Our Connecticut cousins

This afternoon I encountered one of my Connecticut cousins in an unexpected place: on a monument atop a hill in Oak Grove Cemetery in Marietta, Ohio. I felt more than a little guilty about tromping around a cemetery while final exams demand attention in my office, but word went out among the birding community that crossbills had been sighted at the cemetery so I gathered up my birding-and-botanizing buddy and off we went.

Silence reigned beneath the hemlocks, holly, and oaks as we climbed steep hills. We had to tread carefully, glancing alternately down at the uneven ground and up at the treetops, where we hoped to catch a rare sight of the colorful migrating crossbills.

We saw some robins and juncos and a few fat flickers and once we saw a flock of what may have been crossbills too high, too far, too fast to be identified. Halfway up the hill in the newer part of the cemetery we paused by the tombstone of a former Marietta College biology professor, the predecessor of my birding-and-botanizing buddy. On the back of the stone were carved the words of Aldo Leopold: "He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance."

At the top of the hill we paused to enjoy the view, the cemetery sloping downward in every direction and the Ohio River glimmering in the distance. The river brought my distant cousins here in 1818 along with a group of intrepid New Englanders intent upon building a new paradise in the wilderness. They fought in wars, studied law, served in legislatures, and left their names on maps and monuments all over town. We found my cousin today at the top of the hill where a monument bears the name of William A. Whittlesey, mayor of Marietta in 1860 when the cemetery was founded.

Cousin William was born in 1796 in Danbury, Connecticut, not far from the site of today's tragic school shooting. He shares my mother's maiden name and perhaps some DNA but he's as much a stranger to me as the children and adults senselessly massacred in Newtown--but I still wish I could reach out to them, draw them close, lift their pain.

I stand on the highest point in Oak Grove Cemetery wondering what Cousin William Whittlesey saw when he stood in this place--a city on a hill, a beacon in the wilderness, a place of opportunity? I wonder whether he ever looked far to the east and longed to reach out and diminish the distance dividing him from Connecticut. I can't connect to him any more than I can connect to the families devastated by the shooting, but somewhere deep inside, we're all Connecticut cousins now.