Finding meaning in resting places of the dead

I live, part of the week, next to a graveyard with a wooden sign announcing in scrolled letters that it is the first settlers' cemetery in the small community on the South Shore of Nova Scotia.

This is a happy state of affairs because I have always been drawn to graveyards by their solemn beauty and dignity, the sagas they contain and the way they remind us to notice the days as they pass, because one will be your last.

This graveyard is a miniature gem: 49 markers, all but two made of carved stone, most of them still decipherable, even though the oldest person interred there was born in 1782, and a couple, said to be the first settlers in the community, entered the world in 1787 and 1794. The last burial, so far as I can tell, happened in 1909.

The graves by and large stand in neat rows, grouped, as is the custom, by family name. Some of the markers tell stories: of a man who died in middle age who was “beloved and esteemed by all” and who “yielded to his father’s call,” of two young men who died at sea, of a young woman who “died in Jesus.”

Some of those buried there lived to a ripe old age, but one of them did not make it past the age of eight, two died at five, and another was so young that he was just referred to as “an infant son,” on a headstone for his siblings.

People care for them still. I know that from those who stop to visit the cemetery, some with licence plates from far-away places, and the folks living nearby who have been rebuilding the grave of an ancestor.

I know it from those folks within the community who cut the grass and keep the cemetery tended, even though they share a surname with no one buried there.

Graveyards just resonate because they reflect people’s spiritual beliefs and demonstrate respect for the past and for the venerables who walked before them.

Steven Skafte, who lives just outside of Bridgetown, has a different reason.

He grew up in Annapolis County, and still lives there, even though most of the folks he went to school with vamoosed long ago.

“That can leave you with a feeling that life has moved on and you have been forgotten about,” Skafte told me this past week.

So the 34-year-old photographer, writer and poet has made rescuing the forgotten and abandoned parts of this province his personal quest.

Neglected buildings, homes and roads, but also cemeteries, not like the lovingly looked-after one to which I just introduced you, but the ones “drifting into oblivion” while obscured by brush, a tangle of wild rose bushes, or waist-high grass.

Skafte does this the oldfashioned way, by talking to people with long memories.

“With all of these places, someone in the neighbourhood somewhere knows about them,” he said. “It is just a matter of finding the right person.”

Sometimes, this man who calls himself an “ardent explorer of misplaced memories” just goes out into the back 40 or wanders through cow patches in the borderlands between properties, as well as in more-obvious places right under people’s noses. Working this way, he has found 50 abandoned cemeteries in Annapolis County, where he has focused his efforts, as well as another 15 in Lunenburg County and a dozen or so ore in Kings and Digby counties and the Halifax area.

But, Skafte concedes, “there could be hundreds more.”

ABANDONED GRAVES

So, he searches on, in part because the adventure of the exploration is what thrills him. It takes good eyes to do what Skafte does.

Abandoned graveyards tend to have just a few headstones. Any more than 20, he said, and someone usually cares enough to do summer maintenance on the property, to keep the grass mowed and nature at bay.

When he finds one in need of care, Skafte will happily cut away the brush and prune the mess of wild roses so that anyone who wants to see it can. Not too much, mind you. “I don’t cut things back too far,” he said. "I want to retain that abandoned aesthetic.”

He finds it in so many places. In the Mariner’s Section Burial Ground in Port Wade, which took him five days to clear, but also the Daniels Cemetery in West Paradise, which he walked by four or five times before realizing that beneath those shoots of brush and leaves lay five fallen stones.

In Belleisle, where he had to wait for the snow to fly — allowing him to better read the writing on the headstones — before realizing that Joseph and Susanna Patten, born in 1787 and 1788, respectively, lay buried there.

Out behind Mount Rose Baptist Church on Wilmot Mountain, where the last stone disappeared in the 1970s because the person who owned the land wanted to plant turnips in the old graveyard.

At a Baptist Church in long-lost Hardscratch Settlement in Digby County, where he found a stone alleged to mark the grave of a stillborn child, the result of a rape at the Marshalltown Poor Farm, the alms house where Maude Lewis once lived.

He came to this reclamation work innocently enough. Two years ago, some descendants of people buried in the Ricketson Cemetery in Carleton Corner put out a request for people to help unearth the long-abandoned graveyard. Skafte, who had done a lot of brush clearing in his day, answered the call.

Now he is forever “chasing the light and weather and places to explore.” If you live out in the country and see a figure out in the woods, don’t worry: it may just be Skafte, the burial ground detective, keeping the past alive and the old names eternally present.