Last weekend I hiked a couple miles through the county grounds, stalking the rhubarb that still grows, despite all odds, behind the Eschweiler buildings. It's a lot more difficult than it was when I wrote about it here in my first blog entry in June 2006:

I pick bouquets of rhubarb from the abandoned garden plots . . . Pies, cakes, breads and muffins ensue. The world is good when there is rhubarb pie in it.

And that’s how I discovered the disappearance of the tennis courts and emergence of silt fence markers across from Hansen Golf Course.

Bottom line, in case you don’t know, is that a huge retention pond shaped like a reproducing amoeba will cover the old county nursery--one of the prettiest places in the county—behind the tennis court area. You may not have seen it because walking there has been perhaps a tad illegal. . . 

How much has changed since then. The nursery is completely obliterated. I suppose traipsing is even more illegal now than it was then. Plastic fences in trash-bag black and orange mesh have been strung along the silt fence markers. And the roads have been dug out, their entries chained, to make it hard for the scavengers in SUVs to poach wild asparagus and domestic rhubarb. It all  seems a little extreme. 

The retention ponds are in, though still not finished. You can walk around them now and wonder if they will ever look like something other than craters left by strip mining or meteors. But walking into the landfill is even worse. The great views from almost any vantage point are gone. No matter where you stand, you can only see a short distance before your sight line is interrupted by another odd mound. It's like no terrain I've ever encountered: defensive berms everywhere, with nothing to defend.

Was this the plan? Or was the dirt just dumped anywhere? If so, it will have to be completely regraded for any use that might be made of it. And that will cost more money.

The rhubarb, though thin (it's late this year), was good and made a splendid pie.  Something lives, still, on the edges of the desolation. I hope more will creep in: it will make the place less creepy.

Potter Road ends where the Research Park begins, a sprawling cluster of mostly forgettable buildings in which the work of progress is done. But if you thread through the unpeopled streets, under Highway 45, and into the Milwaukee County Grounds, you still might find yourself in a tiny fragment of Wauwatosa’s “Potter’s Field,” a burial ground for the poor and nameless.

The bones of 1,600 of the more than 7,500 people buried on the grounds between 1882 and 1974 were exhumed  during construction at Froedtert Hospital in 1991. Carted to Marquette University, soon they’ll be packed again and sent to UWM to be studied by future students.

Retired professor Ken Bennet told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “I think it would be bone-headed and stupid to rebury them.”

Strong language, considering the importance people in all times and most places have given to honoring the remains of their ancestors.

Even more extraordinary language from UWM’s John Richards: “This is an opportunity to give them a voice, to reconnect them to the community. . . and perhaps (give them) a role in extending the lives of living people, aiding in criminal investigations or helping with medical advances.”

I wonder what voice they’d have wanted, what connection to the community that storehoused them in the various residences for the poor, the ill, and the insane.

Reburying the dead isn’t stupid, it’s an act of the heart.

Consider  the story of Private Earnest Brown, age 31. Just a year after the unceremonious removal of bones from our County Grounds, Brown’s bones were found in an abandoned Belgian foxhole where they had lain since the Battle of the Bulge.  Whoever found them carefully wrapped them in a green blanket. In 2005, sent home at last to Bristol, Tennessee, Brown was buried with full military honors, the uniform he might have worn lain carefully atop the blanket.

Said a townsman, "This man has never had a formal funeral. This town needs to pay its respects now. He’s being brought a long way for his funeral and it'd be terrible if nobody comes. He's coming home. It just took him longer than many."

I wonder, too, how many of the dead in our Potter's Field had served in wars, from the Civil War on. 

In Europe, where land is more scarce, bones are stacked and moved all the time. The scientific arguments for studying the bones buried between 1730 and 1820 in Bern, Switzerland,  are the same as they are here. But there, scientists are studying the bones of the burghers as well as those of the poor. There’s a certain comforting equity there.

And the findings are fascinating. Among the upper class bones were many bent from polio and scoliosis, but among the bones of the poor were no signs of disease. There’s no question that interesting mysteries can be solved by reading the bones.

Still, I want the bones, our bones, to be treated with more reverence for the people who walked on them than for those who might crack them open in the name of science.  It's time to let them stop working.

I’ll leave you with a story from the Butte (Montana) Evening News. It’s long but compelling.

 
THE BUTTE EVENING NEWS, DECEMBER 18, 1905

The records begin halfway down the hillside for the graves were put here in rows as one might plant potatoes. Oh, there was no choice of graves or plots among the men and women who died unmourned at the county poor house. There were no spaces reserved for mothers or sisters or children. When one dies he is put beside the last one who died, and his grave is dug days before the end comes. 

For it is nice and handy to have the grave already dug, for the friendless often die suddenly and it is bothersome to have the body of a friendless one lying around. They keep a stock of graves on hand, a dozen or so ready.

THE MARBLE HEADSTONE 

There is in this pauper's cemetery one marble headstone, and the story that it tells no man can write.  "In memory of John Downie, Beloved Son of Mr. and Mrs. John C. Downie, Vancouver, Wash. 

Johnnie Downie, aged 21 years, died of black smallpox; Dr. Sullivan found him dying in the Cash Lodging house, where for three days he had lain unattended.  He had the proverbial 30 cents.  At first he refused to give his name when he found he had been taken to the poorhouse.  Finally, in delirium, he told of his home and aged parents, for whom he had started out to make a home.  But Butte had been too fast for poor, weak Johnnie Downie, prided as he was by his fond Irish parents.  Work was hard to find, he was qualified for few positions and made no friends.  He washed dishes, swamped in saloons. Finally his environment overcame him as did the germs of a dreaded disease. 

The slums became his home.  His parents lost track of him.  The day he died Dr. Sullivan sent word to them that he was dying. His mother wired that she was coming but the word went back that her boy was dead. 

She wrote a letter such as the doctor, accustomed to heart rending appeals, had never read before.  He was such a good boy her Johnnie, he was working so hard for them.  Oh, he was never careless to her when he was home, Johnnie never missed mass. She had prayed for him night and day, watched every mail for the letter that came not.  Page after page of letters came, written in the heart's blood of a mother.  

When Dr. Sullivan put the blanket over the wasted frame of the dissipated boy, who for three months had been little better then a vagrant, he sat down and wrote the mother a letter that would bring tears to her eyes and happiness to her heart. 

 "Yes John had been a good boy," he wrote. He had had the priest and died happy.  He sent her his love and told them not to worry as he was leaving for a better life.

Such a stone represents months of saving and self-denial for the old couple. But, somehow, they think of Johnnie's death with strange satisfaction which demonstrates sorrow is not always unhappiness. Looking over the pauper's cemetery one recalls the words of a man who saw humanity from the pinnacle and wrote:

Oh, yet we trust that somehow good shall be the final goal of ill: That not one life shall be destroyed or cast as rubbish to the void, when God has made his pile complete.  

Dear MMSD,

I'm not exactly sure if I'm addressing this to the right entity. Like so many Tosans, I'm a little fuzzy about who exactly is responsible for the Twin Craters on either side of Swan Boulevard.

Which, by the way, are starting to look like nice, smooth craters and not old craggy cratery craters. But I digress.

You know the little pond on the side that's not supposed to have a little pond? Well, my dog (Idgy for short) has discovered that lake and her mission in life, which is to chase all geese, gulls, and miscellaneous avian interlopers from the vacinity.

It's a muddy job but someone has to do it. 

Like those other Tosans, I'm not quite sure what will be done with the crater when you aren't pumping water from some other place into it, but rumor has it you are going to put soccer fields there. That or rice paddies, but I'm banking on soccer fields. What else would you put in suburban greenspace, even if we aren't Brookfield yet?

But again I digress.

Geese are a nuisance on the playing field. You can't kick 'em, much as you might like to. Even when they aren't there, they leave their calling cards, if you know what I mean.

Well, Imogene is a lean, mean, goose abatement machine. I know your budget's hovering around $95 million, so I'm thinking we can work something out to benefit all of us.

Presently, I'm training her to rescue kids in soccer pads who might fall into the water. Think what you'll save in insurance! 

Call me.


 

“The last rhubarb pie on the Fourth of July” was one of my mother’s rules. I don’t know where it came from, although it’s probably a good idea to stop picking early enough for the plant to build up the sustenance for the next season’s crop.

I just took mine out of the oven. A hint of freshly ground nutmeg, the grated peel of a whole orange, custard to cut the sharpness just a bit, and crumb topping just because: it’s fairly spectacular.

This really is the last rhubarb pie. I made it from stalks I’d culled from the County Grounds last year in my minor acts of civil disobedience—or criminal trespass, depending on how severe you are feeling today. Since it’s the Fourth of July, and since that’s about freedom, maybe you’ll lean toward favoring the pursuit of personal happiness that doesn’t harm person or property.

Or maybe you prefer restrictions. Lots of people do these days.

I like things a little wild, even if it leads to more effort. It was hard wading through the tall weeds that had overtaken the old gardens in just a year. This year, the weeds are nearly insurmountable, and the driveways to the Eschweiler ruins have been dug out so you can’t drive there.

You’d think there was treasure in those fields, the way the land has been made inaccessible.

In a way, there is. Not the strawberry rhubarb gardeners had tended for decades; that’s gone to dry woodiness. But among the thistles and teazle and Jerusalem artichokes grows wild garlic, a plant of almost unbearable beauty.

Someone’s put down sheets of plywood to give shelter to the Butler garter snakes. These “sudden fellows in the grass” still seem like treasures in the surprise they bring.

Later tonight, when the kids and I come together, we’ll eat the pie and give thanks for the ground in which it grew. I hope we’ll remember to love what we have before it’s gone forever.