Human Flower Project
In a Drive-By World
Roadside memorials, in the U.S., Ireland, Greece, Italy: Cement and flowers say, “Semper fidelis.”
Memorial to Robert Winkler outside Herrin, Illinois
Photo: Stephen Chalmer
What’s the rush?
A wreath of silk flowers, a teddy bear, wooden cross, or hockey stick will slow you down. They mark not graves but mortality, something that may not otherwise flit across your mind on your way to....
Earlier this month CNN Newsnight aired a segment on roadside memorials. It featured Diana Natale, a Massachusetts mother who was wrangling with local government to maintain a memorial to her son. The town manager said the clump of flowers and ribbons around a tree induced “rubber necking” and might cause another accident, though the reporter failed to ask whether there’d been one on-looker injury. Even so, the city of Norton has instituted a rule limiting roadside memorials to 30 days.
For Sarah Walsh, outside Carrigaline, Ireland
Photo: Irish Roadside Memorials
Memorials are INTENDED to make stiff necks rubbery, closed minds open, and emotions fresh. They’re erected in many lands, and have been for many centuries. Consider this amazing website of memorials. It includes photographs and stories of hundreds such sites all over Ireland and includes a whole reference library of links, to photographs, to regulations in various countries, to commentary.
Why would someone go to all this effort? The anonymous author writes, in the fragmentary style of a highway marker: Helping make our loved ones universally known, mourned and prayed for.
Across south Texas these markers are known as descansos. Though each pays tribute in its own way, they often include artificial flowers and crosses.
The roadside memorials of Greece tend to look like strong boxes, often made of concrete and decorated with ceramics and ornamental iron. They tend to be beautifully situated, with candles inside and views of the hills and sea.
A recent article by Michele Smargiassi describes and discusses the custom of altarini, (in Italian). Commentator Barbara McMahon notes that Smargiassi “was intrigued by the use of plastic flowers over fresh flowers but came to see that plastic flowers were a way of people saying that their grief will never end while fresh flowers indicated that nothing, especially life, lasts for ever.”
Outside Delphi, Greece, 1957
Photo: Galen Frysinger
McMahon herself, writing for the Guardian, ties the Italians’ affection for fast cars with their custom of marking roadside tragedies. “On a stretch of road between Ravenna and Ferrara, one of the worst accident blackspots in northern Italy, there are dozens of these sad little cemeteries: a miniature statue of David left in memory of Fabio, 18 years old; a piece of marble inscribed to Giuseppe, aged 24 and a cross for Stefano, who was killed in 1975 just before he graduated in science.”
She finds that “the further south in Italy you go, the more likely you are to find ‘altarini’ draped with crucifixes, holy pictures, black ribbons and statues,” whereas memorials in the north tend to more restrained, oftimes with no mention of the deceased by name.
Unfortunately the town manager of Norton, Mass. isn’t alone. Other states and municipalities have placed restrictions on the size and duration of memorials. To this, Diana Natale answers, “I do not work a 9:00 to 5:00 job. And if it took me every day to get up every day and put a wooden cross, nothing else, a wooden cross, up there, I would do that, and Keith would always be remembered at that tree.” The law stops here.
We particularly laud the State of West Virginia for its compassion and wisdom. West Virginia explicitly permits and honors roadside memorials, “both temporary and permanent,” and gives citizens a guide for protecting these tributes and making them as safe as possible.
Memorial to 16 year old Adam Arnold, of Key West, Florida
Photo: Bill Sampson, Roadside Memorials
Martin Nilsson, a scholar of Greek folk religion, wrote that since ancient times the highway was considered a hostile place. “Theseus conquers highwaymen and robbers who resist civilization and are dangerous to it.” A body that perishes outside the bounds of civilized life may, in the spiritual realm, come afoul of cruel and unruly forces. With flowers and candles, we protect the beloved from such a fate and fill the most desolate places with humanity.
Comments
Ironically, I wrote a song about this. Let me know if you like it. http://www.myspace.com/lh3s
Let me add one thing: I have no sure opinion on this. In this song I called it “a stupid nonsense” (why? maybe because I feel we should try and remember people where and how they lived not where and how they died) but I say also these tombstones are “a lesson on fragility"… I didn’t intend by any means to solve this all-important controversy, just express my mixed feelings about it.
I am a historian by training, and therefore inclined to look for a historical perspective on things that interest me. Many years ago, when I was living in Santa Fe and working on a book on New Mexican furniture, I got interested in the descansos that are seen along the roads there. Although they are now almost universally associated with automobile accidents, a devout Catholic friend gave me an insight into them that I have never seen in print.
Descanso, of course, means “resting place” (actually, in the wonderful way of the Spanish language, it literally means “untiring place"). My friend told me that descansos long pre-dated the automobile age, and that they originally marked places where unfortunate travelers had met unexpected deaths, either through accidents or through being waylaid by bandits. In either case, they had died without receiving last rites, and thus their souls are in purgatory. Descansos were erected so that subsequent travelers could interrupt their own journeys, kneel down, and say a prayer for the souls in purgatory. Thus they were resting places as well as memorials.
I know for a fact that they pre-date the automobile in New Mexico because I have seen one on the old road from Santa Fe to Penasco, twenty-seven crosses carved on a big flat rock, that is in memory of the twenty-seven men killed there in the Battle of Embudo during the 1847 Taos Revolt.
I have also observed that elderly Hispanic men and women will say a prayer and sometimes cross themselves when passing a descanso in an automobile.
Just thought this might be of interest to you.