Larger than life?

Recently I’ve had a chance to spend more time in the Mountain Cemetery, and as the moments pass in observation, I notice social class divisions in life transfer to headstones and cemetery monuments as well.

It’s true, to a hammer the whole world looks like nails, and I have habitual twists on things I always return to. My partner knows enough of it to have fun spoofing my take: tragedy of the commons, emergent property, social injustice, fascination with evolution and extinct animals; that’s me. So, it’s no wonder I connect the dots between class in life and death, my neural wiring is burned to go down those pathways.

Class-wise, Sonoma has gradually closed off and become more inaccessible to regular Joes, in life and death. Originally, natives occupied the land here. Later, the great California climate and good soils were qualities many immigrants valued. Later still, as the Redwood Empire turned to Wine Country in the 1970s and 80s, the residual rural atmosphere and character of “Slonoma” was valued by even newer immigrants. Then as others saw how great it was, and as Sonoma was hyped and marketed to no end, more people wanted in, and the 1970s – 2000 immigrants have sought to burn the bridge, and to restrict the same abilities to arrive and expand that allowed they themselves in.

Post-Native California history has been a series of different kinds of Gold Rushes where the majority of working class aspirants have ended up with the short end of the stick.

Since the year 2000 and on, more people have wanted into coastal Cal and Sonoma than there was housing built to have them. The threat of sprawl and strip development as in San Jose (and many other places in the US), to accommodate all, was a threat that could and did ruin the rural niceness of the valued past atmosphere. As with housing, in cemeteries there were more people to be buried than grave sites to have them. In San Francisco, whole cemeteries were dug up and moved to the Peninsula, to make room for housing, commerce, and urban growth.

The Mountain Cemetery was originally just on the hillside. Then there was expansion in various phases for in-ground burials down below in adjacent flat areas, and then certain buildings were added to go up and add space that way, for caskets and cremains. Given so little room now, what to do? Like the UGB, should the boundary be expanded? Go up more and get denser by taking all infill open space?

The California growth formula, of piped in foreign water, followed by real estate speculation, paid for by a Ponzi scheme of needing more growth to pay for the last growth, seems to be up and over. Cemeteries and housing do not really pay for themselves for municipalities to administer, yet taking care of people is what society and government is all about, isn’t it?

Now a flat-out housing crisis exists for all, good jobs disappearing, strips and sprawl are out, Amazon and smart phones are in; no room to live or to die, huge fortunes on paper emanating out of Silicon Valley making all prices sky high. Towns and cemeteries hang on and are frozen in a paralysis of clinging to the past, against current cultural-economic-environmental headwinds, while the current Area Median Income working class meets the fate of all Gold Rush underdogs. Even the erstwhile middle class is going down the tubes.

The fate of the Mountain Cemetery burials may be similar to Sonoma housing, supply not meeting demand but with a twist, no one has figured out how to cash in like Las Vegas on burials like they do on $850 dollar a square foot real estate. You could sell massive hilltop mausoleums with a view for a million each, and larger than life millionaires would buy them. But in reality the cold hard facts are, live or dead, there is no room at the Sonoma Inn; newcomers are excluded in all ways from the sentimental past of Sonoma’s character. If you don’t have a plot, send you to the county ash pile.

“The community” here is like a golf club, the cemetery is where permanently retired paying members go, those lucky enough to get here and buy a plot while there was still space. The cemetery is also a reflection of the immigrant past, when all the European immigrants, Caucasians, regardless of original ethnicity, all became “white”, supported by tacit real estate redlining and zoning, Sonoma gradually cloistered itself off as a high-end version of upper crust Whiteville, as are many suburbs around splotches of blue cities across the country. The cemetery is a reflection of this pattern, all possible spaces are taken, no room for any strangers, strangers whose role is to serve but to not sit at the table.

Burial location within the cemetery is somewhat equivalent to the east and west sides, up on the hill, down in the flats, or whether you are even in. Displacement and externalization are not new. A few old-time servants and quarry workers are buried there, like John Burris (“Chinaman”), as noted in the Bates and Evans funeral records, or Charles Cheney, farrier.

The Mountain Cemetery is full of immigrants, who came and got a foothold. Therein lies the Manifest Destiney, wagon train and Ellis/ Angel Island generations, the founding fathers, the ones who owned lots where Armstrong Estates is now, and nobody even knows their names, of whose great granddaughter was buried not too long ago on the hill and whose headstone says, “I am not here, I am the wind.”

The cemetery residents are awful quiet, and the living are left to surmise what they can of the inscrutable past. Only the markers and inscribed stones remain. Small headstones are for people of modest means or modest ego. A small-scale crypt can be nicely done, Mary “Pizza” Fazio for example. Or the Patri location, a little house, one to give pause, someone I know will be going in there…  The small metal markers are cheap and fall apart, those dead are gone and forgotten, unless you get the 1935 map from the city and figure out who is in that spot.

Some of the grandiose crypts and mausoleums bely a sense of self-importance, against all of eternity. The grandiose monuments are larger than life, but now even they are gone and mostly forgotten. Some of the big mausoleums near Vallejo’s tomb, I think, were made by Italian stone mason immigrants from the Second Great Migration 1880-1910. They had the stone working skills, made the mausoleums in their spare time, and now, 100 years later, they look rich, but in life were actually masons with the skills and access to the materials.

At the end of the day, all the self-glorification and amassing of sequestered power in life is just more hubris. The relationships and good will that really float the boat of humanity is not measured by such hubris. Fate crushes us all. Past class differences are marked in the cemetery by a refusal of entry for some and an honored place for others, or maybe some who were just at the right place at the right time. Those big crypts, they are equally dead as the rest.

Regardless of class, race, religion, we can know that all were dear members of a family, a brother, wife, kid, grandma, and life went on with all its usual hub bub just like now. One day someone who was at a city council meeting will come and enter the ranks of the eternally quiet. Pretty damn quiet in the cemetery. The wind rustles the leaves on the trees. The stones, crypts, mausoleums and markers tell a story, maybe one made up by folks in the present like me, spinning their usual stories on things, as people are wont to do.

With the increase in cremation, space can be made in the cemetery for newcomers, just like with efficiency and inclusionary units of 400 square feet that are “affordable by design” living spaces, for those trying to get inside the castle moat of a pretty nice suburban small community. This affordable by design mini cemetery stake is not a subsidized burial, like with the SAHA Broadway project, anybody getting in the cemetery now will pay full boat as the city needs its cost recovery.

Times change but everything under the sun stays about the same anyhow. It’s awful quiet in the cemetery, where the dead enjoy their eternal, peaceful rest; they’re gone, and not entirely forgotten. Those with the means attempt to fend off the vagaries of eternal nothingness with large crypts, and even those will fade and fall apart. When the race is done, the builders will longer exists to take satisfaction, nor to be there and admire their monuments. What’s left in one respect, is to see class and demographic differences in death.

All that money it took to build the larger than life crypts, couldn’t buy one more minute than they had anyway.