Entry 2

The ground is dusted with a confectioner's-sugar patina of snow that’s begun to go stale and hard. A clear afternoon, cold and windless. Snowclouds still threaten a flurry overhead, punctuated by rhombi of blue like casement windows opening out onto the sky. Today I enter the cemetery from the Butler St. entrance, on the northwestern edge of the grounds, technically the cemetery’s official entryway. A grandiose Tudor-style sandstone gate complex straddles what was once the entrance to Colonel George Bayard’s farm, before all one hundred acres were purchased in 1844 to establish a cemetery large enough to accommodate the dearly departed members of the congregation of the Third Presbyterian Church. At present, it covers three hundred acres.

I’ve printed out a guide to a walking tour of Allegheny Cemetery available on their website, figuring I ought to get more formally acquainted with the land and its most notable residents. And I can’t resist a good historical walking tour. Did you know that twenty-two mayors of Pittsburgh, including its first mayor, Ebenezer Denny, are buried here?

As it turns out, I’m pretty bad at following directions, and soon end up ditching the guide after getting more than slightly lost. I keep veering off the paved roads to wend through the sprawling family plots, climbing steep hillsides made slippery by the crust of snow. Stones and trees stand out stark and sharp in the chill air. Winter has a way of crisping the edges of things, running an icy thumbnail along the fold of January’s paper. The limbs and bare branches of trees are silhouetted in black against the pale backdrop of sky, innumerable and intricate webs like the crazing in the glaze of a ceramic bowl. I collect a few leaves as I go, hoping to get a better sense of the flora that inhabit the grounds: scarlet oak, planetree maple, Norway spruce, holly.

I spot only two deer today, a pair of doe, stock-still and staring at me intensely when I turn a corner. I stop, nod awkwardly in acknowledgement, and continue around the bend of a hill. When I turn around, they’ve vanished. Only a single crow, invisible somewhere in its arboreal perch, lets out a caw, and then another, and is silent.

A surprising number of cars are driving through today, and it’s not until I spot four or five men in coveralls beside a bright orange backhoe that I realize a funeral ended not very long ago. I watch surreptitiously, about a hundred yards away as the workers dismantle the casket-lowering contraption and load it back into a large van. From my position, I cannot see the open grave. One man climbs into the cabin of the backhoe, pushes in and packs down the dirt in a matter of minutes. Perhaps this cacophony of man and machine have made the deer scarce, or perhaps the rime of snow and ice has made it difficult to scour the ground for edibles. But who can explain today’s absence of crows? It may be the case that, because it is still early, they have yet to return from their afternoon errands to roost en masse for the evening.

Farther along on my walk I notice a gravestone shared by one George Porter Hogg, Jr., and Betsy Hewitt Hogg, atop of which a blue Ziplock bag is held down by several large rocks. I brush snow off the plastic, peer in and see several sheets of paper, letters, it looks like, the top one which begins in typewritten red ink, “DAD:”. George and Betsy died in 2015 and 2016 at the ages of 95 and 96, respectively. In the center of the Hogg family plot stands a bronze angel on a tall stone pedestal, a monument (the guide tells me, making itself useful once again) cast around 1850. With one hand reaching toward the earth and one pointing to the sky, the angel seems ready to take George and Betsy's hands and ascend with them heavenward, only a temporary visitor to this mortal plane. Yet it seems as though it’s been caught here for some time, waiting, perhaps impatiently, for the dead to awaken. Its robes are tarnished to teal, and an almost fluorescent algae-green stain looks as though it’s been dripping down one side of the pedestal for a century and a half. The angel is melting, going nowhere fast.

In 1845, Margaretta Bayard Briggs, daughter of Col. Briggs whose farm this land once was, became the first burial in Allegheny Cemetery. While the guide is not too specific on its location, I believe I identify her final resting place, though I have my doubts since the text on the granite upright is almost entirely effaced. I’m fairly certain, however, that I can make out

BA               B        GS

just barely in relief on the weather-worn marker. The bed-like ledger stone to which the upright is affixed like a headboard looks to be mouldering, blemished by splotches of velvety white lichen. I try to imagine how George Briggs felt as he laid his young daughter to rest here, just one year after he sold his land, his home, only for it to become the very graveyard in which he buried his child. A plot of earth once meant to nurture new life, given over, now, to the dead.

Entry 1

Allegheny Cemetery is what’s called a rural cemetery, even though it’s clearly within city limits. Rural cemeteries are designed to look and feel like large parks, with winding, branching paths and plenty of trees. It takes a while to get deep enough into the cemetery before it feels like anywhere rural, before the constant rush of cars on Mossfield St., eagerly returning home this Friday evening, begins to fade away, and the multicolored monolithic glare of Children’s Hospital is obscured by gravestone-peppered hillocks.

I approached the cemetery gates from the south, through Lawrenceville, weaving through a clutch of tangled and steeply-sloped side streets crowded with narrow row homes abutting the sidewalk. In one curtained window, the Virgin Mary, in sky-blue robes, points insistently to her exposed, radiant heart. A pair of dirty cleats rests on a stoop. Salt-caked sedans sulk in unfinished carports. Turning a sharp corner, suddenly the high dark wall of the cemetery looms ahead, over which peek a few garnished crowns of the taller, more lavish monuments. The Penn Ave. gatehouse, a chapel-like neo-gothic structure, stands across the street from a restaurant called the “Graveyard Grille.”

For a manmade settlement, the cemetery is integrated quite well into the landscape. While the trees that line the main roads are too evenly-spaced and uniformly-sized to be anything but purposefully planted, the majority of the flora seems to have been let to run sufficiently wild, though surely cultivated here and cut back there when necessary to make room for new neighbors. And they’ll undoubtedly be very quiet neighbors.

The crows make themselves known immediately, by both sight and sound. From a distance, they could be mistaken for dead leaves still clinging to the bare branches of a January tree, until by some unknown instinct they burst all at once like dandelion seeds, spread themselves open like folding fans and take wing by the hundreds. The din of their harsh, dissonant caws fills the air, and I stand immobilized, watching their jet-black forms wheel above me against a background of sky deepening into a late-dusk blue.

The crows seem to roost, at least for now, only at the southern tip of the cemetery, and by the time I wind my way into the center of the burial ground the air is still and silent. The tens of thousands of graves—footstones, uprights, obelisks, mausoleums, bronze angels tarnished with a patina of green—are overwhelming, at first, but soon fade into the undulant topography like so many species of flora. I’m alone here, as the sun begins to tumble over the far side of the horizon.

Then, movement, in my peripheral vision. I turn to find three deer among the gravestones, snuffling through the undergrowth. One young female watches me. I keep walking, and at every turn, more deer. Some only watch from a distance. Some stand still in the middle of the path as I walk nearer, before skittering away, the white of their tails and backsides bright in the shadows. Some, curious, approach, and then I’m the one who, deer-like, scampers off. They’re wild animals, after all, and I’m a city boy. I have no idea whether they mean well or ill. The antlers sprouting from the heads of the males look awful sharp. I make a mental note to ask my friend Sarah, a former wilderness ranger, if deer have ever been known to be actively hostile.

It’s become more difficult, as darkness falls, to see the path in front of me, and there are no lights in the cemetery. I realize I’ve never been in a graveyard after nightfall. I realize that the quickening of my heartbeat is the result of fear. Though I’ve already begun walking back toward the gates, a succession of scenarios runs through my mind: I get lost. I’ve actually been walking in the wrong direction. I’m attacked by a family of rabid deer and only the dead can hear my screams.

Finally, the lights of Children’s Hospital rise over the hills, the sound of nearby traffic returns, and I know I’m walking the right way. Nevertheless, I quicken my pace. Then the sight of the hospital disappears again, and the path forks in two different directions. I try to remember which way I came, pull my phone out of my pocket to consult Google Maps, only to discover that my battery has died. The phone will not turn on. Almost reflexively, I mutter to myself, “They’re coming to get you, Barbara.” At least my sense of humor has survived.

I keep walking and, yes, I remember that toppled headstone, and that mausoleum carved with ancient Egyptian symbols is familiar. At last, I see the gates ahead. I also see that they are shut, and locked. Panic sets in before I spot a smaller pedestrian gate still open, and I just about run to and through it, out and back onto the busy sidewalk.

Laughing as I walk away, toward the comforting neon lights of the bars and pizza joints lining Penn Ave., I think of how I alternated between wonder and fear in this patch of wildness in the city. Of how eager I was to get into the cemetery, and how equally eager I was to leave. Not only because of the cultural mythography of the graveyard, but because of what was unknown to me—the size of the cemetery, the layout of the paths, the behavior of deer. Without a map or field guide, I carried only my own wits. Which, it seems, weren’t worth very much.