Resting Places

I don’t admit this to people on a regular basis, but one of my favorite places to go for walks is in cemeteries.  I know it sounds creepy, but I find cemeteries to be very restful places (no pun intended). I used to live near a beautiful cemetery in Lyndon Center, VT, where I would go for walks whenever I needed to think.

Thank God I’m not alone in my love for cemeteries.  Seth Kugel published an article in the New York Times this week (“You Can Come And Go.  They’re Staying Awhile.”) about some cemeteries in New York that have long been tourist destinations:  Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, and First Calvary Cemetery in Queens.  The accompanying photo of Green-Wood cemetery is a beautiful example of why it’s such a popular destination:  It offers an excellent view of the Manhattan skyline.  Kugel reports that

“If you think visiting cemeteries is a bit creepy, you would never have made it as an 1860s tourist. At that time, Green-Wood Cemetery — an early example of the “rural cemetery” movement imported from Europe — had become one of the country’s premier attractions, ranking up there with Niagara Falls. Half a million people visited a year, and that’s just counting the live ones.”

If you think about it, it’s not that unusual.  DC tourists visit Arlington Cemetery to honor our fallen soldiers, and guided tours of the cemeteries of New Orleans is a thriving part of the tourist economy there.  When I visited Austria many years ago, we took a day trip to Hallstatt, where we saw the bleached skulls and bones of centuries of townspeople stacked up in the bone house, the skulls painted beautifully with crosses, red roses, laurel leaves, and of course the deceased’s name.  This was done because the cemetery there ran out of room for new bodies, so they had to do something with the old ones. Now THAT is creepy.

When I visited England (in the middle of a heat wave), one of my most memorable days was spent finding my way out to Highgate Cemetery to see where Karl Marx was buried.  I had met a woman during my stay there, Donna, who didn’t have plans for the day and asked to join me on my trek.  I’m sure she later regretted it. First we almost got hit with a huge fine for being in a zone that was outside what our tube passes were good for; but the guard took pity on us and just made us buy a ticket for that zone.  Even worse, we got off at the wrong station.

This was before the Internet became everyone’s go-to source of all knowledge, of course, so I was completely dependent on a Fodor’s Guide to England to tell me how to get to the cemetery.  The guide had indicated that we should get off at Highgate station, so we did.  We wound up walking for what felt like four years.  At one point during our personal Bataan Death March down the longest hill I’ve ever encountered, Donna said, “You know, I like going to new places and seeing things I’ve never seen before, but I’m telling you here and now, we are not walking back up that hill.  We’ll take a bus, or we’ll split the cost of a cab, or we’ll ride in a total stranger’s car, but I’m not walking back up this hill!”  She did not get an argument from me.

We finally reached the cemetery, hot, sweaty, and exhausted.  It was a beautiful cemetery, separated into a West Side and an East Side.  We only toured the East Side, where Marx’s grave was.  The way it was laid out, it was more like walking through the woods and happening across tombstones here and there.   Some of the graves weren’t very well maintained, but I remember one in particular, a Japanese grave with a large, flat black polished stone lying horizontal on the ground, was meticulously maintained and really lovely.  Marx’s grave was pretty cool.  There was a huge bust of him on the top of the tombstone, and engraved in gold at the bottom was a quote:  “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways.  The point, however, is to change it.” Lots of visitors had left flowers, notes, and other little tokens there.  It was pretty interesting to see how many people paid their respects to the father of communism.

We did not have to ride in a stranger’s car to get back to the tube station.  A staff member at the cemetery instructed us as we were leaving that “Highgate Cemetery” is actually a misnomer.  The cemetery is closer to Archway station.  We walked to Archway to take the train home, and it took us just 10 minutes. This was my first lesson that you can’t always believe what you read in a guide book, not even a Fodor’s guide.  (I hope they’ve straightened that out in subsequent editions.)