Dead Letter Department #25

(did you miss dead letter department #24? read about bad choices in perfume buying & good ones in tarot here! housekeeping note: newsletters will be coming under my new name, Max. welcome to the new era, Dead Letter Department!)

ghost towns

I’ve been feeling stir crazy lately, starved for new landscapes—anything, really, that isn’t the view from my apartment windows or the same eternal round of little chores & errands. The usual remedy for this is big water, the place at Semiahmoo where the bay rolls out far enough islands become mirages, as opposed to the close-crowded quarters of my home harbor, but the various tsunami warnings were making contemplating the endless tides feel a little bit less restorative & a bit little more like the opening credits of a climate disaster movie where I, an unassuming extra with no backstory, am summarily drowned on a beach right before we cut to the main characters.

So I went south instead.

I’ve always liked graveyards. Once you get a sense of the past under your feet, you can’t get away from it again: other people lived here before you almost anywhere you go, & I’m not sure of much about anything but I do feel like there are places that like when you acknowledge the dead. The graveyard closest to my house is an old one but still active, tiny graves with weather-worn lambs and rubbed out names cheek by jowl with new stones, sheaves of flowers telling the story of an immediate loss. It feels like my town, extending itself backwards into the past.

The graveyard I went to is not like that.

You used to be able to park right outside, but when I drove over the hill this time I found a fence cordoning off the parking lot, gates chained and locked together. I went up through the trails instead and found the brick monument for the graveyard entirely gone—there are no signs at the moment telling what the place is. Later I read an article saying they’ve been having trouble with vandalism & theft, so right now it’s just a empty field with a stream running behind it, a row of trees that look like someone forgot to plant the rest and finish the line.

You have to walk through the green gate and look carefully down into the grass to see the stones, sink your feet into the rising mud to find them: small, flat, and scattered all across the ground. The markers are just initials and a number, but there are far fewer stones than people buried there, most of them lost to the years of neglect since the hospital closed in the ‘70s. This is the burial ground for 1487 patients who died at Northern State Hospital & were unclaimed by their families. The initials are meant to give the family privacy, rather than honor the patient with their full name, & I find the idea of being buried under your patient number excruciating— no release from the dehumanization even in death.

I’ve done some reading on the hospital but it’s hard to find sources that aren’t just sensationalized ghost tours (look at this creepy building! I bet this mysterious instrument—clearly milking equipment in the dairy barn—was used to torture patients!) or dated articles about the benefits of working for the hospital, the once beautiful grounds and the hole it left behind in Sedro Wooley’s economy when it closed. Apparently there’s a book, only available in the history musem, and a mass grave for the remains that were discovered at the hospital when it closed. I haven’t visited that one yet—maybe I’ll write to you about it when I do.

The stream was loud, rushing down the gully behind the field, and ravens were clattering up in the tree tops. It’s a terrible place to bury people—they used to weigh the coffins down with rocks to keep them from rising up with the water table. Remains were abandoned in the town dump, causing a local scandal, and then another when hundreds of people’s ashes were found in rows of tin food cans marked, again, with patient numbers. The story I read, by a local historian who was the son of one of the groundskeepers, talked about riding his bike as a kid up the long rows of rhododendrons on the drive, an egg for every patient every day from the farm. There were lobotomies (although not Frances Farmer’s, despite the rumors), insulin comas, and forced labor.

I sat on the bench outside the fence & thought about how weird it is that we play frisbee and ride bikes over a site of such suffering—but would it really be better if it were closed off entirely, no trails, no people in the landscape any more? I hope the monument goes up again soon, so people know what they’re passing. I guess I wonder if the ghosts would be lonely if we stopped going—a place like this definitely has ghosts, even if they’re not in the dairy barns. I want them to know they’re not entirely forgotten. Some of us are still walking carefully over their stones and thinking of them.

one good thing

Trader Joe’s has hyacinths! This is the advance party out so far ahead of the actual season it probably only counts to me in its suggestion that someone, somewhere believes spring will come again. I probably can’t actually buy one every week until they run out, but I’m making a run at it so far. My kitchen is full of that rich, heady hyacinth smell and my windowsill is blossoming.

write back

If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend. Write me back at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com. I hope to see you here at the Dead Letter Department again soon & in the meantime may your ghosts be good company.