October Scares
a brief departure from strictly golf posts
It was that time around dusk when it feels like night if you walk underneath a canopy of trees – and if you remain under those trees for long enough, when you come out it will be fully nighttime. After having surveyed the damage that the 90 foot red oak did to my back fence when its potential energy became kinetic energy, I needed to see what harm had come to the Pilgrims Rest Cemetery which occupies several acres just beyond my back fence over a small brush-filled ditch. I slipped out to my truck quietly not wanting any of my children to volunteer to ride along (something I usually welcome). I told myself that I was not sure what I might find, because it was true, but mostly because it made me feel that suspenseful energy that you don’t often feel as an adult. Most of the suspenseful energy we feel as adults is the real stuff that talk to counselors about. The fun kind is suspense gets lost when you stop doing things like playing hide-and-seek as a child.
Do you remember as a kid when you might venture hiding in a place that you would ordinarily never go alone, but because you were playing a game, those kinds of nooks and crannies became ideal hideouts. Though you wanted the seekers to never find you, you wanted them to get just close enough to be able to hear them and thus not feel so alone amidst the spiders and the darkness that in any other scenario would have kept you far from the custody of such a creepy enclosure.
Anyway, that is the kind of energy that I was enjoying when I decided to go “check things out.” What I found was that many of the burial sites nearest my back fence featured concrete boxes that served as vaults for the coffins. Some of the headstones on the other graves were dated in the 1800s and the ground seemed soft and uneven. I have learned that these concrete vaults had become useful both to deter grave robbery and to firm up the soft southern Louisiana earth less than 3 miles from the banks of the Mississippi. The gravestones were old, and the trees were old, and now one of those old trees had fallen down collecting a few adjacent pine trees resulting a web of intertwined branches and vines of all manner of springtime vegetation. Maybe the ultimate hide-here-but-hope-someone-stays-close location.
I noticed that one of these concrete vaults lay just under what looked like an elbow of a huge tree branch that was maybe the circumference of a paint can but thicker at the joint. As you would expect, the concrete had been compromised but it was too dark to see what lie beneath. I crept in that direction carefully avoiding branches and headstones training my flashlight alternately on the tangle before me and the concrete impact zone. I knew nothing of these concrete burial boxes, but I let my imagination run wild. What is in there? Should I be doing this? Will the coffin be just beneath the broken concrete? Is there a coffin at all? Has it rotted through the years, surely it has, if it was wood? How old is it?
After grabbing and shaking a nearby branch to determine its weight tolerance, I held it tightly and leaned sideways, craning my neck for a better view. I could not quite get the flashlight beam into the cracks, so I took one more step to put me just close enough, but not too close. Just as my second foot joined my first foot on its unknown surface – the surface gave way. It turns out that the sure footing I had established in order to see into the vault was another cracked concrete vault. I was instantly (though very briefly) shin deep in a grave, at night, alone in the Louisiana darkness. I am 60% sure that I yelled a combination of words that ought never cross the mind (let alone the lips) of your presbyterian minister. The other 40% of me thinks that I might have opened my mouth and no sound came out at all. I felt like a Saturday morning cartoon character, my legs churning and spinning at full speed in mid-air hoping to engage the ground beneath to commence my escape. Within an instant (that felt like an eternity) I was in my truck and back around the corner in my driveway taking deep breaths to allow my heart settle to a reasonable bpm before I eased back in through our garage door to speak nothing of these events to anyone. It is amazing how immediately we can become content to never satisfy the curiosity for the questions that we feel almost duty bound to answer just minutes before, by something as simple as experiencing abject terror for about 3 full seconds.