November 16
This was a sad cemetery – almost all the markers were broken or leaning.
And across the pasture, the people in a mobile home were having a loud argument. It was so loud that maybe the sound waves of a earlier argument had knocked over the stones.
(It’s the same place as this.)
Old South Church Cemetery
Collin County, Texas
photographed 3-15-2008, with C. Vigil
Posted on November 16, 2012, in Photography and tagged 365 photo project, black and white photography, cemetery, collin county, collin county texas, haiku, laurie jameson, melinda green harvey, old south church cemetery, photo a day, texas. Bookmark the permalink. 7 Comments.
One Day | One Image 
Perhaps an earthquake
the unholy shock patterns
of wild energy.
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Looks like lousy land for growing headstones. Seems like they need deeper foundations or something. Does it get quite wet here, ever?
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My recollection of this place is that it was on top of a rise, so I don’t think the headstones got this way from being flooded, or even overly damp. In another part of the cemetery, where the stones were flatter tablets instead of obelisks like most of these, someone had stacked the pieces up at each grave. The whole place felt creepy – it was at the end of a dirt road several miles from the main highway, that couple having the huge argument nearby, and the destruction of the graves all combined to encourage us to get out of there pretty quickly. I’ve tried to find information online about what might have happened but haven’t had any luck.
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The Ross Bay Cemetery in Victoria, which I photograph sometimes, has a lot of leaning monuments. Some of them have been vandalized, but many just have poor, or no, foundations and over time tilt over the edge of a slowly sinking grave and drop off bits that, after a certain amount of decay of mortar and the like, rely on gravity to keep them together.
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I guess what was odd about this place – and I failed to adequately describe it before now – is that all the headstones were broken on leaning. I’ve seen plenty of cemeteries where random markers were, for various reason, leading. But this one was uniformly broken. It reminded me of a photograph I saw of a cemetery in New Mexico, near where the atomic bomb was tested; the white wooden crosses succumbed to the shock of the blast, and all fell down. But they, of course, all fell in the same direction.
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That sounds like vandalism…. So does the New Mexico example, though state-sanctioned. That sounds like a very powerful image.
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State sanction vandalism – the worst kind of vandalism.
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