Thursday, August 31, 2006

The Cliff View Cemetery

This is one of my favorite cemeteries. It's located in The Keweenaw Peninsula, Michigan. On our first visit to this abandoned place the Finlander and I found a set of footprints in the myrtle and a fresh lemon and lime. It took us years to unravel the mystery, but eventually I found the 76-year-old great grandson of the deceased. He lives in Arizona and has an orchard of lemons and limes. In the '50s he came back from serving a tour of duty in Alaska and searched out the swampy bit of land his great grandfather was buried on. He hacked a path through the woods with a machete and planted the myrtle that now grows in abundance there. The last burials in this cemetery were in the 1890s.

4 comments:

David Dodd Lee said...

You know, in Arrow Pointing North,
I have a poem about a cemetery I stumbled across in Whitefish Point,
near Paradise, in the U. P.
One grave had a little picket fence around it, and the earth was strewn with odd little toys, tucks and wiffle balls and such. Birds flew through the understory. It was quiet and very strange.

Charmi said...

Ah, The Beauty of the Present Tense. I know. Bears amble through the Cliff View and I've heard a cougar has been seen. Cemeteries all have their own personalities. I'll have to check your cemetery in Paradise out. Does it have a name or is it just one of those places you find as you're wandering about?

David Dodd Lee said...
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David Dodd Lee said...

Oh, you just wander onto this thing, which is part of the character of the place. It's on the little side of a hill not even near any real road . . .