Cross Purposes

Natalie's husband made the memorial. Sammy was his nephew. On the day of the funeral, while Natalie headed to the service with their kids, he pulled over off I-80 where the tumbling car had carved deep gouges into the ground. He collected an armful of stones, arranged them in a neat pile and placed a pole in the middle holding a bouquet of roses. He didn't think about what he was doing. He just did it.

If you didn't know it was there, you'd probably drive right by that little pile of stones. But Natalie Morgan and her husband, they know.

Charles Collins is a geography professor at the University of Northern Colorado. He is fascinated by the relationship between the private and the public, particularly when the public and the private cross paths on the back roads of Colorado. He has studied rural outhouses and he has studied decorative mailboxes, intrigued by what these roadside objects say about the people who make them. "The human landscape," Collins likes to say, "is our unwitting autobiography."

Few subjects intrigue him more than descansos: the perfect marriage of the public and the private. Collins says he stumbled on them the way most of us do: on long, lonely road trips down long, lonely highways. He'd be driving along some rolling landscape and see a flash of color by the side of the road. All of a sudden, he'd find himself standing in the weeds, contemplating a weathered cross and a bundle of dried flowers. He'd snap photos (he has dozens), make a mental note of the location and spend the rest of his trip wondering who had died there and who had marked the spot.

Three years ago, Collins began studying descansos in earnest. He compiled surveys, questioned state officials, interviewed victims' families, mined archives and established a network of writers, photographers and others just as drawn to the memorials as he is. Although he's only halfway through his research, he's already reached some conclusions. Most markers commemorate sudden and violent death. Most victims are young, with an average age of eighteen. Most markers are made by victims' friends and family members. Most are posted along rural highways, particularly intersections. Most are erected spontaneously, usually within two days of the death. Most help survivors maintain bonds with those who have died.

"There seems to be some attempt to re-establish contact," Collins says. "There's the feeling that this all happened so suddenly, that they left this morning and they were fine, and now they're not coming back. And death occurred not in the home and under the protection of the family, but in a public place. Others saw it, perhaps others saw the deceased after the family did. It's wanting to do something for a death that happened quickly, without warning, and there was no opportunity for survivors to be involved. There was no way to find closure."

But finding closure, Collins learned, was not always the motive. "Some people really avoided using these as a gesture of goodbye," he says. "They very much wanted to think of the victim as continuing to exist. When you see people leaving pretzels, beer bottles, baseball gloves and rubber dinosaurs, it's very much thinking of the victim as continuing to exist, with the express idea that they are not here physically but continue to do the things they enjoyed before."

Other researchers have made similar determinations. Kathy McRee, a Santa Fe-based photographer, documented descansos and recorded oral histories in New Mexico. She, too, detected a desire among the families and friends of victims to find the exact place of the death. "They would say, 'Yes, his body is at the cemetery, but his spirit is here. This is where we talk to him, this is where we feel closer to him, this is where he took his last breath,'" McRee says. "There is an ongoing need to communicate with the soul of a person."

And that need, says Stephen Sapp, a professor of religious studies at the University of Miami, can be traced back to the cave drawings, the pyramids and even Hollywood Westerns, where you'd see a stick on the side of the road with a cowboy hat on it. "Humans are social animals," says Sapp, an authority on death and grief. "It's almost a primordial need, an instinctive need. If you look at it from a Western religious perspective, we're created to be in community. We're all part and parcel of some community. When that community is rent, we need to recognize that and respond to that and express our loss. It's human nature."