I’ve been working with the graves of the dead for nearly four years now, keeping the grounds they rest beneath pristine. I’ve risen before the sun every day to walk through the cemetery gates, my boots already wet from the first few steps upon the grass. And what of this grave yard employee, heavy eyes from the long nights and little sleep, from the caffeine or amphetamine I thought I needed so badly in those waking hours to get me on my way, perk up my step, cut the string, mix up two gallons of gas with six ounces of two-stroke oil, shake and fill the tank of the Echo trimmer - forget the earplugs, the ones in my locker are crusty and dirty - I’d just opt to bear the grinding sound about to rattle my nerves. Rev up the cold engine, squeeze down on the throttle, no engine would wake the dead. Better to trim around tombstones than homes, my 30,000 customers never complain.

People who work at a cemetery get two reactions when asked what they do for a living. Either, “Wow, that’s really cool, can you get me a job out there?” or, “Ugh, that’s creepy, do you ever see anything?” I guess there are two types of people when it comes to viewing death – the fearful and the curious.

The fearful type never work on the grounds; the curious just end up doing their job. They never see ghosts, maybe a bone from the skeleton of an excavated grave, and they never see grave robbers, just a picture, a beer, mementos or a note from a loved one to the deceased, left below their headstone.

Aside from these little reminders of death, the cemetery is a rather boring place to work. Nothing really changes. There are not a lot of visitors for the dead, only on sunny days, and they keep to themselves and their memories. Working on the site you get depressed you get isolated, and you either start getting loaded, find something else to do or get stuck repeating the same patterns every week.

It’s not that being around the dead makes you sad; it’s that not being around the living makes you sad.

It’s a lonely job. Employees of San Francisco National Cemetery primarily work by themselves, alone with nothing but their thoughts.

“It turned into a dead end job,” says George Hill, who worked at the site for nine months in 2002, quitting because he needed more out of life than death. The repetition turned sour. “It became Hell on earth,” he says.

But it will take a good while for 18-year-old Jason Rudini to let the cemetery get him down. The money is good, and he doesn’t care what kind of work he’s doing. For $19.62 an hour, the fact that he’s walking on top of thousands of dead bodies every day becomes irrelevant. After his first two months working, I see my old self in him, stoked to be getting that high a wage. Tough, yet simple routines, and no one looking over your shoulder. Just keep an eye out for detail boy, but never mind that spot you missed, no one is going to complain.

Death only hits when you need to take a leak. Better just to piss on the side of the road. Everyone can get a little superstitious, but really it comes down to respect. With an average of 16 burials a year, employees are occasionally called to act as pallbearers. It’s rather difficult not to think of that person as you lift his coffin out of the hearse and lower it into the ground, firmly planting your boots into the earth, looking into the eyes of those present in mourning. That’s when the job becomes sobering; you see what kind of effect that person had on the world. When family and friends are there, you can sense the love and grief this person has left in his wake. When all you see is someone from the Bureau of Veterans Affairs bringing in a body contained in the simplest of wood boards nailed together to make a coffin, and only one person in attendance, you just know the weight of the dirt is going to crush it. There will be a grave repair in a few days.

John Wilson is the current supervisor at San Francisco National Cemetery. He never really had a problem with death. After working on and off at the site for over three years, his skin red from too many days in the sun, and his solar bleached blonde hair, he’s been conditioned to view headstones by their number rather than the name.

I too stopped looking at the names long ago, it’s just a stone that needs trimming.

Hill takes a humorous view toward death. All those rows of headstones, uneven with years of the earth’s movement, remind him of rows of old peoples' faces smiling with crooked teeth. It makes him giggle.

Lawnmower man of years past, Richard Cerney still knows some stories about the people who rest beneath the ground. He shows me a gravestone with a single date and a single name: Two-Bits. He tells me Two-Bits was an American Indian spy for the U.S. government who ratted out his own tribe, an act which led to his death by his own people’s hands. They say he would have done anything for two quarters, two bits, you see.

But history also rises up from the ground, not in the form of a story, but in actual DNA. There is a certain section of road at the far corner of the grounds where runoff from the series of steep hills collects and flows toward a drain. Next to a closed gate leading down to Lincoln Boulevard, the local birds bathe and drink from the puddle it leaves behind. Upon closer inspection, an oily multicolored sheen can be seen floating on the surface of the water. Many of the coffins above have been filling up with water for a hundred years or so. The bodies in turn become liquefied and ooze out into the street. On certain days, the bottom of that hill reeks of the stagnate musk I’ve come to know as the smell of human decomposition. But the skeleton endures. At least there is some sanctity that remains.

The rain is no friend to the cemetery man. A drizzle would permit the grass trimmer to bundle up with some waterproof gear and sludge across the hills to make a buck, but when it pours there is no way to make a dollar that day. The summer promises work, dry earth for the stones to be realigned and grass that seems to grow quicker. What the winter storms do promise are mushrooms. Sprouting up from the nitrogen rich soil, fungi thrive off death. It’s what they eat. A wide variety appears over night, some edible, some deadly poisonous and a certain local hallucinogenic variety known as Psilocybe Cyanescens that pop up every December. What joy befuddled the finder of these mushrooms keeping the sacred spot a secret from all but his closest friends? What is being said about drug laws in this country when land owned by the federal government is naturally producing a substance they deem illegal to possess? Some may call the government the manufacturer of dangerous drugs in such a situation. What riddles the earth poses.

To work on cemetery grounds, death can’t be taken too seriously. Because we can't help consider the centipedes, worms, slugs and mud penetrating into the coffins below our work, a traditional burial is well out of the picture of employees I’ve labored with. If there is anything that the cemetery has taught me, it’s to stay out of the ground.