burying ground

one day pretty far back, historically speaking, the good folks of the city of new york looked around and realized the wells they'd dug and the rivers and springs on their skinny island were browner and dirtier and more full of typhoid and the like than they'd been before. they'd been making do with beer and whiskey and tea, but that will only go so far. you can't have a big city without any fresh water and a city on an island in the ocean doesn't have as many choices as it might if it found itself elsewhere. so the city did what must have seemed like a reasonable thing at the time. it began a process of impounding water from on up the way, up in the mountains of the mainland where the city didn't think too many people were using it. after all, who on earth would want to live up in the middle of nowhere when they could live in a fancy city on an island? especially when you factor in all that whiskey.

impounding is basically the lassoing of water into big piles in one place for quick and easy use in another place. because water is water, these piles came about when the city built dams along parts of the upland rivers, creating spectacular snaky lakes sitting high above the valleys originally carved by those slithers of water. the first damming happened more than a hundred and fifty years ago and the most recent happened four years before i was born. the water reached up and stretched out tendrilly fingers all over the land in valleys, smoothing out the lowlands and reflecting the mountains pretty enough the city folks even began to be proud of themselves for creating a resort scene up there where there had only been cows and bears before.

but you have to know that all those lassoed and harnessed wild waters surely had little towns snuggled all up against them, dot after tiny dot along the ribbony valleys before the waters rose up. and when the city decided how tall they'd need the water to be in each valley, they took away all the towns sitting below the line they decided on. that's right. took them right off the maps. some towns relocated whole and entire up on the banks of the new water. some didn't. but at the edges of the water where the towns used to be there are signs. former site of olive. former site of arena. and before they left, the folks in all those tiny places had to dig up their buried ancestors and take them to higher ground. there are things you just don't think about until you're in the middle of them.

whole groups of dead and buried folks, alone and clustered by name, were packed up and moved from every one of those little towns. arena, brewer, cannonsville, cat hollow, duffy, edgett, granton, old arena, rock rift, rock royal,  shavertown, union grove, wakeman. the water came up and buried the land and the trees and the roads to where things used to be. and a whole bunch of those dead whose families could not be found were carted off to a hillside just north of the water, west of the shavertown bridge, settled back again by what family they had with them underground at the time, and then town by town they were replotted, remapped.

you can see the history of the valleys right there on that hillside. the names of people that have given themselves over to be the names of towns. lamb after lamb across the stones of child after child living and then quickly dying in a time when a cough could mean losing half a family. masons and farmers and soldiers from the civil war. some stones weathered away to nothing because people had been living in those valleys so long and quietly burying their dead near enough by to visit from time to time. a few stones are set into the earth facing backward to all the others in their rows. there are small plugs of cement with metal signs skewered into the ground above the empty grass in some places with names typed onto white paper encased in plastic.

and those stones, markers for boxes of dust and bones, sit there on the side of the mountain. you can stand there in the middle of all of them and look out onto that valley below. you can't see it from where you stand at the edge of the clean lawn, but just beneath those trees is that lake glittering with impounded water.