government to turn into a natural area and wild land. So James Deardorff and his kin and the nameless guy who barely made the end of the Oregon Trail can sleep quietly on the sunny hill where only my footsteps disturb the song of the juncos and the distant hum of the highway.