Another American Adventure: St. Bonaventure Cemetery

Sunday, August 8, 2010

St. Bonaventure Cemetery

I must have been crazy to think that I could go to the St. Bonaventure cemetery and find Lax's grave without any directions. What was I thinking? And on a Saturday in the middle of the summer when I could find no one who even knew who Lax was. I don't expect that Lax would have a big, flashy stone, being who and how he was.

Anyway, Olean is not far from Wellsville, and I pass the exit for St. Bonaventure every time I go to Wellsville. Next time I will remember to get directions. It is a lovely cemetery, on a hill overlooking St. Bonaventure University. The motherhouse of the Franciscan Sisters of Allegheny is also here - my sister worked as an administrator of the nursing home for awhile.

St. Bonaventure's is really in the village of Allegany, which is to the west of Olean. This is how it looked on Saturday morning as I drove through the town. Still foggy.

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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.