The long view.

"This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill."

     Robert Louis Stevenson, Requiem, 1887  

This blog began with a premise embedded in the name I gave it, UpClose with Peter Sage. 

I wanted to make a virtue out of watching presidential candidates up close in their presentations. I wanted direct observation of events. I wanted to be in traffic, amid the hustle. We are living in interesting times, and I thought that by being right there in the front row, watching something and writing about it that day, I would understand it better. 

College classmate Ben Beach caught my attention by saying he had prepared a guest post that he thought was appropriate for this blog. He said it was on cemeteries. What? But I caught his purpose. He pulls me out of the noisy moment and into a mental space measured in lives and centuries. 

I visit cemeteries and the graves of family and friends. The Eagle Point National Cemetery, set aside for veterans and their spouses, is beautiful and immaculate. It is orderly and quiet. Shipshape. Weed-free. Everything in its place.

The rows of headstones are set up in perfect alignment, straight in every direction, the way my vineyard rows are set up, posts aligned in every direction, on the land my dad grew up on and farmed and eventually turned over to me. Some of Dad's ashes are scattered everywhere at the farm. The army sent him off to Boston, then into the Battle of the Bulge in Europe. He survived it and made it back home where he longed to be.

Ben had a long career writing for The Wilderness Society. He began doing distance running in college and then over the next five decades he set a record for the most consecutive finishes in the Boston Marathon: 54. It was broken last year.

Guest Post by Ben Beach

As a teenager, when I had all the answers to society’s problems, I concluded that cemeteries were a waste of valuable space. These sprawling spaces could be baseball fields, for example. Our country should not devote another acre to such use.

Today, 60 years later, I believe I was dead wrong.

When were you last in a cemetery? I’m not what you’d call a “regular,” but I walk, run, or bike through a graveyard about once a month. I love the peace and quiet, nature’s greenness, the early dates on many headstones, and the art of those markers and the statues.

And the stories I imagine that the people underground could tell. Inventors could tell us about their aha moments. Detectives could explain how they cracked their toughest cases. Not to mention all the endearing love stories.

As I stroll through a cemetery, I am grateful for what everyone there contributed to building the country that we’re lucky enough to call home. Doctors, construction workers, soldiers, teachers, cops, electricians, and more.

In the beautiful Bethel Cemetery in my new hometown, Alexandria, Virginia, there’s a 12-foot-high monument that reads: “Erected to the memory of the Confederate dead of Alexandria by their surviving comrades. They died in the consciousness of duty faithfully performed.”

I try to put myself in the boots of those soldiers, some of them teenagers, marching off to battle from that very spot in 1861. Did they believe in the cause? Did they expect to return home? Were they witnesses to the carnage at Gettysburg, Antietam, Chickamauga?

I don’t have close relatives whose gravesites I can visit easily. My parents are buried outside the church in New York State that we attended way back when, and it would be a 300-mile trip. I have a friend whose wife died of cancer, and most mornings in the months after her death he’d go to her gravesite with a cup of coffee and a chair and read her the day’s newspaper. Nice.

My interest in cemeteries may flow in part from my affinity for the death-related rock ‘n’ roll songs of my youth. One rather obscure one, “Laurie” by Dickie Lee, tells of a boy who met Laurie at a dance and walked her home afterwards. She said it was her birthday and then that she was cold, so he gave Laurie his sweater. As the boy headed home, he remembered the sweater and went back to retrieve it. A man answered the door and said, “You’re wrong, son; you weren’t with my daughter. How can you be so cruel to come to me this way? She died a year ago today.”

Dickie Lee tells us that “a strange force” drew him to the graveyard and, yes, you guessed it, there was his sweater lying on Laurie’s grave. His conclusion? “Strange things happen in this world.”

Dickie Lee also gave us “Patches.” Other greats are “Last Kiss” by J. Frank Wilson, “Ebony Eyes” by the Everly Brothers, “Billy and Sue” by B. J. Thomas, and “Tell Laura I Love Her” by Ray Peterson. If I’ve left off your favorite, please forgive me.

What would those buried beneath our feet think if they were to walk out of their graves? Some might ask if Martin Van Buren had been reelected. Or if cars were still electric, as they were in the early days.

At age 76, I know that my days are numbered. Much as I’m drawn to these peaceful plots, especially those small patches along rural roads (often on family farms), I’ve told my wife and children that I think I’d make great compost.

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