This Be the Place: A Name Is a Thing That Fades

This Be the Place is a series of short essays in which poets explore the mysteries and meaning of a particular place.

Six months ago, I flew to upstate New York to bring my 77-year-old father—suffering from a major depression—back to Colorado to live with us and, hopefully, begin to live again. I took him from the only home he’s ever truly known: Ithaca—or, more specifically, Brooktondale. More accurately yet, a stretch of Landon Road, no more than a quarter mile long, where my father had once lived in a converted barn on thirteen acres of woods my family has possessed since 1864. Just up the hill on Landon Road is the large, white house in which my grandfather was born, and the currant bush from which, when I was young, he picked small, bitter, red berries—the main ingredient of his favorite pie—and dropped them into a tin pail. Coming down the rise, where Landon Road angles into Lounsberry Road, a steep gravel drive leads up to the Quick Cemetery. There, from the ages of six to sixteen, I helped tend the graveyard that bore my family’s name.

That the cemetery bore the name Quick wasn’t an irony I understood as a child. In an almost classical sense (Thales, Heraclitus), though, it suggested to an impressionable young mind that life and death aren’t as separate as we might assume. The graves taught me their lesson of time and timelessness. Every summer, my first job was to place flags behind the gravestone of each veteran. The only way to identify them was to read the stone. The oldest grave in the Quick Cemetery belonged to the man who owned the deed, General John Cantine, who fought in the Revolutionary War, and died in 1808. Gravestones are strange texts. Some fade over time, lichen growing on the face of the rock, the once sharp-etched letters grown soft, as a youthful face softens in age. Others sheer off as shale does and announce only anonymity. A name is a thing that fades. As a little boy, I’d place a small American flag behind each veteran’s stone, never in front. It’s an image that haunts me only now, that the flag men pursued into death follows them forever after.

A steep, gray-gravel drive leads up to the cemetery, standing higher than the land around it, on a rise. The whole of it is circled by pine trees my grandfather planted with his father. The oldest part of the cemetery holds the family plot and those of other families long-rooted in the area. My grandfather would point out a large tomb that once had a stone angel on it, long since toppled over. He told me he came out there with friends one drunken college night, to dig up the grave and steal the gold rings off the skeleton’s fingers. The image thrilled me so much I never asked if the story were true. When the old cemetery filled, a new section opened: larger but bare of towering trees, with little shade for the shades, and in it, my grandmother’s family plot—the Palmers. And when this section filled, a final one opened. My grandfather and I would inch the pickup slowly around the drive, circling these three sections, and when we got to the back where the newest stones were—multicolored and laser-etched with images of babies and angels and deer—he’d swear a blue streak at how awful the world had become, staring down the hill at the fields below, at rolls of hay waiting to be sold.  

At the far edge of the cemetery, near the shed where the mowers are kept, the woods start again in earnest: East Coast woods, deciduous and dark, ivy covering the ground. Go into the woods, where a gentle slope slowly, then suddenly, grows steeper, until you have to hold onto the trunks of young trees to stay upright—they bend as if you’re holding a rope. Then you finally see what you’ve been hearing all along: the river that cuts through the valley, digging it always deeper, narrowing and quickening as it gets to the falls.

Depression seems a kind of open grave, or so I’ve thought some mornings, looking into my father’s Lazarus eyes. And as we work our way through these calamitous months, my mind often drifts to the home my father has left behind, those woods I tromped through in summer and snow; a bright orange salamander in the creek. The swim hole at the defunct mill and the deep pool under the falls where, should you hold your breath, dive, and take two strokes, you’d emerge in a cavern, hidden from the world behind the fallen, falling veil of water—the white thunder deafens the ears.

These memories have almost no order. Nothing exactly triggers them. In November, flames in a fireplace here in Colorado evoke the smoke from a brush pile burning on Landon Road—and there it is, should I simply look up and over: the hickory tree my grandfather loved, whose nuts he gathered, hammering away at them in the attic while Cornell football whined through the transistor radio. Years after his death, that tree was struck by lightning but survived; later yet, my dad sent me a cellphone photo of the tree, now with a weird circle of blue sky in the middle of its trunk, a hole piercing all the way through the heartwood.

After my grandparents died, twenty years ago now, my father and I went through the endless boxes. In one, we found a sepia-toned photo of a young woman, and on the back, written in brown-ink cursive: Lettie Quick. I walked with the photo from my dad’s home to the cemetery, the Quick plot where, on a large four-sided stone, I found her name, her early death, and something of the story—that she died on a train ride to New York City for the ceremony unveiling the Statue of Liberty in October 1886. The stone says she fell from the train as it entered a tunnel; family lore is that she jumped. In the earliest days of my father’s depression, he’d often say he wished he was dead. I never knew what to say in response, not knowing in the end exactly what liberty is.

A beekeeper kept four apiaries in these woods. The bees flew off to the fields of alfalfa and clover. The bobolink sang from the growing hay a silver song, a yellow circle like a sun behind his head. Is that liberty? Or is liberty that the bees returned, legs heavy with pollen, and in the forest made their dark honey? Sometimes the whole duration of place exists in memory all at once, mocking the ease of our tenses, as if the past and the present and the future aren’t, in the end, all the same thing; as if each isn’t, always and forever, predicting the existence of the others; as if the future isn’t right now foreseeing the past. I remember I was stung once in the woods, and how badly I felt about cherishing the only words that would comfort me: that now the bee, stinger gone, would fly off and die.

Now he says that he wants to live again; he says it like he’s asking a question.

Love is occult.

I think I only mean by that gnomic claim that something about love’s nature is buried underground in a specific place. The seed predicts the pine predicts the cone predicts the—

    —boy picking up the cones with his grandfather
    —from pines his grandfather planted with his father
    —throwing the cones in a 5-gallon pail
    —boy putting the red F150 in drive to pull a little bit forward
    —grandfather cursing the pines he himself planted
    —“these fucking trees”
    —grandfather who got polio long ago
    —iron lung
    —a dead nerve in his right eye
    —currants so bitter a berry
    —meant one eye was always crying