A minor research task brought me to Mount Hope Cemetery on an afternoon this April and as I walked among the graves I felt, as I always do, the weight of history that presses so heavily on such hallowed ground.

It is a curious mixture of emotions, but pleasant.

Death, of course, is inextricably associated with a burying ground.

Yet when I stroll between the rows of stones I think mostly of life.

As I pause to read a familiar name, or to ponder an intriguing epitaph, I think not of the person’s end but rather about all that he or she experienced.

Mount Hope is of modest size, yet its thousands of graves represent a scale of human life so immense that I feel a sort of mental vertigo as I consider it.

In every row there is a composite story that extends across many tens of thousands of days.

So many smiles and tears, moments of triumph and despair, marriages and children and holidays.

These stories will never be written, of course.

But I know too that for almost every grave there are chapters, or at least anecdotes, that persist, even if they are preserved in someone’s memory rather than a more permanent form.

For every little plot, surely, someone, still among the quick rather than the dead, could tell me something about the person who lies beneath the greening grass of April.

Could share a favorite memory, could bring to a sort of life a person I can never know.

This pleases me.

And it tempers the melancholy that I inevitably feel when I walk slowly through a cemetery.

I feel sad when I wonder, as I pass a grave that was dug many decades ago, how much time has passed since someone came this way who knew and loved the person whose name is engraved in the stone.

For some, I’m sure, the answer must be years.

Decades even.

This reality conveys a sense of loneliness that I can’t express in words.

It is the knowledge that so many summers have passed, so many times the grave has been covered by snow, since someone stood where I stand, someone for whom the name was more than a name.

My search was fruitless and I eventually gave in and walked toward the westering sun, toward home.

I was reminded that as settings go for cemeteries, Mount Hope’s is about as close to perfect as anyone could, well, hope for.

The Elkhorns were wreathed in feathery clouds.

The air was spring soft but the wind, blowing out of the north as it so often does in that month, was a trifle chilly.

It is good, I think, that we can go to ground, after our decades or perhaps a century, in such a place, beneath mountains whose lifespans compared to ours are essentially eternal.

———

Steve Ellis, supervisor of the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest from 2004-10, is one of my most faithful email correspondents.

Steve occasionally sends me links to stories that he thinks I might find interesting.

Without fail he is correct.

And so it was with a recent message.

Except in this case the author was not another journalist, but Steve himself.

He helped the Forest Service Museum in Missoula, Montana, compile a roster of those who have served as district rangers and supervisors on the Wallowa-Whitman and on the national forests which preceded the merging of the Wallowa and the Whitman in 1954.

It is an interesting document, although most of the names are unfamiliar to me. I was particularly intrigued to note that the federal government’s predilection for changing what it calls its various operations is hardly a recent affectation.

The story starts in 1905 when President Theodore Roosevelt designated three “forest reserves” — Wallowa, Chesnimnus and La Grande.

Two years later the feds, always restless in such matters, merged the Wallowa and Chesnimnus reserves to create the Imnaha National Forest.

That moniker was short-lived (the museum’s document makes no mention of what the new stationery cost).

In 1908 the forest was renamed the Wallowa. That same year, the La Grande reserve was added to the Blue Mountains National Forest — another name that no longer exists.

In 1911 the Forest Service — the agency was created the same year those three reserves were named, 1905 — embarked on a flurry of administrative tinkering.

Part of the Wallowa National Forest was carved off and named the Minam National Forest. The Blue Mountains National Forest was divided into four national forests. The La Grande Ranger District — rather like an orphan shuttled among surviving relatives — was initially part of one of the new national forests, the Umatilla, but in the 1940s it was moved, figuratively speaking, to another, the Whitman.

The final change — so far, anyway — happened in 1954 when the Wallowa and Whitman national forests were joined by the hyphen that has endured.

The list of ranger districts, meanwhile, is too long to be included in its entirety here.

But most no longer exist, among them the Bear Creek (part of the Wallowa National Forest), Little Minam and Eagle (Minam), Sumpter, North Powder, Desolation and Burnt River (Whitman).

The roster is basic, with the names and tenures of rangers and supervisors.

I suspect, though, that there must be filing cabinets somewhere, crammed with faded documents, which could tell a much richer history.