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.