The Potter’s Hill

I was driving down an old dusty road one late summer day last year. There were a couple of friends along for the ride because hey, why not, there’s nothing better to do. It was one of those real lazy summer days were it is kind of hazy out in the distance, but it was not all that hot. I remember watching the billowing dust roar out from under the car and wondering if people could track our progress across the county by our huge elongated smoke signal.
It was time for a bathroom break, which is very convenient out on old back roads because there just happens to be a “bathroom” anywhere you need to stop and call it a bathroom. As the four of us got out of the car, our smoke signal blazed past us covering everything in a light coat of soft country dirt. I decided to walk on up the road a little because it is beautiful country out here. My friends and I were in northern Iron County, Missouri, not too far from a little town called Viburnum. This area has to be the oldest part of the state from all I can tell from all the old mining roads, one-hundred and fifty years old houses and what-not. I noticed the undisturbed oak trees growing silently, seemingly forever, on the side of this huge hill that is wearing our little dirt road for a necklace. Out of nowhere there appeared a huge stone arch on the left of the roadway that must be at least a story and a half tall with a Latin inscription over the crest. To this day I am clueless as to what it meant but it sure was cool to see. Right next to the stone arch was an old pump house with an old rusted tin roof that was precariously hanging on to its job of protecting the inside of the pump house. There must have been an artesian inside because you could still smell the live spring water trickling out. Ivy had covered everything. The plants were growing up the sides of the stone arch clinging to it and reaching for the low branches of the oak trees at the same time. The entire surface of the ground was covered in ivy as well. I stepped under the stone arch and almost tripped over a ledge covered by the ivy which upon further inspection turned out to be a huge rectangular stone slab. This was the first of hundreds of steps leading up the hill, all covered in a green carpet of ivy.
Walking up the stairway in the woods, I had this strange notion of peace. The silence of the woods here was very quiet. Oak trees invented a sort of canopy over the area and the Ivy covering the ground snuffed out any other plants that might try to make a home there. The scene made me think of an outdoor room carpeted with Ivy and roofed by oak. I soon came upon a much smaller arched threshold. On each end of the archway there is a wall, about three feet high made of indigenous stone, curving gracefully away and up the hill. There were dozens upon dozens of gravestones in this enclosure. It never really occurred to me until this point that this might be a graveyard. I always liked to visit old graveyards and look at the dates on the stones thinking of what the surrounding area must have looked like to the people living in it in their day. Usually, I realize that it probably looks just about the same now as it did then, which I usually find comforting for some reason. Bending down to inspect the first gravestone, I see that it is the grave of a child. She was around three of four years old when she died in 1847. These old graveyards usually have an unusual (to us) number of children because medical advancements that we are so used to today did not exist back then. I move to the next stone. Another child. The next, another. What I find is a graveyard of children, from newborns to early teenagers. There was not one adult amongst them. Moving further up the hill, towards the very top border of the wall, as it makes its way back around to meet again, I find that the wall is not completed. There is about a three-foot gap in the wall and it just gently curves to the ground. Going through this gap in the wall is a very well-worn path. The path looks to me as if people must walk on it every day. This interests me because coming in from the front of graveyard, you would think no one had been to this place in a hundred years. I proceed up the path wondering where it must lead, because if it is used so much something must be nearby. But there is nothing. I reach the summit of this hill after a winding trek along this path, and there is nothing. The path just ends in a little clearing about five feet wide at the very crest of the hill and there is nothing. I still don’t know why, but from the top I can see forever in any direction.