A Hill in History
Setting rays cast a rosy hue on the old cedar house. Towards the mountains, the sun overtakes the camera’s viewfinder and blots the peaks an inky black highlighting the flare of the horizon beyond. A fugue of day’s-end contemplation blankets Smarts Hill.
Somehow this hill always finds me when it is most quiet. The day can be raging with wind but as I ascend into dusk the air grows stagnant with only the dull thrum of my boots on pavement to break the tableau. A small robin flits from branch to branch but the trees remain posed in preternatural stillness.
It is thoughts of finality that draw me to the hilltop cemetery. A gnarled maple stands at its corner with a metal fence running through tall granite posts marking its boundaries. The headstones are for the most part modest. They are a couple of feet tall, a few inches thick, and are simple with rounded tops and hand carved engraving. Some are colonized with lichen that chew at the words leaving them soft and indecipherable. Almost all are marble.
Scuffing up the sandy soil at the edge of the cemetery with the toe of my boot I wonder about erratics. Pulled from their bedrock a few millennia ago by a glacier, the stones glide across the landscape, blurring the lines of geological time. Silurian gneiss, a permian pegmatite- ancient rocks born in a distant era, they are veritable space voyagers amongst the glacial lake deposits where they now lay. Charged with a sense of transcendence over history, these roving stones find a new purpose as pioneers- they become signifiers. The quartz, feldspar, and garnet that make up their ancestral DNA is only secondary to their importance, it is in the label erratic where they find their primary value. We heap upon these rocks the burden of evidence - we say, ‘here shows what once passed’. In their responsibility to signify history they ascend beyond their chemical bonds and become eternal, letting us peer into the past while formulating the future.
The thin headstones that throw long shadows towards the East become familiar. Although smoothed and shaped their essential rockiness shines through the disguise formed by human hands. Perched upright atop the sand and glacial till these headstones are erratics. Quarried from a landscape hundreds of miles away and carried by the backs of animals these simple rocks became signifiers. And as the Earth subdues under the settling dust of eons, somewhere in the layers of history, 17 small blips of marble will show- ‘here once were people who cared for their dead and the remembrance of the past’.
“Cedar House Sunset” 6x8” oil on panel.