The Headstone Brigade

(Continued from p. 89) overgrown nook of West Haven, Vermont. Three of the cemeteries were complete—notably Galick, “the gem”—and the remaining two would be dealt with before the ground froze in November. If righting a lone wronged stone at St. Peter’s produced a distinct albeit mysterious buzz, what might it feel like to draw a whole pioneer neighborhood back from the thickety brink, the green-smothered beyond?

We met on Sunday morning at the end of a narrow, potholed road tracing the undeveloped southeastern shoreline of Lake Champlain. “A team of us put in 10 days last spring,” Trutor said, pointing to a short, steep slope of jumbled rocks and dense vegetation atop which sat our destination, a clearing that glowed faintly golden inside the murky woods. “We had to rig a cable zipline between a tree up there and a vehicle down here to haul 75-pound buckets of sure-pack, saws and picks and plywood, tons of supplies, and now, you’ll see, it’s the most beautiful cemetery in Vermont, and no, that’s not an unbiased assessment.” He chuckled, shaking his bald head, rubbing his white beard. “I’ll praise the next one we work on the same, but with Galick, oh, I’m having withdrawals.”

In my humble opinion, Trutor, an engineer from Burlington, missed his calling. He struck me as a natural teacher, breathlessly enthusiastic, hugely dedicated (four-hour round-trip commute to West Haven), detail-oriented, armed with handouts, miscellaneous pages photocopied from Rutland County Cemetery Inscriptions. In the ’80s and ’90s, the legendary Margaret Jenks documented 200plus cemeteries in 27 towns, including Galick, where she found just a pair of stones standing. That pair was still erect—well, leaning at opposing 45-degree angles—when Trutor and company, wearing jeans and leather gloves, arrived 20ish years later with the West Haven Cemetery Commission’s blessing. (Note that VOCA’s Nicole Vecchi, from Wilder, Vermont, has uploaded photographs of a whopping 45,000 headstones and monuments to the popular website findagrave.com, rivaling Jenks’s fanaticism.)

“Galick was gone ,” Trutor said, launching into a sketch of invasive honeysuckle tangles, eight-inch-diameter ashes clutching scattered chunks of marble with their roots, stones that slid 15 feet from the original placement, stones in 10 pieces, stones lost deep underground that had to be located by probing with a metal rod. He shook his head and rubbed his beard again— without the chuckle. “It was a disaster.”

Trutor had notified Team Galick that we’d be visiting, and several of the key players awaited us in the cemetery: Jamey Greenough (VOCA member from Queensbury, New York), Elaine and Dave McDevitt (Nature Conservancy caretakers), and Paul Laramie (Trutor’s brother-in-law). Though the team’s bond was the result of this single project, the atmosphere was jovial, chummy, like a reunion of college buddies, jokes and reminiscences galore. Seven weeks earlier they had finished Galick. Today’s gathering was a victory lap, the task to relax and enjoy.

That task was easily accomplished because, as advertised, the cemetery was beautiful, a pocket-size park with a giant black walnut growing in the middle, leaf shadows patterning rows of intricately engraved headstones, cardinals flashing red in the canopy. The Nature Conservancy preserve was genuinely wild, a patchwork of swamps and cliffs and creased hills, prime habitat for falcons, rattlesnakes, bobcats, and ticks, and it would have been wilder yet in the late 18th century when Elnathan Benjamin settled the land after marching in the French and Indian War. His headstone was the oldest in Galick (d. 1813) and, oddly, one of the two that wasn’t destabilized by burrowing rodents, trampled by a cow, tossed by wind, busted by expanding ice, or otherwise disturbed.

Starting with Elnathan, I counted outward, tallying 26 proper carved tablets and more than 100 anonymous fieldstones, the uncut, unadorned grave markers of the indigent, presumably sourced from a nearby erod- ing crag. Small mossy cobbles and small rough-edged shards, they commemorated Irish immigrants who succumbed to “ship’s fever” while traveling south from Quebec. I consulted Margaret Jenks’s write-up: “Unable to pay for funerals (many lived in makeshift shelters among piles of lumber in the lumberyards at Whitehall Harbor), to say nothing of headstones, they were often buried unceremoniously in this graveyard.”

So Galick was a potter’s field, too? In Vergennes, Jeff Bostwick and I had discussed “homework assignments”— how a cemetery begets a stone, a stone begets an Internet search, an Internet search begets a jaunt to the library, a jaunt to the library begets a cemetery, onward and onward, forever. I was suddenly surrounded by enigmas, by possibilities, by imagined stories. “Each of these was a life,” Trutor said with a sweeping gesture, expressing my thought aloud. “That’s a pyramid to me, and that’s a pyramid to me, and that’s a pyramid to me,” he continued, extending the thought in a surprising direction. “Pharaohs had money is all.”

The morning passed quickly with debates on the merits of D/2 versus Wet & Forget, speculation about Emily Shovah and Hannah Phippennee and Emerson Soles and the rest of the Benjamin clan, and silences when the epitaphs softly spoke ( As you are now so wonce was i / As i am now so you must be). Finally, I posed the unavoidable question: Why this blister-inducing hobby, this painstaking rehabilitation? The answers were sincere and predictable—exercise, friendship, exploration, studying a dynamic landscape, confronting time, facing mortality, “straightening the crooked picture frame,” learning, respect—and as they stacked up in my notebook, I realized that they were, to borrow the philosopher’s phrase, necessary but insufficient. They were explanations subsequent to action, language imposed on an inarticulate urge. I realized that, basically, there was no answer. Shadows trembled. Cardinals sang. Bellies grumbled for lunch. Little left to say, but Trutor said it perfectly: “I’m unsure why we’re here. We’re trying to make a contribution in this way, but what the contribution amounts to—I dunno.”

The honesty of I dunno , the unabashed absurdity of it, brought to mind the great poem by Robinson Jeffers, “To the Stone-cutters,” which begins, “Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated / Challengers of oblivion….” Jeffers argues that despite the inevitable erasure, the ultimate amnesia, the nonnegotiable fact that humans are minuscule and fleeting (and ditto our creations), “fighting time with marble”—or with chainsaw and two-part epoxy and toothbrush?—is simply our lot. We balance meaning and meaninglessness. We construct stuff and maintain stuff. Noses to the grindstone of futility, we persist. Caitlin Abrams, a millennial from West Rupert, Vermont, has amassed 2.7 million fans on TikTok not by sharing videos of silly dances, but by sharing videos of cleaning headstones. VOCA members reside in 35 states, and similar organizations exist in Maine, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin. “Challengers of oblivion” are widespread, evidently. The appeal, the allure, is real, indisputable. I suspect Robinson Jeffers and Leon Dean would have hit it off.

As I drove north from West Haven on familiar Route 22A that afternoon, my brain was spinning—nay, tingling —senses pricked, alert to churches whizzing by the windows and, moreover, to soggy gulches, rolling meadows, piney ridges. Vermont has approximately 2,000 cemeteries on the books, but there are innumerable five-stone plots tucked in the hollows, in the brush, in the duff— obscure memorials frequented only by squirrels and chickadees, rowdy snowstorms and muted sunrises. Repeatedly, I was tempted to pull to the shoulder, tighten my shoelaces, and bushwhack, walk and walk and walk, until I tripped on something hidden, something vivid and intriguing.

Why the temptation, the urge, the fantasy to unearth a piece of oblivion?

I heard Barry Trutor’s voice, and for now that will do: I dunno

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