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: Weekstown, New Jersey

Unfolding the Map

Common violet (viola sororia), the state flower of New Jersey.How many times, like William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) below, do you pass by little roadside memorials?  Do they register on you or do you, like me many times, hardly notice them?  I will do a little reflection in this post about roadside memorials, including the ghost bicycles that are now springing up to memorialize cyclists who have suffered tragedy on the road.  To discover where Weekstown is located, see the map.

Book Quote

"I went on south, through Weekstown, past a wooden sign nailed clumsily to a tree: ALWAYS IN OUR MEMORIES - PETE."

Blue Highways:  Part 9, Chapter 8

I couldn't find a decent photo of Weekstown, so here's a photo of the Pine Barrens in which it is situated. Photo by Jim Lukach and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host site.

Weekstown, New Jersey

I see them when I'm driving, usually on rural roads.  I might be swinging around a turn and then at the top of the curve, or perhaps somewhere in the middle of it, a floral arrangement out of character with the landscape.  Flowers that just don't grow there and on second look appear to be plastic to withstand the elements.  Often a white cross blazing through the flowers.  Another roadside memorial.  Another place where a person, usually young, met an untimely end.  A place where someone looking forward to a full life - maybe a marriage or a baby, or celebrating a new job, or on a first drive with friends after getting a drivers license - breathed their last in a maelstrom of twisted metal and broken glass and to the sounds of the jaws of life frantically trying to pry an opening.

At one time, I thought such displays were stupid.  Aren't there graveyards where we can remember our dead?  Didn't the shrines themselves cause a distraction.  The truth is that most people, including me, drive right past them with nary a thought.  We have become used to seeing them and we don't know the people.

But occasionally I do think about it.  I think about the lives lost and the impact on other lives all in the name of the freedom we have to drive factory-assembled packages of metal and fuel.  I think about how that freedom sometimes comes at a cost.  And I think back to my own brush with destiny - a night where I too could have ended up memorialized in a shrine of plastic flowers and a cross between two large cypress trees on the Northern California coast.

I was in college, home visiting my family.  I had been in town doing something.  Maybe I was at the bowling alley playing video games.  I hopped into the family car, a small and sporty Capri, and headed north of town on a windy, rainy night to visit my friend John.  I was traveling at the speed limit or maybe a little above but, on a wet rainy night, I was probably going too fast.  I headed around a turn, hit a wet patch that was probably icy, and began to slide.  I most likely overcorrected.  All I remember was that feeling of not being in control, a crunch, a strange roller-coaster like feeling and then silence except for the radio which was blaring out Eddie Murphy's Party All the Time.  It took me a moment to realize that I was hanging upside down in the seatbelt, draped over the steering wheel.  I was able to push the door open and crawl out and look at what was left of the car.  It had flipped over and was nestled between two giant cypress trunks, lights on, engine running, with Eddie Murphy serenading the surreal scene.  I didn't know what to do, so I ran to the nearest house and called the police, my mom, and John, all in that order.  The police came and later a tow truck.  John arrived and took me home, where I had to face my mom and tell her that I wrecked her favorite car.  It took the wearing off of the shock and adrenaline for me to understand how close I came to death.  Later, when I got a ticket and a $50 fine for "Failure to maintain control of the vehicle" I was slightly insulted.  That line didn't seem to add up to the enormity of what happened and how close I had been to departing this reality.

Lately, around New Mexico, I've seen a new type of memorial appearing.  You see them in medians or along sides of roads, put where they can be seen and registered.  Ghostly, white bicycles without riders, silently marking a place where a day's ride in the open air and sunshine turned into, usually thanks to an inattentive driver, a ride into the hereafter.  In Albuquerque, the second trial of a young woman who killed a bicyclist just wrapped up with her conviction of careless driving.  The bicyclist was out riding with his wife of over thirty years.  He was just getting into cycling as a form of exercise, and was riding a path alongside of and separated from a busy route.  Ordinarily he should have been safe but on this day, the young woman lost control of her car, swerved across two lanes of traffic and went off the road.  The man's wife, who was riding ahead, heard the noise and turned around to see her husband's life disappear in a cloud of dust.

The ghost bikes resonate with me because my bicycle is now my primary source of transportation.  I use it daily to ride to and from work.  When I'm traveling on the street, I can keep pace with the cars between the lights, and I don't usually think about how I am simply weak flesh and bone on a slight metal frame with wheels.  I don't usually think how I don't stand a chance if I make a mental miscalculation or am distracted, or a driver is distracted and doesn't signal or someone in a parked car opens a door just as I'm racing up alongside.  But every time I see a ghost bike, I think of it.  I also think of a friend, a reporter on National Public Radio, whose fiance was killed after being hit by a truck while cycling through Illinois, and how her life was unutterably altered in sadness.

Roadside shrines and ghost bicycles mark the places where the lives of people that I never knew were extinguished in tragic circumstances.  So mostly, I just drive by.  But occasionally, they make me think, reflect, and pull me back into reality.  I'm not invulnerable, I'm not immortal.  Each day carries a risk that such a memorial will be put up for me, even if I'm careful.  If that's what they are supposed to do - make me stop a moment and take heed - they are doing their job.

Musical Interlude

I found this song, Roses by the Roadside by Steve McGinnis, about roadside memorials.

I also put Eddie Murphy's Party All the Time as the musical interlude this week not because I particularly like the song, but because it was the song playing when I had my own brush with roadside death.  In a way, that's both sad and funny at once.

If you want to know more about Weekstown

Sorry, folks, but you'll have to look it up.  There isn't much on the Internet about Weekstown.

Next up: Egg Harbor City, New Jersey