My Special Place:
Oak Hill was my "Fern Hill"
written for the
Endless Mountains Rural Places Rural Lives Exhibit
curated by Ruth Tonachel of 
The Northern Tier Cultural Alliance
http://www.ntculturalalliance.org/rural-places-rural-lives-exhibit/

My special place was my back yard: an ordinary kid's haven with swing set and teeter totter that just so happened to be topographically spooning with a necropolis: the Oak Hill Cemetery. The post-mortem residents of the cemetery were not merely my neighbors - they shared my very address. This was because my father (who could not tolerate working in factories) was the cemetery's caretaker. Thus, we got to live, rent-free, in the cemetery house. 

Contrary to what you may imagine, living here was far from morbid.

By day, "the cem" was a lush, verdant habitat for a myriad of LIVING creatures. Since it was situated at the edge of town, woods leading to a creek (Sugar Creek) edged up against the finely manicured grounds. Today, condominiums and the Rte. 220 bypass have "paved paradise," urbanizing the surrounding woodlands, but when I was a child, the cemetery was still a secret entryway to arboreal, pastoral and wetlands ecosystems - a portal to other worlds.

And, just like the trees in the Garden of Eden, my sister and I could explore them all – but one.

We enjoyed a Huck Finn like existence playing in the cemetery itself, the meadows, the woods and the creek where we observed a myriad of birds, deer, small mammals (including an abandoned baby woodchuck we found on the rocks by the creek whom we named "Rocky"), insects, amphibians and other flora and fauna.

Oh, and the occasional fleet-footed doppelganger!

Indeed, by night, the Oak Hill Cemetery transmogrified from a melodious glade bristling with plant and animal life into, well, the necropolis it most certainly was. I grew to relish it all—the light and the skin-tingly dark of it.

Sometimes, on balmy, summer nights, we would venture outside with flashlights to play hide and seek or catch fireflies by the light of the moon. Unlike afternoon outings, we would restrict our nocturnal wanderings to the yard itself, ever aware of the cemetery looming luridly in the periphery of our vision like the grim reaper with a huge, gaping stomach, growling for cheeky little rascals such as us.

Sometimes this deliciously prickly effect could almost be replicated during the daylight hours: let’s say a gloomy, ominous afternoon before a storm. When feeling particularly adventurous or bored, my sister, my friends, cousins and I would be inexplicably drawn into the cemetery at precisely these moments as if we were unwitting actors in an Alfred Hitchcock film – you know the ones where usually a woman or a child, as if in a trance – can’t seem to resist opening the creaking door and venturing down the steps to the cellar to investigate the ethereal sound emanating there in spite of the warning shouts of we, the TV viewers screaming “Don’t go there!! Turn back!!”

My sister and a friend who lived up the street (Theresa) and myself were not only explorers, but we prided ourselves on being architects and carpenters as well. When we were in middle school, the three of us collected some old boards, some of my father's tools and built ourselves a tree-house in the woodlot bordering the cemetery. We hung out there to hide, to play games, or get into mischief (which we did frequently). Sometimes we even slept in our lofty fort all night long.

My father remained the caretaker of the cemetery for a few more years until he became disabled and my mother (who worked hard well into her 70's) became the sole breadwinner. Yet he continued to take an interest in the cemetery and to this day, I believe I look at cemeteries in a way that is slightly different. Cemeteries are sanctuaries for memories, yes. Their grounds are sacred, YES. But cemeteries are also for the living and (YES!) for babes in the woods.

Whenever my husband and I travel, we are always sure to visit the cemeteries. In the Cimetiere du Pere Lachaise in Paris, we saw the final resting places of the likes of Oscar Wilde, Isadora Duncan, Gertrude Stein and Jim Morrison, among others. I was genuinely moved by the statuary and personal mementos people had placed near the tombs to remember their loved ones.

When I went to a rural section of Germany, known as the Eiffel, I stood, transfixed at the comparatively simple graves of unknown strangers and was equally moved by the meticulous care the people took of the plots. The plots in this German village were more like little gardens than grave-sites.

In Zermatt, Switzerland, I saw graves adorned with photographs of intrepid souls who failed to make it to the summit of the Matterhorn, but instead succeeded in a sort of immortality.

And in New Orleans, the above ground crypts containing far too many 19th century victims of yellow fever seemed as exotic as anything I experienced in Europe.

A few years back, I had the privilege to view a burial place that predates anything I had previously seen - the spectacular necropolis at Hierapolis in Turkey. Here the breathtakingly beautiful hillside was littered with mausolea and sarcophagi (some intact, some in ruins) immortalizing the souls who had perished as far back as the first century BC.

Closer to home, there is a cemetery on top of Barclay Mountain in the ghost town of Laquin (another special place), which was a thriving coal town around the turn of the 20th century. I’ve been told that small pox killed many of the residents and when the economy failed, the survivors fled. The coal mines were abandoned, the trains stopped running, and nature slowly reclaimed the homes. Today, all that remains are some foundations and the cemetery – some plots contain the headstones of entire families who had tragically succumbed to small pox. “Budded in earth, to bloom in heaven,” reads the poignant script on the headstone of an infant.

And then there’s the Memorial Cemetery in Burlington, Pa. where the tombstones lie absolutely flat so the mowers have an unobstructed path to mow. Compared to almost every other cemetery I’ve visited, this one is remarkable only for its plainness and uniformity. No hierarchy of ostentatious monuments immortalizing local luminaries here – just plain folk with simple plaques for markers. Flowers, flags and small kitschy statues are the only mementos to identify one grave from the other. The one I visit has a flag flying over it.

The soul buried there passed through the one portal in the Oak Hill Cemetery my sister, friends, cousins and I were forbidden to explore.

My father died September 22, 1991 at the age of 60. If he were alive today, he’d be 83 years old. He had been a son without a father, a truant sent to reform school, a Marine, husband, father, professional fireman, factory worker, pizza maker, carpet cleaner, and a shining, flawed character, who, for several years, served as a sort of merry ferryman ushering people across the River Styx and through the portal on the other side of the cemetery I grew to love. He wore work clothes and boots in a suit and tie neighborhood and held his head high even when some of the neighbors didn’t bother saying “Hi.”  

My father was the caretaker of "Oak Hill:" my "Fern Hill," my nature preserve, my haunted, hallowed grounds...my very special place. 
 

More pictures of Sugar Creek and surrounding woods to come!