‘The Bone Garden’ smells. It smells for about a mile around its perimeter, which, given that it’s grown in this shrubby not-quite-desert of the outer Death Valley, doesn’t seem to bother anyone. Most people cycling their A/C from the air in the car could drive by without ever noticing it- the stench isn’t permeating exactly. With an open window, though, and paired with the vultures overhead, it isn’t exactly hard to miss.
‘There’s not much to the surface of ‘The Bone Garden.’ There shouldn’t be, anyway. ‘The Bone Garden’ is an informal place where community members have come to bury carcasses in chicken wire, leaving them for a year or so to decomposition and hungry, burrowing insects but confounding the sorts of animals that might attempt to dig them up and scatter the bones.
It’s the bones that people are after. Given time, the chickenwire fills with the skeleton of the animal in a form that’s near to life. What people need these skeletons for is not a simple question. For some, it’s a morbid curiosity, for others, it’s nostalgia for a lost pet. Some people make art with the bones. Others claim to cast spells.
There has been some drama in ‘The Bone Garden’ of late. A sign has appeared, handwritten but on wood, that asks the gardeners to not place human remains on the premises. This has been met with backlash, not so much for the rule itself, but for the idea that anybody should be able to regulate a community project such as ‘The Bone Garden,’ which has been maintained for over a decade now. Efforts to organize a clean-up of the discarded bones that litter the ground have been met with similar derision.
“Those bones belong where they fall,” said one gardener, casting about with the skull of a rodent, “How would you know it’s the garden without the bones?”
The woman is later recorded tripping into a pile of remains as she searches for her plot, waving away the camera from the ground and swearing she tripped on her own shoes.’
The guide fails to mention that the ground of ‘The Bone Garden’ is swarming with insects, and I suppose that’s because they’re the sort of uninterested, half-alive larvae that feast on the dead and ignore or even resent the intrusion of the living, but had I known the earth beneath me would be so saturated with life as to be undulating beneath my sneakers, I probably would have tied bags on my feet or something. As it is, I waffle on whether or not to hike up my pant legs, choosing instead to tuck them into my socks and hope that nothing capable of squirming in between the tight fabric will choose to do so.
The bone layer on the ground moves slightly with the earth beneath it. The bones make a noise, like the rattle of an insect, course and grating. Piled remains sometimes topple with the sound of hollow wood, the effect of which is to drive some deep instinctual fear of predators into overdrive. I turn reflexively each time this happens and my eyes try to make sense of the shifting landscape, occasionally determining that something large seems to be moving just below the surface of the ground, before the pattern collapes back into chaos.
I stick around long enough to take note of the plot system- loose at best. Gardeners plant little signs- a name, at least, and an entry date. Some indicate the contents or an estimated time of retrieval. Others advertise their social media accounts.
Before I leave, I watch a vulture fall from the sky, breaking its neck as it crashes into the center of the garden. I came upon a short scientific article about this. These birds are drawn in by the smell and become locked into a loop, waiting for a meal that never comes. I suspect the dead vulture may feed the others, but before they can descend a woman has made her way out of the woods with chickenwire to bury the fallen bird.
Another vulture breaks briefly from the circle, hesitates, and returns, drawn in by a promise nobody intends to keep.
-traveler
