Dawn of Tomorrow — Territory
Illustrated by Suzanne Calkins
March 2017
I want to see the grave of a stranger. And so I leave a valley six hours north of Los Angeles to surf the fast flow of the Ventura Freeway and exit beside railroad tracks and the Golden Road brewery, passing Dinah’s Chicken, El Sauz Mexican Cafe, a street named for Chevy Chase, a billboard asking “Does God Exist?” I drive through the world’s largest wrought-iron gates and park at the side of Cathedral Drive, on softening asphalt in late July, in Glendale, ten miles north of downtown Los Angeles.
Forest Lawn Memorial Park lies before me, three hundred acres perfectly mowed. I stand at the steps of the mortuary, Tudor-style, a swooping brown-shingled roof dwarfed by surrounding green. A quarter million people have been buried at Forest Lawn in the century past, many of them Hollywood stars, artists, musicians. Beyond the mortuary, I see no grave markers on the rising swathes of turf, no dark monuments to endings, because the men who designed Forest Lawn found rows of headstones too grim for the climate of Southern California. The place seems to be an experiment in the virility of grass, a green blanket tossed over the earth, a picnic spot for giants, like no desert cemetery I have seen.