Cossack Corpses: St. Andrew Memorial Church and Cemetery

June 29, 2013 — Between my book projects and this site, I’ve written about scores of cemeteries. Never have I described one with the word “exotic.” I’m doing it now. For a cemetery in New Jersey.

St. Andrew Memorial Church can be found at 240 Main Street in the borough of South Bound Brook. It’s a Ukrainian Orthodox Church, meaning it’s Catholicism one country away from having a Bela Lugosi accent.

As you can imagine, its Baroque Cossack architecture sticks out on the New Jersey soil, as it would most anywhere else but Eastern Europe. I also mean that literally. The building is extremely tall and extremely thin and tapers to a cross, like it was built in a much rarer atmosphere and then transplanted to ours. It was completed in 1965 after a decade of construction.

It’s a memorial church, meant to honor, according to the church website, “those who were victims of the genocidal famine created by Josef Stalin and those who gave their lives for the independence of Ukraine and the United States of America.” The archbishop who spoke at its dedication called it a “very humble cross over the graves of millions of victims of the genocidal famine ploughed over by the enemy.”

It’s pretty impressive-looking for a “very humble cross,” and the only thing that could possibly make a person tear their attention from it as they pulled into the parking lot would be if the church erected a large black statue of an evil queen in front of it.

Which, I must hurry to say (so read fast), it doesn’t have…although it does have the ebony statue of an enthroned saint-princess looming above the road in front of it. According to her pedestal, she’s Saint Olha, Equal to the Apostles, Great Princess of Kiev, Sovereign of Rus-Ukraine, 945-969. She’s the one who brought Christianity from Constantinople to the Ukraine.

But, probably due to the color of the stone, the sober set of her features, and too many old Disney movies on my part, she looks like something out of a fantasy story, especially since her wizard is close by.

Again, I hurry to say it’s not really a wizard, but another saint, Vasyl Lypkivsky. He’s depicted as a bearded, robed guy standing atop a tall pedestal and motioning to the heavens, declaiming to some hellspawn or other “You shall not pass.” He’s also made in that same black stone that renders him more mysterious than holy.

Now that all that’s behind me, we can get to the cemetery. I also mean that literally, since the cemetery is behind the church and statues.

At first glance, St. Andrew Cemetery seemed to us like an ordinary, uninteresting modern cemetery. It’s small, nicely kept, with close rows of polished headstones. So no classic graveyard atmosphere. But then, as we started looking closer at each headstone, it seemed more like an ordinary graveyard that had been rotated about ten degrees into a different dimension. The cemetery arrangement was familiar, but the shapes and flourishes of the stones were alien. Or exotic.

Very few were your basic rectangles. Most were asymmetrical, with off-centered points or shaped like grand piano lids or punctured with cutouts. Others look as if they were commissioned by avant-garde artists trying to deconstruct the very idea of a tombstone. Heck, with many of them, the only reason I knew they were tombstones was because they were in a cemetery. And, of course, every epitaph was chiseled in Cyrillic script and featured the triple-bar cross of that Eastern Orthodox church.

Basically, there was enough fascinating Old World funerary art here that makes me wonder if being a cemetery guy in the New World is the wrong place to be a cemetery guy.

I tried to be sensitive in taking pictures. As I mentioned, it’s a modern cemetery, so some of the compelling stones and images were for and often of people recently deceased. There was this one really great bust of an older woman that for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to defile with the camera. Of course, now I regret that. My favorite by far, though, was this guy:

I honestly don’t know exactly what he is, but he looks like some kind of ancient Cossack warrior….which means, what with the saint and the queen statuary up front, the place was that much closer to being the world’s coolest chess set.

Not the way you’d think a post about a New Jersey cemetery would end, huh? That's because I suck.

I’ve Got Your Ten Commandments: The Georgia Guidestones

June 20, 2014 — “Ya’ll ready for the new world order?” The question was asked us by an elderly man who had just dropped out of his pickup truck with his wife. We were standing in front of a series of large granite slabs that were the only things around for miles. The twang the man spoke with was all Georgia, the state in which we found ourselves, outside the city of Elberton. The old-timer explained he’d lived in Georgia all his life, but had only recently moved close enough to visit this oddity he’d heard about for decades. “We’re from New Hampshire,” I told him.

The Georgia Guidestones are certainly one of the more famous oddities in the country. The thing is, they’re not exactly interesting by themselves. They’re a bunch of quarry stones placed on the edge of some farmland. Specifically, there are four 19-foot-tall rectangular slabs set on end that form an X-shape with a thinner center slab of the same height, all of which is capped by another slab of granite. From certain angles they look like open doors and, given the empty farmland around them, stand out like a message from the Almighty, but overall the arrangement seems the type of inoffensive art you might find on the property of a corporation or in an outdoor sculpture park.

Except for what they say.

Inscribed on the surface of the slabs is a series of 10 vague, preachy ideas for bringing about utopia. You know, limit the population, unify the language, be excellent to each other, party on—the kind of thing a crazy bum might scrawl on a cheeseburger wrapper and hand you or which you might find in a brochure shoved inside your screen door from the local cult.

The guidelines are carved into the stone in eight different languages; English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian. On the four sides of the capstone is the phrase, “Let These Be Guidestones to an Age of Reason” in Babylonian cuneiform, ancient Greek, Sanskrit, and Egyptian hieroglyphics.

And while this strange multilingual message to mankind makes them a little more interesting, what really elevates the oddity is the same thing that makes anything interesting…the mystery of them. We don’t know who erected them.

And I don’t mean like we don’t know so it might be aliens or a lost civilization. I mean, the group who funded this monument remains anonymous after more than three decades, even as the fame of the oddity has spread.

In 1979, a man walked into a local granite company, gave his name as R. C. Christian, and threw some money down. “Make me a monument,” he said in what I assume was a Georgia drawl similar to my new friend. From there the story is sparse. Christian, whose name was a pseudonym, said that he represented a group of religious, patriotic people who really wanted a giant geometry of stones to exist. And that’s all he needed to say since he had the money.

But that’s it. That’s the story that makes these plain planes of stone stand out. After all, anybody with a chisel can carve esoteric pronouncements in stone. It takes someone truly remarkable to shut up and go away.

Today, the Guidestones show up on the home page of Elberton’s website and an informational plaque is installed beside them like any historical monument or tourist destination. It even has its own little parking lot.

Most of the information we have about the stones is engraven into a nearby keystone. This slab of rock is embedded horizontally into the ground beside the Guidestones. On it are listed the physical dimensions of the slabs, the languages inscribed, and—since it follows the time-honored tradition of setting up giant stones to align with the solar calendar—astronomical properties. Basically, all the what, none of the way. The most interesting part of the keystone is that it claims to be sitting atop a time capsule, but, since the dates for the capsule were left blank, it’s thought that the capsule may never have been buried.

We hung out at the Guidestones for maybe 40 minutes, and in that time, quite a few people showed up to wilt in the June Georgia sun and gawk at the rocks. Besides the elderly couple, there was another couple on a motorcycle, a pair of ladies in a convertible, a solitary man driving a minivan, and a family of eight…all pilgrims looking for the secret to the ultimate society.

And finding rocks.

Mysterious rocks.

Metal and Fire: The Kaskaskia Dragon

June 17, 2014 — I walked into the liquor store like a recovering alcoholic…a little bit nervous, a little bit awkward. I got into the checkout line with nothing in my hands. When I made it to the counter, I looked around to see how many people were in earshot and then leaned toward the girl behind the cash register. “Dragon?” was all I could muster.

She broke into a large smile, pulled out a white plastic bucket that clinked, and said, “Dollar a token.” I slid two bucks across the counter like they were a robbery note, and she handed me a pair of dirty, metal circles embossed with dragons.

I was in Vandalia, Illinois, just off a Route 70 exit on Rock Island Avenue. There, across the liquor store parking lot and against a cornfield stubbled by young green shoots, towered a giant metal dragon facing off against a battered and pathetic-looking white knight. My family waited expectantly in front of the monster.

Words painted in black on the right haunch of the beast warned me of its powers, and a nearby box hung on a signpost told me how to complete my quest in this strange little fantasy movie. I walked over to the box and inserted one of the tokens into a slot. Immediately, the monster belched forth a few feet of actual fire from its nostrils. The effect lasted about ten seconds and, at the insistent urging of my four-year-old, I stuck in the other coin with the same result.

The Kaskaskia Dragon rises to a height of about 25 feet. Tip-to-tail, it’s a lot longer, but I can’t find a geometry formula for calculating the length of a dragon. Kaskaskia is a regionally used word that was originally the name of a local tribe of Native Americans, but in this case, the dragon gets its name from the hardware store that built and owns it, Kaskaskia Supply, located just a little farther down the road from the liquor store

The silver serpent was created in 1995 as a float for Halloween parade. It wasn’t until the next millennium that it found its place in life as a roadside attraction. The secret of the serpent’s fire is a propane tank in its hind leg that fuels its hellitosis. That’s where you should aim your sword.

Now, I’m not usually much one for roadside kitsch, but if that kitsch involves sticking a coin in a box to watch a giant metal monster spew flames from its snout, I reckon that’s a better place than most to stretch my legs.

Muddy Waters Takin' Back: The Johnny Cash Boyhood Home

June 16, 2014 — The dead turtles that lined the roads of Mississippi gave way to dead armadillos in Arkansas as we tried to outrun the tornado conditions that TV forecasters had been illustrating with vivid red patches along our route. The ominous dark clouds that covered the broad sky were throwing solid blocks of water the size of counties down onto us, and we were mudding down dirt roads in a Toyota Camry that hated what we were subjecting it to in this remote stretch of country.

The Man Comes Around was playing on our CD player, and it fit the scene. We were actually listening to it because it fit the theme. We were looking for the boyhood home of Johnny Cash.

We were traveling the extreme eastern edge of Arkansas, not too far northwest of Memphis, Tennessee, heading toward a place called Dyess. We were surrounded for miles around by flat farmland, most of it flooded so that it all looked like rice paddies. Finally, in the distance (everything was in the distance), we saw the small white house of the Man in Black.

Johnny Cash was born in 1932 in Kingsland, Arkansas. His family moved to Dyess when he was three. It was in Dyess that farm dirt got under his fingernails. In Dyess that his brother died in a violent mill saw accident. In Dyess that he was called J.R., long before adopting the name Johnny to put on his military papers and, later, on his albums.

But Dyess wasn’t really a town at the time. It was a social experiment. It was originally called Dyess Colony, and was an agricultural co-op where poor families were offered land to farm with no money down. Cash’s family got 20 acres and a house. They repaid the country by raising a music legend.

Today, the lonely little house at 4791 CR 924 is uninhabited. A historic sign stuck in the dirt road at the edge of the road proclaims to the lonely surrounding farmland the significance of the little, white, one-story, five-room house with its dark shutters carved with crescent moons and its porch swing. The whole thing was well taken care of despite its context.

The house, which was used in the 2005 biopic starring Joaquin Phoenix as Cash, was surrounded by a high chain-link fence that prevented us from getting too close. We didn’t climb it, although the thought crossed our minds since the location was so secluded. We walked the line. Right. A large sign hanging on the fence told us the house was being restored and invited us to leave mementos in an inaccessible box that rose from a wide pool of muddy water.

In two months, the house will officially be open as a museum for tours as part of a larger cultural development project that hopes to see recreations of other buildings on the Cash property and monuments to Dyess Colony history in general.

I hope it does all right, but I wouldn’t trade our lonely, stormy moment in front of Johnny Cash’s boyhood home, the strains of American IV from our car speakers barely heard above the wind. My shoes are still stained with dirt from it. Johnny Cash dirt.

A Big Stretch of Road: Our June 2014 Road Trip

June 14, 2014 — I take the phrase, “big stretch of road” literally. To clear out the brain build-up of daily living, I often need to stop the normal circuits of my life and geographically stretch myself before settling back into my regularly scheduled programming. And lately I’ve needed a big stretch.

This time, that stretch ended up being a 3,267-mile, 17-state, 9-day jaunt with my wife and kids. You should see how I crack my back. But this road trip was going to be different than our previous big road trips.

First, it was short notice. That’s right, this 3,000-mile road trip was about a week in the mis-making. For a few months, I had been casually planning a road trip from my home in New England to head west and north around the Great Lakes and into the Dakotas. However, work sent me a curve ball, and I needed to be in Maryland the week before that road trip.

So instead of departing from New Hampshire, we needed to depart from Maryland. And psychologically it was easier to change the entire route than to use a day to travel back to the original starting point. Vacation days are precious things.

Second, I wanted to make sure this trip hit a few states I’ve never visited. That necessitated a long drive to get through all the states I’ve been to already, just so I could add the Mississippi, Arkansas, and Missouri stars to my flag.

The largest difference for the trip, though, was the Time Bomb in the back seat. That was the role my two-month old played in this adventure.

Normally, and even with my older daughter, I’d pack a million things into each day, stay off highways as much as possible, and do plenty of foolhardy things. But with a Time Bomb that could explode with the tyrannical behavior typical of infants, we needed to adapt to make sure every day wasn’t the bridge-crossing scene in William Friedkin’s Sorcerer.

Basically, it would be a trip my family would either never forget or never forgive me for.

I plan on doing full OTIS posts on everything here at some point, detailing the experience in full, but until then, for those interested, here is a summary of our itinerary:

Day 1: June 6

Four states on our first day, although two of them don’t count. We started in Maryland and jumped across a sliver of West Virginia. We spent most of the day in Virginia and finished off in North Carolina.

1. Natural Chimneys, Mount Solon, VA: This columnar rock formation is evidence that the entire Shenandoah Valley was once an inland sea.

2. Virginia Safari Park, Natural Bridge, VA: I’d visited here in the early days of OTIS, but no way was I going to pass up the opportunity to do it again with my oldest daughter.

3. The grave of Chang and Eng, White Plains, NC: These famous conjoined twins from Siam are the reason we often call that type of birth anomaly “Siamese twins.”

Day 2: June 7

Finished out both Carolinas and sped through Georgia, completely ignoring Atlanta. There are things to do in Atlanta if you happen to be there, but, in my experience, very little to go out of your way to see …at least until the Center for Puppetry Arts gets its full Jim Henson wing built. Ended up in Alabama for the night.

4. The grave of Daisy and Violet Hilton, Charlotte, NC: These conjoined twins from England became famous as entertainers and died in 1969. Why two famous sets of conjoined twins from different countries ended up moldering 100 miles apart in NC, I don’t know.

5. Metamorphosis, Charlotte, NC: This mirrorball fountain in the shape of a giant head is mesmerizing whether its layers are moving or not. I know because it was doing the bare minimum of spitting water during our visit.

6. The Georgia Guidestones, Elberton, GA: One of the more famous oddities in the country, this tall set of stone tablets erected by a mysterious person or group lays out the ground rules for Utopia…and, boy, are they both strict and vague.

7. Jurassic Subs, Bremen, GA: Our unplanned stop at a humble, dinosaur-themed sub shop that rips off the title font of Jurassic Park was for a daughter obsessed with dinosaurs.

Day 3: June 8

My first time in Alabama, the state of my wife’s birth, was spent mostly in Birmingham, where we had some of the best times of the trip in this empty, empty city. We ended the day at a hotel in Mississippi during a tornado watch.

8. Sloss Furnace, Birmingham, AL: This spooky, old industrial complex built to create pig iron out of raw materials is now a national historic landmark and tourist attraction where you can feel like you’re trespassing somewhere dangerous when you’re really not. One of the highlights of the trip.

9. Vulcan Statue, Birmingham, AL: The world’s largest iron statue depicts the Roman god of fire, who stands atop a tower on a hill overlooking the city. We ascended it for that god’s eye view.

10. McWane Science Center, Birmingham, AL: Obviously, a stop for my kid. It’s a typical science center with plenty of taxidermy, children’s science activities, a dinosaur room, and an aquarium level with a shark and ray touch tank. But it was the first time I’ve ever seen a “Decomposition Box,” a sealed glass tank where they place dead animals to decay to teach kids about the futility of life. A rabbit was putrefying inside on our visit. The image rises unbidden in my mind about 10 times a day now.

Day 4: June 9

The tornado watch continued directly in the line of our route as we drove the turtle-strewn roads of Mississippi before spending the night in Memphis, Tennessee. The storm added drama while mercifully cutting the miserable southern heat.

11. Witch’s Grave, Yazoo City, MS: I love stuff like this. A broken slab surrounded by broken chains in a local graveyard not only has its own witch lore, but said lore is inscribed right on the slab. Interestingly enough, the author who made the witch story famous is buried just a few plots over.

12. Jim Henson Sites, Leland, MS: Henson was born in nearby Greenville, but it was Leland where he grew up and Leland where he drew inspiration for his swampier characters, including Kermit himself. As a result, the place bills itself as “The Birthplace of the Frog,” with a small exhibit, a historic sign, and a bridge with green-painted guard rails and a large colorful sign proclaiming it the “Rainbow Connection Bridge.”

13. Robert Johnson Crossroad, Clarksdale, MS: It was supposedly at this crossroad where famed and ill-starred blues musician Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil so that he could play the blues. Today, it doesn’t look like the place a devil would haunt, unless he’s a fan of suburban retail…or good BBQ.

Day 5: June 10

I’d been to Memphis before, and didn’t want to spend too much time there as I wanted more time in St. Louis. After a quick jaunt to a cemetery, we left Tennesse and crossed the Mississippi to travel the extreme southern edge of Arkansas, before arriving for the night in St. Louis.

14. Elmwood Cemetery, Memphis, TN: This amazing Victorian cemetery doesn’t have any nationally famous interments, but it does have plenty of amazing statuary. Way worth seeing while you’re there to visit/instead of visiting Graceland.

15. Johnny Cash’s Boyhood Home, Dyess, AR: This humble little house on a dirt road in a desolate field will open in two months as an official, tour-able museum. Wouldn’t trade that experience, though, for the lonely, flooded, stormy moment we had with it.

16. The Gateway Arch, St. Louis, MO: In our ongoing quest to ascend every city’s Signature Tall Thing, our first stop in St. Louis was above it, which you do, surprisingly enough, by squeezing into small spherical five-person pods and riding them to the top of the arch.

Day 6, June 11

Man, did I fall in love with St. Louis. And not for the reasons people usually fall in love with cities…culture and restaurants and atmosphere and such. There are just a ton of sites there and in its suburbs that intersect with my interests. Obviously, I couldn’t get to it all, so I will be back. After spending most of the day in the city, we crossed the Mississippi again and stayed the night in IL.

17. Vincent Price Sites, St. Louis, MO: One of the main reasons I wanted to visit St. Louis is because it’s the birthplace of Vincent Price, and there are a few sites worth seeing in connection with him, including the candy factory his family started which inspired this strange night of my life.

18. City Museum, St. Louis, MO: This might be one of the strangest, coolest places on the planet to take a kid and to face death with them. I still don’t know quite what to make of it. I just remember disappearing into dragon caves and 10-story slides and strange exhibits and climbing through wire tunnels 10 stories above the ground to see giant praying mantises and to enter old airplanes. It was terrifying. My four-year-old loved it.

19. Exorcist Sites, St. Louis, MO: Another of my ongoing quests is to visit all the sites connected to the exorcism that inspired the book and movie “The Exorcist.” I’ve been to all the DC and Maryland sites, including the Exorcist Stairs, and now I can check off the St. Louis parts. I think that’s everything. The quest is over. I am sad.

20. Piasa Bird, Alton, IL: This giant painting of a Native American monster myth is a modern reproduction of an ancient version, set dramatically on some large limestone quarry caves like it’s the monster’s lair.

21. Robert Wadlow Statue and Grave, Alton, IL: If you’ve ever been to a Ripley’s Believe it or Not! Museum, you’ve probably seen a statue of this guy. At one time he was the world’s tallest person, and his demure personality and bespectacled and besuited appearance made his size seem doubly strange. He’s buried in Alton and also has a life-size statue in town.

22. Kaskaskia Dragon, Vandalia, IL: It’s a 25-foot-tall metal dragon that shoots fire when you stick a token in it. You won’t find a better way to stretch your legs and singe your hair.

Day 7, June 12

Due to the short timing that I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I actually hadn’t planned this trip past St. Louis. But we’d done pretty well with Illinois and our luck continued in Indiana, where we mainly stopped in Indianapolis before moving on to Ohio.

23. Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, Indianapolis, IN: Sure, because it had life-sized dinosaurs clambering over and breaking through its exterior, we went for my dinosaur-obsessed daughter (it also had a way-interesting mummified dinosaur fossil named Leonardo and a dragon-looking one whose scientific name is in honor of J. K. Rowling’s stories), but it was also an extremely worthwhile stop to see a temporary exhibit of the famous Chinese terra cotta warriors, which I’d always wanted to see.

24. Indianapolis Moon Tree, Indianapolis, IN: We made this stop because it was an easy one. Seeing a tree grown from a seed taken to the moon is a cooler story than it is a site.

25. Hollow Earth Monument, Hamilton, OH: It’s the grave of a man who espoused the scientifically heretical belief that the earth is hollow. Today the cemetery is a park, and his grave monument is the only one still standing amidst the playgrounds, complete with a hollow earth above it and a sign on the edge of the park proclaiming the honor.

Day 8, June 13

Although Friday the 13th traditionally ends for me with a night of horror movie watching, this one ended on a cliff over Lake Erie watching the sun set after driving the width of Ohio, a short stretch of Pennsylvania, and then entering New York.

26. Great Serpent Mound, Hillsboro, OH: I’d been to Native American mounds before, but never an effigy mound, which are piles of grass-covered dirt shaped like animals and humans. So when I heard that the longest one in North America is at the southern edge of Ohio, we altered our route to make sure we hit this pile of dirt shaped like a snake. Unfortunately, we had to bypass Ohio’s other effigy mound (this one an alligator) to make sure we had time for the last site of the day.

27. Leo Petroglyphs, Leo, OH: These Native American rock carvings feature both the familiar and the strange, from fish and birds and stick-figure humans to a smiley faced creature of unknown identity.

28. Ohio State Reformatory, Mansfield, OH: I don't remember what I thought of The Shawshank Redemption the one time I watched it, but ever since I saw that old Travel Channel episode of America’s Scariest Places, I’d wanted to visit this spooky reformatory where the movie just happened to be filmed. With its peeling walls and old cells, the place is certainly spooky, but more chilling was the view it had into the exercise yard of the still-working prison next door, which was full of the meandering incarcerated.

Day 9, June 14

Technically, at this stage, we still had two more legs to this trip between Buffalo and home, but as that route of New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire is well-trod already by us and accessible any weekend, we decided to just burn rubber straight home and have some time to recuperate before letting the brain build-up of daily living start again.

So thanks to everyone who followed along with us on Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr (where you can see more pictures from the odyssey), or here on OTIS. Having you guys involved not only helped out as far as finding sites en route, but also kept us entertained in the car and motivated us to really make it a rich experience with as little copping out as possible.

For any of you thinking of making a similar trip, drop me a line, as I have a list of sites that we didn’t make it to that’s as long as this list. Or you can contact my alternate universe self directly.