A job of weight and honor
Most of us on Labor Day took breaks from jobs we had not aspired to hold. One thing led to another and you found yourself in a job that maybe isn’t better or worse, but certainly different from what you had in mind back when you pretended to be Sandy Koufax in the backyard.
I say this as introduction to Ryan Lee, supervisor of headstone operations at San Francisco National Cemetery in the Presidio. He and his two-man crew straighten headstones.
Sometimes they dig graves for the spouses of those already interred. (The cemetery stopped taking in new military casualties some years ago.) Sometimes, when the groundskeeping responsibilities are light, they trim the grass around the headstones. But mostly they keep the 30,000 headstones in the 28-acre cemetery lined up in plumb-straight rows, like soldiers at attention. Shifting soil and rain cause them to loosen and become crooked.
It is backbreaking work, as Lee will be the first to tell you. He’s been at the job for about 2-1/2 years and figures he has only about another full year in him.
Lee is a wiry 35-year-old in a striped work shirt buttoned to his neck with an old-timey oval patch on the right breast that says “Ryan.” He grew up in Reedley, a farming town south of Fresno, where at 15 he worked summers packing the peaches, nectarines and other tree fruit that keeps the locals working 16- hour days for three or four months of the year. Then he moved on to year-round work at the glass plant, where he learned to be a glasscutter. Then he sold Fords for five years.
He landed the headstone job by answering an ad on the CalWorks Web site. During his interview, the boss pointed to a headstone and told Lee to lift it. Each of the white military headstones weighs 250 pounds. Lee lifted it and got the job on the spot.
Then he had to learn the art of straightening. First, Lee explains to me, the crew puts down string to guide their lines, working in sections of 15 rows up and 10 across. Then they cut out a square of grass behind the headstone and set it aside to be replaced afterward.
They dig a hole 14 inches deep, which allows Lee to lift the stone out of the ground. Each stone is 42 inches high — exactly 24 inches above the ground and 18 inches below.
The empty holes are then tamped with a sledgehammer to just the right depth, taking into account that the headstone will compress the soil either 1 inch or 2, depending on the looseness of the soil.
This prep work for the 150-stone section takes the three-man operation about 10 hours.
Then the headstones go back in. A worker lifts the stone off the ground and stands it upright, then he lifts it again and drops it into the hole. If he has calculated perfectly, he needs only to fill in the dirt around stone, replace the patch of grass and he’s finished.
Lee tells about the rainy day when thick mud stuck to all the stones he and his crew lifted away the ground to put back into their holes. When the rows were all finished, straight as yardsticks, Lee realized some of the headstones had been put in backward. In the mud, the crew couldn’t tell front from back.
Spend any time in a cemetery, as Lee does, and you feel not only the weight of dirt and stone, but the weight of all the stories packed into these acres of earth. Lee still reads the headstones as he works: an Indian guide named Two Bit who Lee once read about in a book; a woman who was a Union spy; a private whose comrades decided a standard headstone wouldn’t do and bought him a 4-foot high obelisk engraved with poetry about his bravery chiseled into the sides.
It matters to Lee that the headstones stand in dignified, perfect rows. In this job he never imagined, he takes care of those whose jobs demanded more than they, too, might ever have imagined.
(Joan Ryan is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Send comments to her at [email protected].)