The Zen of the Snow-Covered Cemetery

The snowstorm began on Sunday, January 25, and got more intense as the day progressed. By noon, it was relentless. The Philadelphia area expected about six inches of snow, but it soon turned to sleet and became untenable. If you were driving in a cemetery – like me – you were hard-pressed to stay on the recently plowed roads. I found myself driving on the lawn in the blinding snow at one point. Kind of reminded me of the time near Snowmass, Colorado, when my friend Mike was driving us through a snowstorm in his Subaru. The car was creeping slowly forward, but we could see nothing through the windshield. I rolled down the passenger window to get a less foggy view, and right next to us were tall hedges! “Um, Mike? I think we’re in someone’s yard….”

Gates open, roads plowed ...

So why would I be driving around a cemetery in a snowstorm? The question is, why would you NOT be driving around a cemetery in a snowstorm? Unique experience! With the snow-covered monuments and statues, it is like immersing yourself in a dynamic art installation! The zen of a snow-covered cemetery is difficult to put into words. There is a state of attentiveness that happens clearly in such an environment in such a situation. As Brad Warner says in his book, Hardcore Zen, its not enlightenment, and "yet there is something, and even though this experience doesn't change anything at all, it changes everything." 

I was there at 9:30 a.m., when the cemetery opened. This was hours before the radio started pleading with people to stay off the roads unless it’s an emergency. I knew it was going to snow the night before, so I planned on hitting Holy Cross Cemetery in Yeadon, PA (which borders Philadelphia where I live, on the west side). It is one of my go-to cemeteries because it has lots of low statues that get covered with snow. It is also relatively convenient for me to get there and I know that unlike Woodlands Cemetery in West Philly, Holy Cross plows its roads.

The snow was soft as it fell, and I made a few quick statue photographs but JESUS CHRIST was it cold (see above)! And windy! With chemical hand warmers in my gloves, hood up over my head, I kept the SUV running with the heater on full blast as I jumped out every few minutes to photograph something. To drive through a snow-covered cemetery is one of the reasons God gave us SUVs. God, however, cannot prevent you from locking yourself out of it in a snowstorm like I experienced about fifteen years ago. Always never do that.

I was careful not to slip in the snow (which was getting deeper) as I walked amidst the gravestones. The whiteout made it easier to spot the ceramic memorial photographs on the stones. I don’t think I’d ever seen this one before, even though I’d been in Holy Cross countless times. Might be a postmortem photo, not sure. Snow and bitter cold changes your perspective, as well as your tolerance for pain.

Postmortem image?

The trucks were re-plowing the roadways during the 90 minutes or so that I was there. Saw a small herd of deer running away from the plow truck at one point. The workers must have thought I was nuts. Or maybe they thought I was true to my art. Naw, they probably just thought I was nuts. When the snow started to fall more and more heavily, it was with less and less alacrity that I would stop and jump out to make a photograph. I only strung lights on a couple statues as it was just too cold to work the fine wires and switches on the battery packs. But like Christmas, its not over, ‘til its over, and you throw away the tree (from the Louden Wainwright song, Suddenly its Christmas). I finally resorted to just shooting out the window with a zoom lens.

Driving became virtually impossible. Defrosted snow turned to ice on my wiper blades, requiring a stop every few minutes with attempts to pull enough ice off the wipers so I could sort of see through the windshield. Then came the sleet. This storm, and driving a vehicle in it, just became a discordant experience. When I finally left the cemetery and got to the main roads, vehicles were stuck everywhere, on small inclines, at intersections. Again, it reminded me of Colorado. Once I was invited by a group of British friends to ski the Arapaho Basin with them. The mountain was higher and more remote than I was used to. It began to snow heavily as we began to descend from the top. My goggles fogged up and they left me for dead. Ah, good times.

So why would I put myself through this? If I lived in Colorado, this sort of storm would be a more quotidian event. However, Philadelphia rarely sees this heavy a snowfall. So, when such a gift is bestowed upon us, I view it as an impact opportunity not to be squandered. That said, getting stuck in a snowbank on the highway is not my jam. I did have to back down an on-ramp to Interstate 95 near the airport because a small clot of cars was blocking my progress. Seems the highway maintenance vehicles plowed the snow against the on and off ramps, blocking them. As Foghorn Leghorn says, “Some people ain’t got the sense God gave a bowling ball.” 

By the next morning, the nine inches of snow was anointed with a layer of ice that only a flamethrower could penetrate. Temperatures had dropped to about eighteen degrees after the sleet storm Sunday afternoon. They dropped into the single digits over the next few days. I didn’t go back to Holy Cross Cemetery during the week because with the snow sleeted over, this concretion became nine inches of ice. My friend Linda, in my neighboring state of Delaware, calls this “snowcrete.” You take your life in your hands trying to climb through/over a crosswalk. It is relatively easy to do a James Brown split on the ice if you aren’t careful. Owwww! (screamed in a high-pitched James Brown-type vocal).

I did spend a few hours after work during the week driving through various cemeteries in the area, shooting bleached snowscapes and every once in a while, getting out of my vehicle to shoot something up close. The close shots were rare, because even though roads were plowed in some Philadelphia and south Jersey cemeteries, you could not actually walk on the ice fields. Too treacherous. Too real. Didn't want to get stuck in the snow like this hearse at Laurel Hill Cemetery!

Hearse in the snow, Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia

So back to zen, and the truth found in the frozen reality of a snow-filled cemetery. There is that, but I’m also a treasure hunter, I guess, looking for that once-in-a-lifetime photograph in a snow-covered graveyard - these sophisticated built environments we make to avoid the truth. Or at least tuck it away down a side street. Attempting to make an amazing photograph is not a hobby, or a job for me – its more like an addiction, as one of the characters said in reference to wildcat oil drilling in the television series Landman. While I wish I was good enough to capture a Red-Tailed hawk plucking one of the just-released doves out of mid-air at a funeral, I must be content with shooting gravestones in the snow. I rather like this one below, which I made in Fernwood Cemetery, in Lansdowne, PA.  Kind of looks like and old Victorian lithograph, doesn't it?

While it is tempting to stay indoors where my furnace works, there is hot water to shower, and the ice box is filled with frozen burritos, I have been venturing out daily to photograph the ice in my local cemeteries. I plan to continue doing so until the city decides to remove the frozen snow, the weather gets warmer, and the rock salt barges are freed from the ice on the Delaware River (now that’s ironic).

A Cautionary New Year’s Tale Involving Cemeteries (the Non-ChatGPT Version!)

Whether you’re spending New Years’ Day visiting a premature baby in an ICU or waiting for your mom to die in hospice, you can’t help but wonder what the new year will bring. You hope its good – or at least as good as it can get. Life can be like standing in a graveyard while its snowing – you’re surrounded by death, but then something may soften the idea. You feel that newfallen snow brings the idea of new life, a fresh start.

So instead of an all-night tears-of-the-moon rain tonight, snow is forecast. The group of cemetery photographers I had planned to hang with tomorrow backed out due to the expected snow and icy conditions. But that’s why God created the SUV, am I right? Back when I drove Saab convertibles, I would’ve found myself begging off as well. But seeing as I have an SUV, I will be out there tomorrow morning in the snow. Supposedly it will still be falling in the morning. This will make my inner child very happy.

I have a go-to cemetery for snow days, with lots of angel statues and other monuments, so hopefully I’ll have some images to post with this piece. Make hay while the sun shines, they used to say. Or as an eighty-year-old woman told me yesterday, “have fun and enjoy yourself while you’re in your sixties and seventies!” Weird, but true. She said all your kids have grown, they have their own lives, and you can just go out and have fun. While its true that most of our knowledge of the world is vicarious, I hoped to meet some of my own snow ghosts to haunt my dreams.

And haunt me they did. I always figured that if I didn’t believe in them, they wouldn’t try to get me. But that does not always work. For instance, I was raised Catholic, twelve years of good-versus-evil Bible squitter. Then a couple weeks ago, I started reading a book my friend George loaned me, by Randall Sullivan, called The Devil’s Best Trick (2024, Atlantic Monthly Press). The trick is that the devil has convinced us that he’s not real. 

I began reading the book in bed. Read about twenty pages, and put it beside my pillow and went to sleep. What I read had not been scary. The book is comprised mainly of historical accounts, exorcisms, and the author’s experiences. I awoke from a really disturbing nightmare. Something dark was slowly flapping its wings as it sat on a sort of altar inside a sort of church. Really nothing more to it than that, other than the feeling of intense evil. I tried going back to sleep, but was too wired. I took the book from beside my pillow and threw it under my bed. I fell asleep just fine.

Maybe the snow tomorrow will white-out some of the evil surrounding us these days. At least until it melts and things resume looking shitty again. Slowly, the dirty soil bleeds into the white snow. But a lot of that is perception, right? When Victoria Wyeth gave a recent talk on how her grandfather Andy painted snow, she presented four categories, something like, flurries, footprints, melting snow, and dirty snow. The dirty snow intrigued me. She explained how the soil’s brown colors were drawn up and absorbed by the snow, changing its colors in subtle ways. It had gone far from being simply “dirty” snow – now it was snow tinged with raw or burnt umber. It really is all in your perception of things, right? So is dirty snow evil, filthy, or just tinged with brown pigment? It’s a perception thing – you need to choose.

Sometimes a misimpression or misunderstanding pays off. Charles Dickens’ misperception of, or rather misreading of, Ebeneezer Scroggie’s tombstone in Scotland’s Canongate Kirk graveyard lead him to believe that Scroggie was “a mean man” - it actually said, “meal man.” Scroggie, it seems, was a successful corn merchant. Dickens conjured up the famous skinflint character Ebeneezer Scrooge based on his idea of what he thought Scroggie was – a mean man. So Dickens’ mistake paid off, obviously. (Ref.)

What then will the new year bring? Misperceptions? Mistakes? Sure. Lean into them, learn from them. Certain experiences can create an artistic epiphany as sometimes happens with snow falling in a graveyard. Maybe you pivot your old way of thinking, like the “ah-ha” moment I had last week when I realized why metal water bottles are so popular. After dragging some women to the new Neil Diamond-themed movie, “Song Sung Blue,” I was about to apologize, thinking they’d found it boring. Then I realized they were drunk and didn’t care. Its been, what, twenty years since metal “water bottles” became a thing? It never occurred to me that anyone would fill them with anything but water. Well, Bob’s your uncle, as the Brits say. Same startling realization as when I found out that the song, "Over the Rainbow" from The Wizard of Oz is the most famous Jewish song ever. Didn't know that, hmm? Written by two Jewish immigrants about hope, the promised land, and exile.

So after all, it snowed a bit last night, but then turned to freezing rain. The snow was tentative, I realized that. I wasn’t treating the situation like it would be the last dinner on the Titanic. When I went to the cemetery this morning, it was not what I expected, or hoped for. (Really, what is?) Instead of standing inside a calm snow globe that someone had just shaken, I was greeted by icy roads and ice-covered monuments. I spent about two hours trying not to kill myself on the ice and made a few photos while I was at it (much to the amusement of the drivers of the two plow trucks parked on the property). As I grabbed onto the base of a monument to keep myself from falling, I wondered what other purpose these monuments served. 

Why do monuments even exist? Sure, we all know they are meant to memorialize someone or something. In her article, “What monuments stand to teach Americans about themselves,” (Spectator, December 2025) Julia Friedman says that they show us “just how attached we are to grievance…reimagining defeat as victory.” A beautiful angel carved in granite indicates to us that even though the deceased person may have died, they succeeded in being borne aloft by angels to the heavens, and to their eternal reward. Success! Victory over death! Bullfeathers. Would we install a monument on the grave of the hiker who was killed by a mountain lion in Colorado on New Years' Day? 

Fancy cemetery monuments and buildings with your name on them do not define your life – your actions do. Whether you feel like last year was a dumpster fire or the Second Coming, keep in mind what ChatGPT said in my last blog post: cemeteries remind anyone seeking fresh beginnings of an inconvenient truth: Time does not reset. It only continues—and it keeps excellent records.

So for the new year, maybe be more realistic? Be more artistic – add beauty to the world. As the great philosopher Frank Zappa said, the human mind is like a parachute – it works best when its open. Accept your mortality, and that of others. There are so many choices in life that sometimes it looks like a Chinese menu. Buy that dog for your kid. Accept that people lie to you. Accept that people are lying to you every day. In my previous ChatGPT-created post, I lied to you. Maybe do your children a favor and lie to them every once in a while (but point it out shortly afterwards). Explain it to them as a life lesson – people will lie to you, so don’t be like a heifer to the slaughter, as musician Brian Eno sings in “Baby’s on Fire.” Instead of memorializing oneself with an expensive monument, maybe focus on making the world a slightly better place. Otherwise, the new year will suck as badly as the old one. Remember the Devil’s best trick… that the Devil has convinced us that he’s not real. 

I’ll leave you with the last verse of Eno’s “Baby’s On Fire.” Maybe it relates to your life, your job, your nation. Maybe in the new year, we should all show more respect for each other. I’m not expecting perfection, and neither should you. I’ll be happy with a six-seven year.

“But baby's on fire!
And all the instruments agree that
Her temperature's rising
But any idiot would know that”

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Read my previous post, which I authored with the use of ChatGPT,  

"A Cautionary New Year’s Tale Involving Cemeteries:"

http://thecemeterytraveler.blogspot.com/2025/12/a-cautionary-new-years-tale-involving.html