Photo: Sam Battaglieri
There’s a hole in the side of a hill down the Old Wire Road in southwest Missouri called Ash Cave. As a kid, we passed that cave every time we drove into town. I recall it being unnerving. The unknown of the darkness was terrifying. Maybe it was all the Mark Twain I consumed as a kid, or just sheer curiosity, I still wanted to explore it. One day I finally got the nerve to walk the mile and a half down the creek to the cave entrance. Inside the first partially open room were the remains of a pickup truck. It had received the worst of someone's weekend revenge, little was left but a charred frame and shattered glass. The second room held candles arranged purposefully for some sort of ritual. I’ve spent more time in that small cavern since then, even slept in it a time or two. The opening is always more ominous and foreboding in my mind than it ever is in person. Somehow I’ve never been able to remove the dramatic view and meaning I gave it in my youth.
Concord Cemetery is nestled down a series of Barry County backroads. I’m not entirely confident I can find it by memory again, but I’m going to try soon. There were always deep cut ruts down the center of the last road. Thick red clay mixed with sharp jagged rocks protruding from the ground like they wanted to lay in the sun. At the end of that road sat a few dozen graves, some of which dated back before the Civil War. Many of the stones had fallen victim to time or vandalism. The cemetery also held numerous tales of ghostly experiences. Most of which can be heard about any other rural American graveyard, but youth is full of intrigue and quick emotions, and my friends and I certainly had the shit scared out of us at times.
A few years back I became blatantly aware of how much the cold Iowa winter wore me down. I’d luckily booked a tour down to Kentucky and back through St. Louis. The change in latitude was just enough to catch the first blooms of spring. This was yet weeks before Iowa would see it’s first signs of thaw and spring. I roamed the Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis for a few hours. Missouri writers and senators are buried there, as well as William Clark and Adolphus Busch. The sprawling grounds are kept immaculate, and you forget you’re standing between the Mississippi River and a major metropolitan area. Perhaps it was the new and old of springtime in that graveyard, but I felt alive.
I’ve read more books about Civil War battlefields than I care to admit. Throughout the years I’ve managed to put my boots on the soil of many. They’re often serene and spectacular tracks of land. From elementary school libraries to lonely archives, I’ve read stories from those who saw or studied the tragic events of these sites. Those facts still don’t betray the beauty found at Shiloh or Gettysburg. Yet, my mind sees artillery and infantry: humans doing their damndest to destroy other humans. I can better relate to the conflict of the past than the peace of the present. I’m comfortable in conflict and chaos, that was the setting for a lot of my early years. I’m trying to be better at sitting with peace.
I acquired some western dust on my boots last week with my dear friend, Jordan. We roamed the Black Hills and some not so empty ghost towns in Colorado. It was both far more a gathering of shacks than any kind of town and far less vacant than “ghost” would imply. That seemed like the perfect imagery of my mind: a very active ghost town.
