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Canal of Ghosts
Walking with ghosts along the Blackstone Canal.
Walking with ghosts along the Blackstone Canal.
The wind is sharp as I scurry across busy Branch Avenue, sending the clouds scudding and keeping the rain at bay. The tops of the trees have been stripped bare, limbs black, bony against the sky. I’m entering the North Burial Ground, and I’m looking for the place where the Moshassuck River emerges from its subterranean crossing of Interstate 95. I walk for ways with the highway to my left and rows of stones and statuary to my right. There’s much room to grow on this side of the burial grounds; I cross large lawns of brown grass. A concrete retaining wall announces its arrival. A pair of rectangular openings angling back toward the highway. Two echoing chambers, cast free of any date or ornament, bearing only a modest “716”. These are entrance and exit to fields set aside for the collection of dates, names, and bones.
The river immediately finds its Blackstone Canal days maintained, the bed running as straight as ever between walls of cut stone. The tow path is clogged with Catalpa and Oak and masses of twisting vines. That’s no problem, as I have only myself in tow, and I happily clamber around, glad to be free of the droning interstate.
Some trees have succumbed to the water's pull and have lain down for a rest, momentarily holding and releasing the stream. It’s a reasonable approximation of a babbling brook, and I stop to consider an earlier traveller on an earlier journey.
The canal bounds a potter’s field, and likely displaced some remains when it was dug. That certainly happened much later, when the highway claimed part of the burial grounds, nipping a piece of the potter’s field. No matter. Despite the appearance of order among the numbered plots above ground, it is chaos down below. Decades of poor record-keeping have made this area a de facto mass grave. If someone has to move for the convenience of the traveling living, they can move in with someone else; the more the merrier. Perhaps then, this accounts for the observations of my distant voyager, a passenger on a Providence-bound canal boat who reported seeing (while passing through the burial grounds) ”a strange blue-tinged orb that seemed to hover just at the level of the trees, then dart quickly forth and back…”.
Current employees of the cemetery have described what they called a "spirit in the trees”, a human shape moving around and above the trees which sometimes "seems dark and sometimes glows with light”. People who have seen this phenomenon say they have seen it not only in the trees here along the canal but around the pond and on the ridge of the esker, which lies just east of the river.
At the north end of the potter’s field, the river once again dives below the busy off-ramp. Further north, on the rail line that put the canal out of business, there was a terrible accident. Two trains collided at the Valley Falls station. Thirteen people were killed. Beyond the loss of life, this accident is notable for another reason. It is thought to be the first train wreck ever photographed. A Pawtucket man made a daguerreotype at the scene, from which an engraving was made that was reproduced in newspapers only weeks later.
In this cemetery is a headstone adorned with a carved image of a locomotive. Are there ghosts here beyond the ghosts of engravings in old newspapers? I consider then the lost thirteen, never to arrive at Worcester. There they are for eternity, some staring out a coach window anticipating a less eventful departure, others rattling along aboard the second train oblivious to the oblivion so soon before them. I can also imagine a fourteenth ghost, the ghost of the photographer from Pawtucket preparing his plate and hefting his kit down to the station, focusing his brass-barreled lens on the same horrific pile of splintered wood and twisted iron, year after year, trapped by the shade of the plate he is forever making. I snap my own picture. The rain arrives, and I squeeze past a fence and onto the road home.
Bucket Week - Day Three
In Oak Grove.
This week in honor of the city of my residence and my daughter's home town, I will be featuring Pawtucket, Rhode Island, aka the 'Bucket'.
Oak Grove Cemetery, 1994
Gates of the Oak Grove Cemetery, 1994
Some people are put off by pictures of cemeteries. Some people are put off by cemeteries in general. Not me. I find they are great places to explore, full of interesting names and fragments of interesting stories. They are usually relaxing places to photograph in as well. No traffic, often no people at all (above ground anyway) so you can mess about with your gear and not feel stressed. There are exceptions. Swan Point in Providence has a strict policy regarding photography and they will chase you out. Hasn't stopped me though, you just need to be quick(ish). In cemeteries within urban environments I find I'm drawn to the ways that the city of the living relates visually to the city of the dead, how the streets line up or how a row of headstones is echoed by a row of houses. This is very likely something else that Walker Evans has taught us to see. These two photographs are almost back to back from each other. I love the detail of the little lamb (a child's grave) in the lower right of the second image. These were made with a 4x5 camera on Tri-X film.
