In the spirit of John Green’s book of the same title, our theme for the month of October is “the Anthropocene reviewed.” Writers were asked to review and rate some facet of human experience on a five-star scale.
Out of all the parks in Grand Rapids, one of my favorites is a quiet green space on the southeast side of town. Its ambling paths are lined with towering white pines, punky spruces, and flowering dogwoods. Stones dot the landscape, giving texture to the smooth greenery of well manicured grass. Benches are common there, and most other park-goers aren’t in a hurry; it’s always been a pretty restful place when I visited.
Yes this park is, in fact, a graveyard with a thriving population of the deceased. It’s one of those graveyards people are just dying to get into. More than just a spot for your next long (final?) nap, graveyards have a lot to offer us living folk.
Birding
Believe it or not, cemeteries are local hotspots for spotting birds. Large, well-fertilized trees provide excellent habitat. The grounds are quiet allowing birds to communicate and establish breeding boundaries. House cats, a bird’s suburban arch nemesis, are barred from entry or kept on humiliating leashes. The birds are present, and the bird watchers flock. The thick brush of an ornamental spruce makes for perfect roosting for owls, and the headstones are favored by ground-loving, skulky wrens. One bird aficionado even recorded the first ever description of an Olive-sided Flycatcher in a cemetery. You never know, you could be the next to find a never-before-recorded species in a cemetery! But don’t sweat it, it’s just birding—it isn’t life or death.
Driving Lessons
Learning to drive in a cemetery is a life hack on par with pressure cooking meats and peeling a banana from the bottom. First off, it’s a low-risk space since most of the people there are already dead. Second, the roads are usually one-way so there’s no need to worry about oncoming traffic. Often there’s topographic change, which is great for learning hilly ascents and descents, and the roads usually have a gentle curve to them. I learned to drive in a cemetery and it worked out great, except to this day I regularly get honked at for going too slow; cemetery-learned drivers make for slow, steady drivers, who may or may not still bear the mental turmoil of having learned to drive surrounded by dead bodies.
History
Who doesn’t love history? In cemeteries, you’ve got the jackpot. Literally every person who has ever lived also died at some point, and many of the more recent ones ended up in cemeteries—so you’ve got a lot of fodder to work with. Cemetery tours can be a great way to see into the past of a place through the headstones. Visit a famous person’s grave and reflect on their life’s work. Thinking this way about a historical person can help put things into perspective; you can see what really mattered from their life in the end and ruminate on what really matters in yours. Or pull a card from the deck of the New England Saints interim trip and visit the graves of famous authors. Then, next time you read their work, you’ll be able to put a headstone to a name.
There are countless ways to spend quality time in a graveyard. There are, however, some activities you may want to shy away from, like treasure hunting or hole digging of any sort, really. And if you’ve got a strong fear of zombies, well, graveyards would be the place to not be in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, so maybe it is just best to avoid spending extraneous time there.
And though they’re relaxing spaces, spaces you might want to stay for a while, don’t get too comfortable in graveyards. Moving in can be quite a process, and rent ain’t cheap; it’ll cost you an arm and a leg…heck, it’ll cost you your life.
I give graveyards five stars.
Jon Gorter (‘17) graduated from Calvin with degrees in English and environmental studies and holds an MS in natural resources from the University of Michigan. He enjoys fly fishing, mushroom foraging, and waterfall scrambling near his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
