Multi-Use Paths

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Some locations materialize only under certain circumstances. An emergency room emerges out of blurry blankness on a map of the city we live in just at the moment a pain radiates from a newly noticed spot deep inside the abdomen. Then we become a citizen of that other city, the city of the ill, with a hospital, an infusion center, doctors’ offices. There are times that signage appears only for us, a Covered California billboard we never noticed above the roof of a Japanese restaurant, a placard for a law office that specializes in health care, an ad for grief counseling services. New routes are marked for us on streets we never knew existed when we are sick, evicted, sued, bankrupt, addicted or even when we start a new hobby and find – say – a teacher of that hobby in a garage on a fog-bound hillside next to a brussels sprouts farm with a plastic-covered field that shimmers like a pond. And so I set out into one of these other cities when I leave my house on a sunny winter Friday morning in search of a broken headstone.

Last spring, I found a fragment of what an architect friend told me was cast concrete, a decorative specialty in the sand and limestone-rich Santa Cruz of the nineteenth century. The shard was on a path between the jail and the San Lorenzo river levee, scattered among less recognizable stones and a blanket smeared with grass and mud. The top was a curlicued wave of movement; a small carved rose punctuated the center. Even there, it had the nineteenth century grace of a skirt brushing the animal leg of a table in a gas-lit drawing room. If it could make a sound, it would be a quiet sigh over a few treble notes on a piano. I took it home, put it in my garage, and became determined to reunite this piece of a memorial with its memorializing marker. I imagined that a small whisper of a once living person followed the broken piece and remained with it in my garage, awaiting its return home.

An obvious origin of the fragment was Evergreen Cemetery, a shaded tangle of graves of civil war veterans, Chinese immigrants, gold-fevered successes and failures. The Museum of Art and History oversees the cemetery, so I emailed them. The staff did not recognize the rose and curlicue pattern. A visit to Evergreen yielded promising piles of stone fragments but no match.

I called Santa Cruz Memorial, the largest cemetery in town. An administrator I talked to could not be sure – they lose so many headstones and parts of headstones. These are sometimes found in storage lockers and sheds and brought to them by family members or the police who find them amongst other purloined items. I asked her why people steal gravestones. She had no idea. A search on eBay for “antique gravestones” and “antique headstones” yields only three, one with a starting price of three-hundred dollars (Harriet Ann McKenna, who died in 1902), so it does not appear that there is a particularly large market for stolen gravesite oddities and memorabilia, though one certainly exists. It is possible people steal these things out of some sort of compulsion to be close to the dead or, perhaps, out of anger towards them for reminding us of the inevitable. The Santa Cruz Memorial administrator suggested I visit the cemetery and look around.

I am not sure of the best way to get to Santa Cruz Memorial on foot. It is on the other side of a flurry of traffic, a twizzle of thoroughfares where Ocean Street meets Highway 1 meets Highway 17 meets Graham Hill road. It is one of the least walkable stretches in town. I know from the people I see crossing under Highway 1 on the San Lorenzo river bank that there is a camp under the highway. I could reach the cemetery by following the river under the highway bridge, through the camp, and then through any number of holes there must be in the cemetery fence, but the people who live along the levee have their own need-filling routes marked by chalk messages and syringes, and I am unsure if I can cross that mysterious terrain. We live in parallel neighborhoods, one constructed of postal addresses and intersecting streets and the other, a network of tents and fentanyl.

I plan my route on the streets marked on Google. I head onto the river levee, a paved foot and bike path called the Riverwalk. A red bike-share bike is on its side in the grass like a fallen horse; tents that were there a few days ago are gone; sections of cut black hair are strewed like the feathers of a hawk-eaten bird on the dirt where the tents used to be. A man rides by on a bike that squeaks so rhythmically that I think, at first, he has a radio on. A backpack the size of his back hangs off his shoulders, banking his bike side to side. A police SUV speeds past me, crosses the bridge where the path ends ahead, and stops on the other side of the river by the outdoor gym equipment. The river’s current drones through our small city.

Friends who live in other parts of town are surprised I walk on the levee. They express concern for my safety. The other day, on my way to the store, I encountered a man on the ground crying into his folded and filthy knees. A man next to him sang loudly. About ten yards away, another man was sitting and weeping into his hands with the intensity of a new widow. I had somehow wandered into the terrain of the lachrymose and felt that I, too, would cry if I lingered among their drugged grief. So I hurried past and went on my way towards my sanguine grocery errand.

I take a path off the levee onto Felker Street and walk past bike wheels, stripped of the bike they once belonged to, chained to a fence. A fraying edge of the neighborhood, Felker is dotted with apartment buildings, old houses among large yards that end at Highway 1. I make my way on Felker to Ocean Street, where a Denny’s, decked out in chrome and neon, faces four lanes of traffic that spill out of two highways. I cross the Highway 1 exit, pass through the shade of an overpass with the body-odor smell of acacia flowers, and cross the entrance to the highway, a notional crosswalk the only barrier between me and the traffic.

Relieved to still be among the living after dodging distracted drivers hurrying on and off the highway, I walk into the graveyard through a back driveway, an ingress that looks like an afterthought, so unofficial I ask myself if I might be trespassing. The most proper-looking entrance, the marked and iron Santa Cruz Grove gate, is locked both by a padlock and years of ivy that weaves the entry closed.

Cemeteries are an unalphabetized phonebook of proper nouns: Hartman, Rice, Evans, Flora, Holway, Butterfield – all these names that are recyclable, used again and again for different faces and voices. The website How Many of Me reveals that currently in the United States, only one person has the charming name Cordelia Butterfield, and there are seventy-eight thousand, three hundred and thirty Hartmans. Yet, though names are well-worn and used over generations, faces and voices are never reused. They are unique and unrepeatable. Except in the unusual circumstance of twins, no two people will ever look or sound the same, though we may share names such as Elmer or Minnie Hanson, and all of us will end up among the dead.

Two markers in the shapes of tree stumps stand like diminutive colonnades in a family plot. I try not to step on anyone’s grave as I make my way to them: Frank Stanley, 1873-1899 (the year of his death is hard to read, and I think at first it is 1999 -- impossible, I remind myself! The longest documented life was a mere 122 years). John Stanley had a longer life than the young Frank: 1830-1904. The stumps are cast with the texture of tree bark and buds of dead branches. They are low enough to use as stools. In the late-19th and early 20th centuries, these stump-shaped stones were provided as a benefit to members of the Woodmen of the World, a fraternal organization that provided burial insurance. After these grave markers became – for lack of a better word – popular, families could buy stones of this style in the Montgomery Ward and Sears Catalogues for only $25.75.

The cemetery was built by the Odd Fellows on the San Lorenzo River, which makes watery S’s through downtown and terminates in its ultimate curve under the candy lights of the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. Though the Odd Fellows acquired the land in 1862, a Sanborn map of 1888 shows merely a yellowed-paper expanse among the hand-drawn squares and scribbled addresses on nearby Jewell and Claremont streets. My own street, too, is missing, showing, on a Foreman and Wright map in 1886, only the name of the owner of the land – Frank Ball -- through which my street now runs. So to get from my house to the cemetery in 1886 or 1888 would have involved rambling through the ranches and farms belonging to Ball, William Felker, Louis Lapier, and thickets of brambles and trees. I would have, perhaps, lifted the boggy bottoms of my feminist bloomers and walked through the mud and murk and thorns. It is unclear what I would have then found – the tiny graves – certainly – of the diphtheria epidemic victims of the 1870s.

I scan the cemetery for a stone with a broken corner and the rose motif from the fragment in my garage, but as I walk deeper into the graveyard I realize that there is no living soul here other than me and the crows in a tree by the bedizened Bowman crypt. Down the hill a bit, seating is set under an awning for a funeral, but no one is there now. On a Friday morning, there are no mourners memorializing at Santa Cruz Memorial, and I begin question the wisdom of being alone in a large cemetery. I came meaning to check the obscure corners of this place, the older and less kept portions down by the river bank, but I see how foolish that is. From here I can see the Tannery, where my friends live, and the Gateway Plaza, where a Ross Dress for Less and a Pet Smart stare blandly towards each other across a parking lot. The comfort of those nearby familiar places only underscores that I am in unfamiliar territory in a place I told no one I was going. I sit on a stone wall and watch morning light bouncing off the windshields of the cars as they speed on Highway 1. A living person –another man on a bicycle -- rides towards me. I stand up and edge my way a little closer to the fence, just in case I need to hop over and back into a more recognizable map, but he rides past.

I decide to abandon my plan and return on a more populated Sunday or with a companion. I weave through the tombs and crypts towards the driveway. The first car I’ve seen here – a black SUV -- goes past me driven by a harried looking woman. I notice the license plate: PST MRTM. The funeral director, perhaps? The mortician? I find my way to the sidewalk and find a standpipe with a glove that someone placed on top in imitation of the headstone hands that point towards heaven. This is a place full of hidden jokes.

The crematorium across the street sports the Egyptomaniacal style of its time: a simple ancient temple with vulture wings flanking an image of the same temple carved in the pattern at the top. It sits above the cemetery in sober geometric simplicity. The wings, representing Nekhbet, the vulture goddess who is curiously also a symbol of maternal love, are a hallmark of Egyptian Revival cemetery architecture. Forever Legacy, whose website purports is the “premier provider of custom-built private mausoleums throughout the continental United States,” opines that “Egyptian is the most funerary style of architecture.” Indeed. The ancient Egyptians were geniuses of death, never shying away from the inevitable. Though they don’t get enough credit in the popular imagination for their embrace of life and its pleasures – animal-handled mirrors and combs, perfume, the whiskery affection for pets -- they, too, recognized the invisible terrain of the dead, providing detailed directions for the newly departed.

I begin the walk back home, past the chaotic Highway 1 entrance and exit, through the angry traffic, and then onto Pryce Street where I am relieved by the homey quiet of ranchera music playing through a kitchen window. Overgrown roses grow against the window of a house built around the same time as the cemetery. A Bath and Body Works bag is upturned next to the remains of a plate of food covered in ants. I take the path at the end of the street back to the levee.

I return to my street, the former land of Mr. Frank Ball, and where there is now a cinderblock jail built to look like a cross between a medieval fortress and a Brutalist Soviet apartment building. I often hear the sounds of shouting, calisthenics, and alarms coming from the jail. I walk past the jail and an apartment complex and up the hill to my house where I make a cheese sandwich and nestle back in to my own familiar spot on the map.

I am sometimes struck with the uncanny feeling that I am standing in someone else’s long past life. I can be sitting in, say, a drawing room in a San Francisco Victorian and believe that I am in the room now and in the same room a century ago, not in some sort of paranormal way, but in the sense that the places we get to inhabit in life are just very crowded multi-use paths that we share with everyone who came before us.

I find it strange the surveyors left the cemetery out of their drawings. But different maps tell different stories, and perhaps their story did not include the diphtheria epidemic or any other paths towards the inevitable. They were mapping the future, a Santa Cruz that would soon have gas stations and cafes and stores and amusement parks in place of the ranches and flood plains. Perhaps the tenderly ornamented fragment of a gravestone that I found at the end of my street came from one of these older versions of the town, these other maps. Isn’t it possible that occasionally an object like a shard of decorated concrete might poke through those flimsy pieces of paper on which are drawn all of our inhabitable places?

The stone fragment still sits on a shelf in my garage. I keep it in this liminal space, wanting to protect it by storing it indoors but also – superstitiously – not wanting it inside the house. Maybe the concrete crumble of memory that sits in my garage is perfectly at home. Maybe it already sits on a street in a city I can’t see.

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