My friend's house is off the two lane highway that leads out to the Pacific coast and just at the junction of a much smaller road where he lives are the remains of a very small town that has all but disappeared, except a one room school house that is now a local museum, a boarded up legion hall and a few other ancient 19th Century wooden buildings. High up on the western hill that over looks this once upon a time town are two huge palm trees.
We were driving back from Tomales and my friend told me to look up at this hill and try to guess what those Palm trees were doing there. He told me in advance I would never guess. I can't remember now what my guess was. Something about a faded resort or deserted mansion or some thing along those lines. So he drove me up the hill. My friend told me, I would be surprised. Indeed I was.
There at the top of the hill was an old grave yard. The palm trees marked one of the plots. We got out and wondered over to it. The mostly heavily weathered marble head stones had dates in the 1860s and 1870s. On one of the graves, the birth date was 1797. Some were large plots with fancy stone fences, some were very small, no larger than a book. The smaller ones were for children. There were many graves, probably more than a hundred, whole families were laid out side by side. These must have been the people who build this town, and the earliest dated graves were perhaps from the generation that founded it.
It was a bright late afternoon and there was a cold wind blowing straight off the Pacific, which we could see about ten miles away. It was strangely eerie and lonely. Of course from movies and photographs you would expect that. But what was unexpected was to be presented with these feelings as the immediate presence of the place. It was a total eclipse. These were the graves of the people who once lived in a town that was no longer there. Many of the graves that had stone covers that had collapsed under the weight of their covers and sunk below grade as the coffins had collapsed. The ground all around the place was lumpy with a closed cropped grass. It had been a open pasture at some point before someone had rebuilt the fence to keep the sheep and cows out. The gophers were having a field day..
After looking at names and recognizing a couple from the local road names in the empty town we started back to the car. There was huge a Monterey Pine growing by itself with no other trees around it. I thought it was odd, so I went up to it and looked at some of the large exposed roots. There was something white embbeded in the eastern side of the root system. It was a piece of marble that had been broken long ago. Just under it was another stone, not marble, maybe heavily weathered composite cement of some sort. I suddenly recognized what these two pieces that seemed to be pulled up into the roots and mostly grown into the base of the huge trunk were. They were the remainder of a small grave stone, the same size as those of the other children's graves.
I was struck dumb. Some one had buried their child there and had probably planted a little pine sapling next to it, as a sentimental gesture. Over more than a century, the tree had grown,and it was now a huge, massive tree that could be seen from the distant roadway more than a mile away. It had completely overgrown the grave, its stone and little ground setting, and continued to grow until these stones were incorporated into the lowest reaches of the trunk's embrace. Far from the prettiness of the original thought, it was now some thing almost virulent and rank, almost horrifying, and yet magnificent.
As I pointed out the stones in the tree trunk and their possible origin to my friend I felt forced to cover the intensity of my feelings and thoughts, and so I said, ``Gee Billy Bob, looks like little Josh has started to hit his growth spurt.'' We laughed.
Nothing could have been further from what I felt. I was in awe. I had focused on the Palm trees and their absurdity, and had not noticed the huge Monterey pine, over to one side. They are a common tree, usually seen further south or further north. But this particular stretch of coast near Tomales is mostly empty of trees except the ubiquious Eucalyptus which were planted as wind breaks and natural fencing along roads.
It was freezing in the late afternoon wind so we hurried back to the car and drove away.
CG