"In Loving Memory of Clark Bohmer"

Crowsnest Pass, British Columbia, near the BC/Alberta border on Hwy. 3

Clark Bohmer, Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada Husband, Stepdad, Brother, Cousin, Son. November 26, 1976-August 27, 2012

It was that upright, hockey-stick crucifix that caught my eye, high in the Canadian Rockies, zipping along BC Highway 3 on a long, downhill curve at 107 kph, give or take, just a few miles west of Crowsnest Pass, where Alberta passes the provincial baton to British Columbia for those headed west.

“Hard to get more ‘Canada’ than that.” I whistled as it dawned on me just what I was seeing; a roadside memorial set well back from speeding traffic and beside a six-foot deer fence. Hockey and the saving power of Jesus in one glorious, unified cross.

…and, well, a cornucopia basket from which protruded a bunch of fake flowers.

It took a few seconds for all those elements to begin making sense together, and by then we were well past any possibility of pulling over safely, so I calmly asked Mary, who was driving that leg, if we could please turn around at the next safe and convenient possibility.

“Sure,” she replied, quizzically, “what did I miss?”

“You didn’t see the hockey stick?” I asked.

Her eyes remained dutifully glued to the road ahead but the curve of her brow changed... and the first hints of a smile began to appear and reshape her face.

“Hockey stick?”

“Yep. Hockey stick. Someone’s memorial back there has a cross made out of an upright hockey stick. I kinda need to know more. Obviously someone wants us to see it. And there’s this big, wide, safe place to pull off the road…”

Getting turned around on a three lane (passing lane on the uphill side), isn’t as hard as you might imagine at first. There are plenty of spaces in traffic out in the dingleberries, and gravel side roads head off, right and left more often than you’d think.

When we were safely parked in that pullout I’d seen as we whizzed past I grabbed my camera from the trunk and walked toward the stone pile holding up the NHL themed crucifix. Mary emerged from the driver’s seat, allowed herself some stretching exercises, then found a discreet place to pop a squat. Road trips sometimes mean peeing in the bushes.

Seeing that Pittsburg Penguins logo on a laminated funeral program held in place beneath a large, Canadian rock at the foot of a Canadian roadside memorial took a moment for me to square, the intermingling of what I would have thought surely a form of blasphemy, a Canadian, apparently loving an American hockey team, and the mixed symbolism of two very different religions, Ice Hockey and Christianity. The possibility of these unlikely intersections had not ever even occurred to me until I was standing right there beside them, reading the fading funeral program of a man I’d never met on a warm Tuesday afternoon.

Though the printed program indicated that Clark, his wife, Marianne and stepdaughter, Kristen were from Lethbridge and that he had family living in the Crowsnest Pass area, it didn’t look to me like anyone had visited his memorial or tended it for quite some time. Months pass. Then years. Life happens. I get it.

Who knows what those eleven years since his passing might have brought to his people. One hopes some measure of peace has found them, the survivors who loved and grappled with losing him, but there are never any guarantees.

I’d never met or even imagined Clark before stopping at his mountainside memorial, but I feel like I left with some sense of him and I’m grateful for the efforts of those who consecrated this roadside bit of land, high in the Canadian Rockies, marking his departure gate as a place of remembrance, discovery and celebration.

Clark Bohmer, you left our shared world right here on August 27, 2012. May your soul rest in peace and may your memory be a blessing.

When my mother died in a car wreck that almost took my sister, as well I needed to go and stand at that place where it happened. I needed to see it, walk that stretch of road, again and again, try to understand, get a sense of that place where she took her exit from the world that we continue to wake and sleep in.

I did not build her a memorial at the crash site. We didn't have that sort of relationship anymore. But even more so, because she was driving drunk and in a jealous rage at the moment of her departure. She did not leave those of us who loved her on good terms.

I crawled in through the broken window at the junkyard, in sweltering heat to sit there inside the crushed car she died in, needing to feel something more, understand better, but in the end, did not ache to leave some mark of loyalty in the world for her. Not there. Not like that.

Perhaps it’s no surprise then how acutely aware of others’ tributes, their very personal and heartfelt exit markers I have been, ever since. And so, as the spirit moves me, I pull over. I look for a safe place to stop. I stand with the departed and with those left behind trying to make sense of things, bowing at their alters, reading their notes of loss and gratitude, trying to honor their hints and often bumbling efforts to memorialize their loved ones' passages.

From time to time I'll add another of these memorials, here. It won't make a lick of sense to some, but perfect sense to others. I’m ok with that. There are no written rules for this sort of thing, as far as I know, and yet, each Roadside Memorial I've encountered, whether alongside some crumbling, two lane road in rural Thailand or a busy freeway in urban Illinois, each always has some elements in common, the most discernible of which is a profound need to express one's sense of grief and loss. After all these years I still find it worth the effort to pull over, get out …then to listen to whatever voices might be carried on the breeze, touch the edge of someone else’s tale of loss, say thank you to a world big enough and imaginative enough to allow this possibility, too..