Entry 8

It would be easy to make a correlation between the cemetery and springtime; rebirth, what is dead once more come to life, et cetera. It would be even easier to make these connections today, on Easter, a holiday celebrating resurrection, and on Passover, celebrating release, regeneration, beginning things anew. But if there's anything I've learned from these past three and a half months abiding with this cemetery, it's this: connections, and the meanings we make from them, don't come, can't come, easily. To force these metaphors would be to homogenize this place sparkling with diversity, to assume a consistency and predictability of the seasons, to flatten out the experiences of all those tens of thousands of dead buried here--to do a disservice to their lives.

April 18, and almost all the trees are in leaf and bloom. A blessing of green washes through me. Here's the tall silver maple clustered with golden flower buds; the scarlet oak with its young leaves like viridescent starbursts; pink dogwood, branches curved upward like the outstretched arms and curled fingers, at the tip of each digit a four-petaled blossom; and the evergreens, still here, stalwart as ever, like Viking pioneers who have outbraved the siege of winter.

April 18, and the trees are in leaf and bloom, and some have begun shedding petals, dusting the grass and pathways that now look like the aisles of a wedding chapel. Far too early.

We've all been reading about how spring has sprung weeks earlier than usual across the country this year, in stubborn defiance of Punxsutawney Phil's predictions. Snowdrops barely had a few days to bow their heads in a show of grace to the passing of winter before a wild nor'easter hit. They didn't stand a chance. Time is out of joint, and I hesitate to believe that this is the new normal--to do so would mean giving in to the admittedly enticing oblivion of apathy. But I wonder how much we'll ever be able to rely on the regularity of seasonal changes again, how sure we can be of that cycle, rooted deep in our most primal imaginations, of death and rebirth.

I've been amazed at my ability to restrain myself from overly morbid or macabre ruminations on the cemetery and the corpses six feet beneath everywhere I tread, and my ability to avoid any death-related puns (well, perhaps a concession was given to the blog's title), especially taking into account my repeated reflections on crows without ever using the word "murder." But the truth is, I wasn't necessarily actively avoiding these easily usable and abusable tropes--they never really even came to mind. For me, my perambulations became acts of intense witnessing--of the city, of the wild, and of the great difficulty that lies in attempting to separate the two. I feel that my inquiries into the history of the cemetery aren't that far removed from this witnessing, either, for in examining this distinction (which is ultimately more semantic than ontological), I also consider the distinction between "history" and "natural history." Over the semester, my inquiries, then, into the natural history of the cemetery have taken into account flora and fauna, yes, but also people, the human manipulation of and engagement with place (and time), and the necessity of integrating humanity, even if this only means our own writerly bodies, into our meditations on the environment. Perhaps this comes from repeated explorations of a place situated within a dense urban center, or perhaps it comes from being increasingly, acutely aware of the human-engendered disruptions in our climate, but--even through observations of deer and crows, spruce and holly, goose and rabbit--it is impossible for me to extricate the human from the inhuman.

Stillness and staying put; watching, listening, reading what's written on stone and in moss--these are skills I know I've sharpened over the course of writing this journal. Awareness, too, and over time, a sense of belonging, to a place both alien and familiar. Pittsburgh being the city in which I grew up, I began to feel a kind of intimacy or kinship with this place, bodily, even; a sense that my own history is rooted in this soil. I learned more about the city's history through this cemetery than I ever did the first eighteen years of my life here. I believe this came less from my own personal investment in historical research than from an absorption in the task of ingesting, digesting the environment around me.

In communing with the cemetery, I became part of its community. Connections elude us. But I revel in that elusiveness. I celebrate the difficulty that lies in making sense of things, in the recklessness of metaphor. We can feel for those collusions, conspirings of sense and story. It's the work of feeling out that counts. Feeling for the links (even the broken ones) that bind me to birch bark and willow, gravel and grass. To the yellow feathers of the flicker, the sistrum-rattle of chestnut leaves as it alights on a pliant bough.

These sounds are enough; this song is enough; there are stories there. Go, write them down.

Entry 7

As it's a beautiful, mild early spring day, I decide to walk from my home in Shadyside to Allegheny Cemetery, in Lawrenceville. It's a walk that takes me through East Liberty, Friendship, and Bloomfield—neighborhoods that either didn't exist in or were distinct villages from Pittsburgh at the time the cemetery was established in 1844. Originally free grazing land east of Pittsburgh, East Liberty (a "liberty" being a plot of common land) developed into its own town thanks to the commercial and infrastructural efforts of Negleys, Mellons, and Winebiddles, family names that have since become ingrained in the geography as well as imaginary of Pittsburgh. Friendship and Bloomfield were once streetcar suburbs, after the Winebiddle clan divided and sold off plots of land to develop into rowhouses and, later, larger houses for more prosperous families. Lawrenceville itself was founded by William Foster, father of the famous Stephen Foster, Allegheny Cemetery's most famous resident. The two-and-a-half-mile journey to the Butler Street gatehouse is a journey through the city's history, the seamless meetings of neighborhoods today belying the fact that, once, there were open fields here, empty plots of land where both industry executives and industrial workers made their homes, when the iron and coal began to pour in and the steel began to ship out.

While the trees in the city have yet to fully leaf, many are in bloom. The dogwoods with their thousands of tiny, four-petaled white flowers, the pastel pink of weeping cherries. The red maples have already shed their crimson flowers, now sticky and bloated, littering sidewalks and catching in the treads of my sneakers. The faint yellow of poplar blooms are giving way to early leafs, oblong, the size of thumbnails. Bright, sporadic splashes of color in the afternoon sun. Clusters of tiny red berries dangle from the wild cherry trees planted along the sidewalks of Liberty Avenue, berries that will drop and rot, uneaten, come autumn.

In a book on Allegheny Cemetery published by the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Association, I discovered that, a few months ago, I had misidentified the grave of Margaretta Bayard Briggs, the cemetery's first interment. The picture in the book does not look the same as the grave I had believed was hers, so I'm on a hunt to find the right one. Surely I'm not the first person to misidentify the dead—voiceless, so many headstones effaced by time and weather. Families, joggers, cyclists, and amateur photographers have all come for an afternoon jaunt in this wide, quiet green space, now that the sun is out and there's not yet enough pollen in the air to stir up allergies. I climb to the top of a hill in the oldest part of the cemetery, Lot 2, where Margaretta is buried (I found the "impostor" Margaretta in Lot 1). It's a large and densely populated lot, and I have a hard time finding the right stone, but eventually I find the Bayard plot and Margaretta's small, rococo stone. In the picture in the book, the engraving on the stone is still legible—not so today. In the twenty-seven years since the book's publication, the text on the stone is all but erased. I feel an odd kind of sympathy both with and for Margaretta, her worn stone, no plaque to mark the significance of her grave as there is for every one of the past mayors of Pittsburgh buried here. I wonder who the last person was to purposefully seek her out, to spend time with her here.

Other Bayards are buried here, too, and there's a wide, shiny new headstone beside Margaretta's that I suspect was commissioned recently by whoever remains of the Bayards, commemorating the members of that apparently illustrious family. This being originally Col. George Bayard's farmland, I suppose they have a right to do so. Remarkably, however, none of the Bayards listed on this stone are actually buried here, save Margaretta, whose name is carved in clear, crisp lettering.

The scion of the "de Bayard" line, it would seem, was Pierre Terrail de Bayard, identified on the stone as "Chevalier Sans Peur et Sans Reproche" ("The Knight Without Fear and Beyond Reproach"), 1473-1524. An Internet search reveals that de Bayard was, in fact, a remarkably accomplished, chivalrous, and all around well-liked knight with who served three kings and is buried in France. A medieval French knight honored, here, in Lawrenceville. Also listed on the stone is Col. Stephen Adams Bayard, 1744-1815 (whom one would presume fought in the Revolutionary War), and the founder of Elizabeth, PA, thirteen miles south of Pittsburgh on the shore of the Monongahela. Beside him, his wife, Elizabeth Mackey Bayard, after whom he named the town, and identified as the "First White Child Born in Fort Pitt" in 1767. I wonder about this clarification, "White," and who, then, was really the first child born in what would become Pittsburgh—an African child? Native American? Or what would have been called a "mestizo" or "mulatto"? And where do they lie buried, unmarked, unnamed?

The loud, rhythmic call of a bird I do not recognize startles me out of my reverie. I look around at the many trees around me and spot what looks like a woodpecker gripping the trunk of a bare-branched oak. It lets out the call again—wik-wik-wik-wik—and another bird swoops in toward it, and they both fly up into the tree's branches. I walk closer to get a better look, but they keep flitting from tree to tree, calling loudly all the while. Then, they both spread their wings and soar right over my head, and I almost gasp as I catch sight of their cadmium-yellow bellies and underwings, a color I don't think I've ever seen before in nature, banded with dark brown. With the help of the handy "Merlin" smartphone app, I identify the bird as a northern flicker—what a terrific name to match that flickering bright glimpse of their undersides. Some further probing on the website of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology reveals that this particular call is a territorial call heard in the spring and early summer, when pairs are forming and establishing their territories. That would explain the antagonistic chasing about and insistent vocalizations.

I've barely covered any ground on today's walk and have already seen and learned so much. Ahead of me, further into the cemetery, wait a herd of young, bandy-legged deer, geese and mallards wading in the no-longer-frozen ponds, robins scurrying in the green grass. I walk on, hoping to catch another glimpse of the flickers. But it seems they've moved on, staking and battling out the borders of their territories, where they will, for the season, find mates and raise their young. So I leave their province, wishing them the best, hoping I'll meet them again when I least expect. Because it seems that the flicker should always come as a surprise.