I hardly need to endorse Jon Krakauer's Into The Wild. I just finished it; you should have read it by now.
What started as a 9,000 word article in Outside Magazine called "Death of an Innocent," about a young man, Chris McCandless, who ventured "into the wild" of Alaska and died of starvation, eventually swelled to book-length in 1996 and was then adapted to a film directed by Sean Penn in 2007. The book, a gem of narrative non-fiction on its own merits, is a second draft of the magazine piece in many ways; it fills in gaps, rights assumptions and gives Krakauer a chance to tell in own story of reckless adventuring in parallel to Chris McCandless'. I'm not outdoorsy or adventurous in the least, and I found it all riveting. McCandless' story, imo, falls somewhere between tragedy and farce and adolescent thick-headedness. And it is a STORY in the classical sense, of the particular vintage where the ending is known as you begin (or before you begin), and this doesn't in the least stymie the drama. None of it feels inevitable -- which, of course, it all is.
Although Into the Wild revolves about McCandless, it's absurdly rich in place. It deals in, cautions of, and revels in the mythology of the American West ... where McCandless flees to after he graduates college. His journeys are many, as are his modes of transport: hitchhiking, a canoe, but mainly on foot. He rarely settles, and when he does it's only to raise funds for the next leg of tramping and exploration. The Slabs, though, a commune and refuge in the deserts on Niland, CA, caught my eye, I imagine, because it caught McCandless' eye, too. Note how the space is manipulated by those who inhabit it, converted by those who use it.
(It reminds me, in a sense and off-topic, of the lawn chairs arrayed in Times Square this summer. People moved them around, reclined in them, saved them for friends. For those few weeks, Times Square became something it had never been, both because of the chairs and the way people interacted with them. The people escaped from themselves, too, at least for a few minutes in the sun.)
Without further ado, Krakauer's passage on The Slabs:
"Jan and Bob were staying three miles outside of Niland (CA), at a place the locals call the Slabs, an old navy air base that had been abandoned and razed, leaving a grid of empty concrete foundations scattered far and wide across the desert. Come November, as the weather turns cold across the rest of the country, some five thousand snowbirds and drifters and sundry vagabonds congregate in this otherworldly setting to live on the cheap under the sun. The Slabs functions as a seasonal capital of a teeming itinerant society -- a tolerant, rubber-tired culture comprising the retired, the exiled, the destitute, the perpetually unemployed. Its constituents are men and women and children of all ages, folks on the dodge from collection agencies, relationships gone sour, the law or the IRS, Ohio winters, the middle-class grind."
You've heard the old saw: there is no place safer than a cemetery because everyone there is already dead. Excepting Thriller, Night of the Living Dead and the recent glut of zombieliterature, this pretty much holds up.
I grew up four blocks from a cemetery, Roseland Park. I didn’t find this to be at all creepy, or even usual. Living near a cemetery had become normative, my everyday. My dad taught my sister to drive on the twisting, all right-away roads; I threw stale bits of bread to Canadian geese near a shallow pond. It's always a curious process of being blindsided when places become our homes, or get in our blood -- no more or less so when those places are dangerous or unbecoming or extravagant. The sooner these unconventional places show up in our lives, the less likely we are to question them, to get spooked.
Because of the early initiation, I’ve always felt comfortable crossing the iron bars of a cemetery’s gates. More than comfortable: I’ve often sought out cemeteries as zones of solace, cut-outs for quiet reflection and clean air.
When I spent a few hours alone at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, recently, something shifted. Not that the grounds, headstones, and masoleums aren't beautiful, wonders of stone and landscape architecture (they are); not that I felt overwhelmed by the scores of anonymous dead (Boss Tweed and artist Jean-Michel Basquiat are buried there); not that the day was grim, overrun by shadows (it was gorgeous, breezy and fragrant, as evidenced below):
But for the first time, I felt like a trespasser. I wasn't there to grieve. That obelisk? Built in honor of no one I had heard of. This towering sculpture of an angel? Nightmarish with the sun setting behind it. The only sounds were my footsteps, and when I stopped walking, my pulse, and if you're anything like me, cursed by a nervous imagination, you start to think of silence as a precursor to noises you'd rather not hear, stirrings you'd prefer not to identify. I was alone but no longer felt alone.
Which pointed me, as luck would have it, to collegial memories of the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles, CA, where the wards get fat on cutting off solitude. Instead, pack a cooler, spread a blanket, and melt to the stylings of DJ Two-Tone's fusion of bossa-nova and house.
Cemeteries as centers of society, commerce, and entertainment? I'm game. I saw a screening of The Apartment at Hollywood Forever, and waded past revelers eating churros and buying skeleton trinkets at the least threatening Day of the Dead festival imaginable. Hollywood Forever -- "the resting place for Hollywood's immortals" -- actually has a forward-thinking service called Forever LifeStories, where loved ones -- digitally, with the help of a trained Biographer, and for a price -- compile photos, spoken descriptions, text, video clips, old film reels, awards, or other memoribilia to honor the deceased.
Are cemeteries sacred, vast wastes of space, or perfect for a night out with a few friends, a bottle of Merlot, a pack of Clove cigarettes and a Ouija board? How do cemeteries fit into your towns?
BONUS:
For the truly avid, check out the The Graveyard Rabbit, an association and blog dedicated to the historical importance of cemeteries, grave markers, burial customs, burying grounds, and tombstones.
