So it began this way, I can't recall how it got started
When I was little, I started playing this mental game with myself. I'd be in the car, slumped in the leather pilot seat behind heavily tinted glass and sandwiched between whichever parent was driving, barely tall enough to see over the muted thunk of the door lock mechanism. I'd be watching the white lines flit by and I'd pick a spot outside the window - sometimes right beside the car; sometimes a little further ahead; sometimes all the way out in the distance, between vast swatches of graffiti on the highway sound barriers. And after I picked my spot I would wonder, "Do you think anybody in the history of ever has died in that spot?"
I mean, the history of ever is a pretty long time, especially when you're a little kid. Usually the answer in my head was an empathetic yes. Of course, someone had to have died in that exact spot. And every other exact spot I subsequently picked, there had to have been blood shed there somehow. It didn't have to be modern-day blood, still red and drying tacky to the touch in the hot sun, like one Mother's Day when my dad and I saw the car careen off 95 and into that same sound barrier and he held some woman's hand while she died next to her mother and her pregnant sister. It could be older blood, from pioneers beating the wild terra of America into submission via manifest destiny. Or Indians meeting those pioneers along the way. Or who even knew? My little kid brain couldn't exactly wrap itself around the specifics, just the general idea of death and how it had to have physically permeated the land simply via the sheer numbers. There were too many people, too many hominids being born and living to not have died on most of the spots I passed, even the spots where the land was covered by some towering building or blazingly hot asphalt or carefully arranged marble tile.
This is a game I still play in my head, and not just on the highway. In classrooms, grocery stores, on Air Force bases. Except as I got older, the specifics started showing up in my imagination, and that evolved into an even more horrifying concept: What if someone had died in that exact spot and then just been left there to rot in the elements? Who knew how many unmarked graves were littered beneath the paths I crossed everyday? The though just seemed too repellant to consider, even for someone as macabre as me. Until I read this, about an author searching for a body of a long-dead relative and members of the infamous Donner Party:
"The hillside...[I was visiting]... was once home to Corralitos Cemetery, back in the 1870s. But in 1878 the owners of the property decided he wanted to put in an orchard. He notified the local families that they needed to remove the remains of their loves ones... Many of the bodies were duly exhumed and moved... elsewhere, but others were still in place when a hired man began to prepare the ground for the orchard. Careless or overzealous with his plow, he destroyed the markers and obliterated any signs of the remaining graves. The man was fined, the orchard was planted, and the dead have remained in place ever since."
- The Indifferent Stars Above, Daniel James Brown, p. 275
And this occurred a little over two hours from where I sit right now. I think the game just got a lot more real, and somehow a little more fucked up than it already was.
I mean, the history of ever is a pretty long time, especially when you're a little kid. Usually the answer in my head was an empathetic yes. Of course, someone had to have died in that exact spot. And every other exact spot I subsequently picked, there had to have been blood shed there somehow. It didn't have to be modern-day blood, still red and drying tacky to the touch in the hot sun, like one Mother's Day when my dad and I saw the car careen off 95 and into that same sound barrier and he held some woman's hand while she died next to her mother and her pregnant sister. It could be older blood, from pioneers beating the wild terra of America into submission via manifest destiny. Or Indians meeting those pioneers along the way. Or who even knew? My little kid brain couldn't exactly wrap itself around the specifics, just the general idea of death and how it had to have physically permeated the land simply via the sheer numbers. There were too many people, too many hominids being born and living to not have died on most of the spots I passed, even the spots where the land was covered by some towering building or blazingly hot asphalt or carefully arranged marble tile.
This is a game I still play in my head, and not just on the highway. In classrooms, grocery stores, on Air Force bases. Except as I got older, the specifics started showing up in my imagination, and that evolved into an even more horrifying concept: What if someone had died in that exact spot and then just been left there to rot in the elements? Who knew how many unmarked graves were littered beneath the paths I crossed everyday? The though just seemed too repellant to consider, even for someone as macabre as me. Until I read this, about an author searching for a body of a long-dead relative and members of the infamous Donner Party:
"The hillside...[I was visiting]... was once home to Corralitos Cemetery, back in the 1870s. But in 1878 the owners of the property decided he wanted to put in an orchard. He notified the local families that they needed to remove the remains of their loves ones... Many of the bodies were duly exhumed and moved... elsewhere, but others were still in place when a hired man began to prepare the ground for the orchard. Careless or overzealous with his plow, he destroyed the markers and obliterated any signs of the remaining graves. The man was fined, the orchard was planted, and the dead have remained in place ever since."
- The Indifferent Stars Above, Daniel James Brown, p. 275
And this occurred a little over two hours from where I sit right now. I think the game just got a lot more real, and somehow a little more fucked up than it already was.