Blue Highways: Dover, Delaware

Unfolding the Map

When William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) relates the story of the Chief Justice's ghost on the Dover village green, it causes me to ponder a bit on the sometimes thin separation of our world from that of the dead.  Should you want to see where Dover is located, say a little prayer for those who have passed on and see the map.

Book Quote

"On the village green in Dover, citizens successfully buried the ghost of Chief Justice Sam Chew in broad daylight.  Around 1745, the judge's shade developed a nocturnal penchant for meditating on the common and beckoning to passersby.  His honor's whangdoodle began to keep the streets empty after dark and tavernkeepers complained.  So residents dug a symbolic grave on the green, and, in full sunshine, tolled bells as clergymen spoke the restless soul to its peace."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 13

Downtown Dover, Delaware. Photo by Tim Kiser and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host page.

Dover, Delaware

Recently, here in Albuquerque, we celebrated Dia de los Muertos or Day of the Dead.  A day that we in European traditions have turned into a celebration of spooks and ghouls, of treats and tricks, and of costumes and candy is now mostly celebrated by little kids on parade at dusk while their parents keep a watchful eye on them.  Halloween is a sanitized holiday, the original purpose of which was to highlight the rending of the veil between our world and the spirit world, but  has been lost in commercialization and the bottom line of candy sales. 

The origins of Halloween are therefore obscured.  Perhaps an amalgamation of different Roman and pagan holidays, the day was usually marked as the end of the harvest and also, according to Celtic traditions, when the door to the Otherworld opened and spirits and sprites could join us here in ours.  Later, after Christian influences on the holiday, children went around to ask for cakes and other treats to offer as prayers to lost souls.  Of course, there are only echoes of that left in our Halloween, where it's all about the candy gained and consumed.

But the Hispanic cultural tradition has kept a bit of the original intent of the day alive.  In Albuquerque, families take time to come together in feasts.  They gather together to spruce up the gravesites of their families and leave fresh flowers and other mementos.  Ofrendas, or altars, dedicated to the memories of friends and loved ones are constructed in homes and adorned with food and mementos important to the person or persons being commemorated.  The ofrendas are often garlanded with marigolds, which are believed to attract souls to the altar where they may consume the spiritual essence of the food left as offerings and hear their living relatives talk about them.

The symbols of the day are calaveras, or skulls.  These are fashioned out of sugar and decorated in fancy and floral patterns and used to decorate for the holiday.  Catrinas are also brought out.  These carved figures usually depict a skeleton lady who represents someone from a higher class, a reminder that while riches may separate us on this earth, there is no difference between us when it comes to death.  We will all live our lives and die, and be reduced to the bare elements of what we are.  Skin and flesh, then bone, then dust.

My wife and I, after years of attending, had an opportunity to participate in the Marigold Parade, which over the past few years has become an Albuquerque tradition.  The parade features individuals and groups, dressed up with faces painted like calaveras, marching with grim faces (because death is grim) in a macabre procession that is at once somber and at the same time joyous.  The parade not only celebrates the thin veil between life and death, but also the follies of the living.  This year, small makeshift floats lampooning the 1% vs. the 99%, and other national and local politics, were mixed in with floats (usually the decorated beds of pickup trucks) remembering people who have passed on.  Because it is Albuquerque, a center of "lowrider" culture, the end of the parade featured lowriders, some equipped with hydraulics, filled with skeletal drivers and passengers in a strange, motorized death procession.

Like my feelings about unexplained phenomena, which I've written about in this forum in the past, I've always wanted to be able to believe in spirits and ghosts.  As a scientist, I am taught only to believe in what I've been able to observe, and to even question that.  On that score, I have never observed a ghost.  I've tried - I've visited supposed haunted places, including dragging my wife on our anniversary up to a haunted hotel, the St. James, in Cimarron, New Mexico on our anniversary weekend.  The strange smell of cigar smoke in our hotel room that was unaccounted for wasn't enough to convince me (though the always accommodating clerk told me that I was probably smelling the ghostly poker game in the card room around the corner).  Like most people, I wonder what happens when we die, and if our spirits and essences just disappear into the universe, or whether there is something beyond this life that we can look forward to, as many religions promise us.

But on the other hand, the thought of restless spirits roaming around, never finding a place of peace, is also quite disturbing.  If there are ghosts tied, by some unfulfilled longing or unfinished business, to a place or location where their sole purpose is to haunt until the end of time, then their existence seems sad to me.  They can't move on, and they are trapped in a kind of loop.  They are never able to leave that place and therefore, they never find the peace they desperately crave.  Isn't death supposed to be an eternity of peace after a lifetime of toil on this earth?

In a similar train of thought, my wife just reminded me of an interesting concept.  We read a short story once about a waiting room where souls of dead people are trapped as long as their names are spoken on earth.  In this vision, the people who are unknown are able to truly pass on because they are forgotten.  Those that seek fame and fortune, through vanity or other reasons, are those that remain in the waiting room purgatory.  If we are continually tied to this earth by how we are remembered, then maybe we aren't doing the dead a favor at all.  Maybe we, who must comfort ourselves and deal with our grief of those departed, actually are complicit in their inability to achieve rest.  What if they resent us for this?  What if they just wish that we would forget them so that we can move on, and in the process let them go where they need to be?

That's why, out of all the traditions, I like New Orleans' tradition around death the best.  Steeped in Christianity, it still maintains some of the non-Christian elements that make it special.  The deceased are mourned for a period, usually the first part of a jazz funeral.  Once the coffin is blessed however, a huge party breaks out.  The dead are "going home."  We have mourned, now we can be happy for them.  They've left the toils and cares of this world behind.  If anything, the dead should be grieving for us poor souls left on this hard rock to complete our own journeys.  They've finished theirs.

Musical Interlude 

My wife and I do a global music radio show on KUNM, and we did a show based on the Day of the Dead.  What follows is a mix of over 30 songs that are around the theme of life and death.  All you have to do is click on it and play.  Yes, that's me and my wife, Megan Kamerick, in the picture.  Enjoy!

Death and Life from mhessnm on 8tracks Radio.

If you want to know more about Dover

City of Dover
Delaware State University
Dover Post (newspaper)
Downtown Dover
Kent County and Greater Dover Convention and Visitors Bureau
Wikipedia: Dover

Next up: Somewhere on the Delaware Shore

Blue Highways: Darlington, South Carolina

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for Map"Drivin' into Darlington County..." sings Bruce Springsteen.  We drive into Darlington County with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) and confront a man's peaceful contemplation of his own mortality.  Wish I had that kind of peace of mind.  To contemplate where Darlington is in our journey, click on the thumbnail of the map, and leave a comment if you have a way you face your own mortality.

Book Quote

"'Travelin' alone!  Ever ascared alone?'  I shrugged.  'Me, I ain't never ascared,' he said.  'Looky here.'  From his left breast pocket, he took a worn bullet: a .22 long rifle.  'I carried a live forty-five round in the war and never got shot by friend or foe.  Always carry me a round over my heart, and ain't never ascared because I know when I die it's agonna be from this.  And quick.  Lord'll see to that -- when it's my time.'

"'You mean you'll put it in a gun and shoot yourself?'

"'It's a sin to do that, ain't it now?'  He waited for an answer.

"'I've heard that's the case.'

"'Nope, this here little lady will go off by herself some way or t'other.  When it's my time.  Won't know it neither.'

"'What if it goes off by accident before it's your time?'

"'You ain't alistenin'.  Ain't no accidents in the Lord's Plan.  When she pops off, my ticket's agettin' punched.  Oughter get yourself one.  They make a man right peaceful.'"

Blue Highways: Part 2, Chapter 14

County Courthouse: Darlington, South Carolina

Darlington, South Carolina

Every week, I read a website called "Badass of the Week."  I don't know why I like it, other than that every time I read it, I learn something about some person in history.  It might be someone whose name I know but didn't know much about them.  Sometimes it's someone completely new to me.  Regardless, I learn new things, which is the hallmark of a good website.

The reason I'm not sure why I like it is because of how its written.  As you can see from my "About Me" page, I am a PhD in Political Science.  I have pretty cultivated tastes in literature, the arts and other "highbrow" types of things.  But for the life of me, if I want to, I can laugh heartily at a fart joke just like anybody.  I love slapstick comedy.  I have a sense of the absurd.  And "Badass of the Week" fits all of that.  It is written in a juvenile fashion, with lines about some person's "titanium plated testicles" and things like that.  It is so completely juvenile that I find myself laughing both with genuine amusement and with a slight sense of guilt that I am laughing.

The reason I mention this, is because I would classify the guy in LHM's quote above as a badass.  Here's a guy who not only has carried a bullet around in his breast pocket for years, but is fully convinced that if the bullet goes off next to his heart, that it's his time to go.

When I was young, and hunting with my father, I didn't realize just how dangerous bullets in themselves are.  He never bothered to explain that to me.  I thought that the only way a bullet could go off is if you put it physically in the gun and pulled the trigger to release the hammer and set off the gunpowder reaction.  So I was pretty careless about bullets.  I remember dropping them once in a while and not thinking anything of it.

The first time I understood how dangerous that could be was when I watched a movie titled Hope and Glory.  It was about kids in wartime England during the Blitz, and in one scene, a couple of kids threaten a third by holding his head in the potential path of a bullet that was clamped in a vice at the end of a table.  The one kid was threatening to hit the back of the bullet with a hammer.  It then clicked into me that any sharp blow to the base of a bullet chamber, whether in the gun or not, could cause the bullet to fire.

And here's a guy, carrying it around in his breast pocket, fully convinced that it will eventually be the bringer of his doom when his time is up.  And he's okay with it.  When LHM suggests that it could go off by accident, and that might be before his time is up, he is perfectly content with the idea that any time the bullet goes off is the right time, because the Lord wills it so.

On one hand, it makes one crazy.  My reaction would be to just get rid of the bullet - why tie your doom to an object that you keep with you?  Why not just accept that your life could end naturally, or because you weren't looking while crossing the street and walked into the path of a semi-truck, or that a freak lightning bolt struck the tree you were sheltering under?  But that's because ultimately, I'm afraid of death.  But this man feels in control.  He knows what will end his life, more than likely, and he's not afraid of it - not one bit.  In my mind, that makes him a badass.

On another brief topic, Darlington was the subject of a Bruce Springsteen song from his Born in the USA album.  I remember mid-1980s evenings at a Milwaukee pub, O'Donoghues, where Jimmy the bartender loved it when we played music, and we played a lot of songs from the Born in the USA album, including Darlington County.  I share it with you here.

If you want to know more about Darlington

City of Darlington
Darlington County
Darlington News and Press (newspaper)
Darlington Raceway (home of NASCAR Southern 500)
PeeDee Foodie (blog post on a Darlington restaurant)
Visit Darlington County
Wikipedia: Darlington
Wikipedia: Darlington County

Next up: Newberry, South Carolina

Blue Highways: Dunn, North Carolina

Unfolding the Map

We take a littlClick on Thumbnail for Mape bit of a dark turn in this post, with reflections on death and life.  It's the landscape the William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) is traveling through, and his thoughts are influencing our thoughts and reflections.  To see where we are physically on that landscape, click on the map thumbnail.  If you want to leave a comment or reflection of your own, be sure to click on the "Post a Comment" link at the bottom of this post.

Book Quote

"Highway 421 dropped out of the Piedmont hills onto the broad coastal plain where the pines were taller, the soil tan rather than orange, and black men rode tractors around and around square fields of tobacco and cotton as they plowed wavelets into the earth.  At the center of many fields were small, fenced cemeteries under a big pine.  All day farmers circled the acres, the white tombstones an axis for their planters, while tree roots reached into eye sockets and ribcages in the old boxes below.

"Near Dunn, North Carolina, I pulled up at a cemetery to eat lunch in the warm air.  Last names on the markers were Smith and Barefoot and Bumpass.  All around, the buds, no more than tiny fists, were beginning to break the tight bindings and unclench.  A woman of age and size, her white legs blue-veined like Italian marble columns, stooped to trowel a circle of sprouts growing in the hollow center of a large oak dead from heart rot."

Blue Highways: Part 2, Chapter 5

Downtown Dunn, North Carolina

Dunn, North Carolina

Cemeteries and death seem to be a focus of LHM's thoughts as he drives Ghost Dancing through North Carolina.  He looked for the grave of his ancestor and found the memorial next to a reservoir near Franklinville.  Now he's left with reflective thoughts as he travels through rural farming areas.  When one travels through the countryside, as LHM is doing, it is easy to contemplate death and life and its endless circle.  "Do not go gently into that good night," wrote Dylan Thomas, but the somnabulance of death quietly biding its time among the tobacco fields (themselves eventual purveyors of death) and cotton fields in the midst of winter quiet or summer malaise lies enshrouded in the gentle peacefulness of the rural landscape.  The dead sleep, and we erect memorials to remind us of their endless slumber.  I love the image of the farmers, coaxing new life out of the soil, even amidst the buried remains of men and women who have gone before.

As a young budding poet, I contemplated life and death in one of my first stabs at a sonnet.  I don't promise a work of Shakespearean elegance here, but I am proud that it won me a poetry prize at my university (and $250, a kingly sum in 1986).  I share it with you now not because I think that it will establish me among the great poets (it certainly won't!) and not because I am looking for your accolades, but because LHM's musings remind me of my own.

Gravestones and Grass
by Michael L. Hess 

Some grass grows through the cracks in marble stones,
And reaches toward the setting winter sun,
Against the shafts of tombstones, pale and dun,
That guard the finest men, reduced to bones.
These lonely blades that missed the reaper's eye,
Blaze forth, in midst of death, with marvelous life,
And over the remains of man and wife,
Defy the gloom, and reach out for the sky.
How did such wondrous seed invade this plot
That men established as their monument
To coldness, darkness and mortality?
Perhaps these plants will remain in permanance,
To root in mankind's past, which lies in rot,
And drown all thoughts of grief in greenery.

Other poets and writers have mused more eloquently than I about death and life.  As living beings that have the capacity to reflect and to look ahead, death is omnipresent in our lives.  We die, our friends and loved ones die.  I think that perhaps every day of my life, I am given some reminder of death.  It could be as small as my accidental crushing of a snail on a walk with my dog, to a story in the newspaper, to my mom telling me about an old classmate who has passed on.

But if most of us acknowledge death, we also try very hard to live in spite of it.  Certainly our lives have pain and loss that remind of death, but we live, laugh, love and create joy.  We come together in community around the world, we care enough to participate in politics and help those those who need our help, we gather in nice little towns and communities like Dunn, North Carolina and do our business and raise families.  We do this despite the fact that we will die, our sons and daughters will die, and that our time alive is just a brief flash, like the spark of a lighter in the darkness, in the eons of the existence of the universe.  We accept death as a natural part of the cycle of life, but we get what we can out of living.  "Death is terrifying because it is so ordinary. It happens all the time," wrote author Susan Cheever.  But Native American flautist Robert Cody answers "Have the courage to live.  Anyone can die."

If you want to know more about Dunn

City of Dunn visitor page
Dunn Area Tourism Authority
Dunn Daily Record (newspaper)
Wikipedia: Dunn

Next up: Greenville, North Carolina