Mary Hood

Why Stop?

        Si monumentum requiris,circumspice.
                               —Wren

THERE IS AN ESSENTIAL HUMAN ICHOR OF AWE, an instinct for reverence, a gracious sap which rises in us seasonally and flowers into devotions and wreaths. “Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.” Goon indeed. Every sap has its sucker. SEE THE CONTINENTAL DIVIDE IN ACTION, the billboard in the Rockies invites. The parking lot is not empty. (When one sparrow decides to bathe, they all splash in.) Yet whether we queue up at the thronged-in-August, hell-hot gates of Graceland, candle and rose in hand, “the blisful holy martir for to seke,” or shiver alone on the wintry bleak summit of the Kill Devil Hills contemplating the Wright brothers who may have climbed the dune as we did but found quite another way down, it is all one expression of that wayfaring urge, now sublime, now ridiculous, which must not be confused with religious piety—whose zeal seeks the soul’s perpetuation in a timeless future; homage, on the other hand, cherishes endurance of mortal report—fame—and acknowledges the past’s claims upon us. We raise memorials against oblivion, not death. Death is, to the makers of monuments and pilgrimages, but one more occasion.
    Apparently, any occasion will do. Near Jamestown, North Dakota, broods the world’s largest concrete buffalo (three stories). South Dakota, not to be outdone, has erected a forty-foot-tall fiberglass pheasant. Although these monuments of civic pride stand in somewhat out-of-the-way places, seekers find them, eager to feel themselves dwarfed in the sweep of those great manmade shadows. The mood is festive, more aw shucks than awe. Yet even when a monument may have originally honored some historic glory beyond its place and pile, it can ultimately win its own fame as a landmark which travelers seek, not for the spirit of its intention or any love of history, but for itself alone, because it’s there. The brochures and one’s neighbors and coworkers label this sort a “must see” for no other reason than that many have seen it. Such a pilgrimage risks devolving into merest tourism. Still, if touring—travel for curiosity and recreation—is reverence’s lowest expression, at worst a Pavlovian response to report of marvel or infamy, at least it is motion, and at best it offers some poignancy, if not poetry, to be recollected in whatever tranquillity the post-vacation letdown affords. At times we are moved only to laughter on the scene, out of embarrassment, perhaps, at our being there at all, yet who would willingly miss an Alabama meteorite as long as it first missed us? Is not the Cardiff giant—ten-and-a-half feet of midwestern gypsum sleeping in a Cooperstown museum—more popular now in his exposure to ridicule than ever he was when first exposed to light?
    “Was this here then?” asks a child at the top of the San Jacinto monument in Texas, staring down at the curried swale where Sam Houston, that tough old bird, caught his worm by rising early. Tourists are all children at history’s knee, begging for some snatch of song or scrap of idea to play with. Though all the world’s a stage, we prefer the sideshow. “I know not,” said Rasselas, “what pleasure the sight of the catacombs can afford; but since nothing else is offered, I am resolved to view them, and shall place this with many other things which I have done because I would do something.”
    Even now, in Providence, lines are forming to view the root of the apple tree which consumed Roger Williams in his grave. They say it curved around his skull, grew straight down his spine, branched for arms and legs, and turned up at his feet. “I’ll believe that when I see it,” we scoff, already loading the camera and car, keen to meddle ourselves in legend; like so many Mandevilles and Marco Polos, we’ll bring home proof in our trunk. In Kodachrome: WE WERE THERE.
    “Fame is proof that people are gullible,” Emerson warns all pilgrims. But what cynic could fail to share the curator’s pride in the key exhibit of the Jimmie Rodgers Museum in Mississippi, The Singing Brakeman’s simple iron bedstead: “Over a hundred years old so far at least.” For the small toll of admission we may wander around for hours, studying the trainman’s guitar, signal flags, oilcan, cap, his wife’s red dress, and the ordinary postal scale with which he weighed his replies to fan mail. We walk out into the present tense as though waking from a tender dream. And though roadside museums can offer the traveler the greatest opportunity for disappointment or suffocation, there yet remain these surprises and satisfactions, reminders that the quotidian has its charms and adventures.

LOOK WHAT’S HIDING
IN YOUR CUPBOARD!

urges an enthusiast’s placard in the rice museum in Crowley, Louisiana. At an Acadian shrine a candid genius loci has scrawled this caveat:

Yes we have
mosquitoes we
don’t give re-
funds.

   Sometimes the spirit of a place “gives out glory, sometimes its little light must be sought to be seen,” Eudora Welty notes of her own sorties down byroads. And sometimes, “generations have trod, have trod, have trod,” as at San Juan Capistrano, where the returning swallows gull the punctual busloads in, to squint through lenses at those twittering walls and then further stretch their credulity and legs in the SACRED GIFT SHOP, whose harried clerks are more expert at making change than small talk.
    Disappointment, from time to time, plagues every pilgrim. The shrine may be closed for the afternoon, or the week, or the duration. Roads and rivers may have altered course and given the lie to the sincerest maps. Rustic parlors suffer urbane renewals and portraits enjoy retouchings with a glossy wink toward beauty rather than authenticity. Mice and moss invade and creep. The arbors sags. The cobbles sleep under layers of asphalt. The jambs and sills of a birthplace may glower too low to have ever framed our heroes. Legend lengthens stature until truth cannot keep up. Doubts creep in with the unforecast rains. The winds and attendants may be contrary. One’s will, or train, or diligence, may falter. In short, “I have not the memory of Chinon,” as Henry James sighs on his little tour in France, “I have only the regret.” The most eagerly anticipated romantic tumults can eventuate as mere drips; honeymooners have been stranded high and dry at Niagara when for reasons of civil engineering the falls are shut down as though a tap had been turned. Authorized biographies and lyrical guidebooks may prove fiction or trumpery, and the reality leaves us unabashed and cold. “If the house is small the tablet is very big,” Henry James observes on that same tour, when viewing the birthplace of Lamartine. We may either give up the hunt, or become stoics. “Do I fail to find in the place to which I go the things that were reported to me? ... I do not regret my pains,” shrugs Montaigne; “I have learned that what was told me was not there.”
    If you seek a monument, look around, Sir Christopher Wren advises us from his grave. Even the most cursory glance around harvests treasures of homage. We honor Liberty, Justice, and the Boll Weevil with shrines of perpetual glory. We similarly remind the world of the site of the birth of the first English child in America, and upon the National Honor Roll list the date of the first live birth in an airplane. Lest we forget, earmuffs were patented in 1877, and the ball point pen is having its centenary. There is a museum for moonshiners in Georgia and one for sponge divers in Florida. Besides labor, we celebrate rest: the hammock in South Carolina, rock skipping in Michigan and California.
    When it seems as though no one else will, we honor ourselves. There was a ton or so of granite ordered carved and shipped south, the story goes, by a homesick native son relocated in the Midwest. When the shoulder-high marker arrived by freight on the L&N rail, was no one left alive in his native place to know and honor the man’s beau geste? Did his patriotic love go unclaimed? Or was it simply too daunting a task, too monumental a labor in horse-andbuggy days, easier to offload it and set it there, rather than try to trundle it overland to its intended homesite? Gentle mystery surrounds it even today. It stands facing west behind the superannuated Holly Springs depot—trains don’t stop there any more, and the kudzu gropes yearly nearer—in Cherokee County, Georgia. Its journey over, it has for almost a century announced to the setting sun

Birthplace of
Julian M. Hughes
Feby. 3. 1860

    Mr. Hughes is famous for his having been born, if not for his poem. But perhaps the most cherished and lively posterities are reserved to fortune's children who have surprised and surpassed local custom in martyrdom for love. Every hamlet has its lovers’ leap, or lane, or oak; its Frankie and Johnnie; its Helen or Romeo; the Hatfields and McCoys even tried for a second Troy. When Longfellow invented Evangeline and Gabriel, he could not have imagined that Dolores Del Rio would pose for the statue, or that it would be erected facing Bayou Teche a few paces from where the actual Evangeline (Emmeline Labiche) lies buried in the churchyard. The real story is sadder than poetry. (Isn’t that what lovers always learn?) And then there is that bull moose in New England who became enthralled with a dairy cow; in all weathers he guarded her—lovelorn, dignified, loyal—the very exemplar of Longfellow’s “affection that hopes, and endures, and is patient;” and didn’t the country lanes clog with the traffic of pilgrims who wanted to pay their respects to that enchanted fool?
    That nine days’ wonder brought out the best in us; we didn’t seek to disillusion the moose, or ride by to jeer at his amazing valentine. We cheered. But if fame can elicit the finest of our instincts, it can also draw forth the worst. Milton calls the fever for fame the “last infirmity of noble mind.” And it is true that a man who will not take the slightest steps to alter his pace of living to prevent illness will run long risks to assure remembrance; in fact, he may be stimulated by the notion of death, though not craving its early sting—“Fame is the spur”—to raise advertisements to it thereafter. Didn’t Cheops close the temples and exhaust four hundred thousand Egyptians in his service annually for a decade, merely to construct the smooth approaches to his future tomb? The pyramid itself required twenty years more to build. Cheops must have been as shrewd as he was determined, to know to begin early and live long, to keep alert till that bed was made, when so many could have rested if he’d slept sooner.
    According to Herodotus, one wall of the tomb bears a grudging inscription complaining how much garlic, onions, and radishes the slaves on that project consumed. Cheops’s expenses, beyond greengroceries and even with forced labor, were so staggering that he ordered his daughter into a brothel to procure by her own industry “a certain sum—how much I cannot say, for I was not told”—the historian modestly confesses. By her monumental exertions the daughter—who had begun to lust for a pyramid of her own—exacted from each client not only her father’s levied tribute, but also the gift of a building stone for herself. Thus, one by one she laid the foundations, one-hundred-and-fifty feet along each side, of her own tomb. The work was completed in her lifetime, or as the perpetual care salesmen call it nowadays, “pre-need.” Is there something as interesting as radishes, onions, and garlic inscribed on her deathchamber? Herodotus does not mention it.
    Fashions in tombs and inscriptions—and in monuments and literature—have changed over time. Yet from the beginning, we can be sure, there were both events and ways to remember. “... Before the music, there were drums,” Eudora Welty reminds us, in "Some Notes on River Country." Before there were alphabets and tools to carve them, there were the mute stones, to be shouldered upright, single, slow-weathering, massive, or accreted, toss on toss, into sun-bleached cairns. The stones are all that last long, say the Cheyenne. “When people pass and remember, they bring stones,” Paco explains in Harriet Doerr’s novel, Stones for Ibarra, voicing the primitive principle of reverence and respect which allows the most awful historic catastrophe to be witnessed in human perspective and sympathy, and claimed on a personal level. It is no longer a vainglorious and Kilroy boast of “I was there.” It becomes rather a humble gesture of inclusion, present tense, a comprehension and admission of decent and deep kinship. According to myth, Fame is the last child of Mother Earth, brought forth in anguish at the deaths of her sons. Whether we chase it in granite or sandstone or marble, fame is the quarry. Quisque Ibarra lapidenda est we might say; every Ibarra must have its stones. Considered in this way, remembrance is an act of mercy, as is burying the dead.
    Monumental fashions ever change, reflecting the tastes—now sober, now giddy—of the era. Sir Christopher Wren, rebuilding St. Paul’s after the Great Fire, got the dead back on their feet, preferring his nobles upright, rather than reclining upon stone biers, under their own effigies, guarded by fabulous beasts and antic angels. Vengeances and jests abound; in Paris, Napoleon’s eternal couch is so framed that all who approach must bow. Emerson’s marker is an elephantine and unpolished hunk of pinkish rock; Thoreau’s, in the same Massachusetts cemetery, is a plain tablet, ankle-high, announcing simply HENRY. The Victorians had, perhaps, the most generally elaborate funerary furnishings since the Chinese emperors and the Pharaohs. No expense nor word nor feeling was spared; if there lacked wit, in these public performances and reminders, there was not room for it. Handkerchiefs were larger then, also.
    But even before Victoria's reign and storm of tears, perhaps since the beginning of messages on stone, a certain uncandor has canted the proceedings. Cum grano salis ought to be the motto of the churchyard pilgrim, and the statue-gazer and battlefield stalker. “In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath,” Samuel Johnson cautions. All the sweet old protocols and decorums of hero-making and worship failed in the aftershock of World War I. Literature and the survivors have been dusting off the fallout ever since. While valor had its finest hour, glory had its worst. On Peace Day, 1919, Virginia Woolf wrote, “I can’t help listening to speaking as though it were writing and thus the flowers, which {were} brandished now and again, look terribly artificial.... a melancholy thing to see the incurable soldiers lying in bed at the Star and Garter with their backs to us, smoking cigarettes and waiting for the noise to be over.”
    There have been wars since, never a day in this century when there was not armed conflict somewhere on earth, but in the English-speaking world, stone has latterly learned a new bluntness and integrity, as has literature, and—intermittently— politics. That frankness achieves as well as honors heroic moments, as though truth and emotion finally have found a lasting, living style. The minimalist tendency to offer the anguished facts and allow the seeker to supply the emotional caption has culminated in a stark and dark modern monument, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a black wall furnished with no rhetoric, simply the names and dates, row on row, achieving, below ground level, the monitory and pathetic impact of that archaic epitaph on a Greek clifftop: When my ship sank, the others sailed on.
    Perhaps the pendulum is already swinging back, and our memorials, unsparing and spare, will once again costume themselves to honor the drama of history. If old ways may return, new ways might also be discovered to make some statement mocking transience. Already, for a price, one may have one’s ashes rocketed into space, to be outward bound forever, or till the stars fail. That’s about as far as any pilgrim can go: Hic jacet for speed readers; “urn buriall” at the velocity of light.
    On earth, in pioneer days, it was unusual to have surveyors at one's beck and call; landowners did their best to locate and abide by the boundaries and landmarks mentioned in their grant deeds. To assure that the bounds, once agreed upon, wouldn’t alter, the settler would take his sons—to whom the land would pass at his death—and stand them at the corners of the lots and sections, near some memorable natural marker, or if none existed, a stone hauled in on a leather sling behind an ox; the child was beaten and left there alone all day, to watch and absorb his surroundings. No water, no food. The ordeal was repeated, day by day, corner by corner. It was a common enough practice to have a name: “beating the bounds.” The purpose was to engrave by suffering and privation and the child’s eager willingness to please his elders, the exact location of the corners and lines upon the youth's impressionable memory. He would indelibly have a mental map of what was his to claim. He would know his limits. He would be able to recognize, in all weathers and seasons—for after the boundaries were learned, they were patrolled from time to time, to check for incursion or erosion—what was rightfully his to cherish, and how precious it was, for it had been both earned, and learned, by blood.
    Pilgrims make the same journeys and suffer similar ordeals, though the boundaries are less clear, and larger, and the patrols longer. We find out by patience and witness who we are, where we belong, how much we hold in common with the rest of humanity. Sometimes there is but a rubble; at other tunes incised and magnificent stones speak to us, invite us to stop and look around. Sometimes we must suffer to find it; at other times we lose our way, confuse one place for another, or miss our exit. We must try again. “Have I left anything behind me unseen? I go back to see it; it is always in my way,” says Montaigne, who knew the joys of taken pains.
    There is a directory published by Lone Star Legends-you may purchase it in the gift shop at the Alamo—which advertises that near Corulla, Texas, twenty-five miles southeast of farm/market road 468 on private property—GATES LOCKED we are warned—there is a historical marker celebrating the fact that “O. Henry came to Fort Ewell for his mail.” Who would not detour many anxious miles over washboard or desolate roads to relish that or any such legend in cast bronze in its own natural context? However, the editors of the directory point out on the back cover, "This book is published so that you can read the inscriptions on 2,850 Texas roadside historical markers without having to stop. You will not only save time but also be rewarded with knowledge...." The guidebook—a menu of morsels to whet any pilgrim’s appetite—is poignantly titled Why Stop?
    Why stop? As Satchmo answered, when asked to define jazz, if you’ve gotta ask, you’re never gonna know.

“Why Stop?” first appeared in our Winter 1988 issue and was selected for reprint in The Best American Essays 1989.

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