Art parks, open-air history museums, picnic spots, trysting grounds, community gathering places: cemeteries—if I may say so—cover a lot of ground. I've covered some 750 of them in better than 17,000 photographs, mostly in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, with a smattering from elsewhere (you can visit them on my Flickr site.). It's taken me since 2004. I can safely say the subject will outlast me.

Lately, I've been organizing some of that data into more accessible forms that one can carry along or read at their leisure: books. How old-fashioned can one get? I try.

Don't let that picture on your left fool you. Someone else has inhabited my body of late, and I have no idea where I am. I suspect I'm going to have to go down with this body. Alas…

I work out of Portland, OR which explains my bias. There are worse places. You may well live where there are many more cemeteries than here, but then again, you don’t get out into the Columbia Basin searching for them. My children and grandchildren think it an odd avocation; but, so long as I’m on this side of the sod, they don’t mind.

In these books you’ll find a selection of cemeteries arranged by region, a guide to and history of Portland’s premier pioneer cemetery, and a collection of 1100 epitaphs from the Oregon Territory. It’s a big space. I’m not done. Come visit my private Oregon.

It Could Be Me