Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Dateline: Wednesday 6 November 2019

The quest began after a gourmet breakfast of bullfrog legs harvested this weekend during pond cleaning operations. I was off for the furnace place in Somerset County to get some rope gasket and caulking to replace the door seal on the outside furnace and then on to Altoona to find Fairview Cemetery and pay my respects to the late Science Fiction author H. Beam Piper who passed on this date in the 1960s. This will be my third attempt to find his final resting place in Fairview Cemetery which I recently figured out is right next door to the local UPMC hospital campus and just around the corner from the Taco Bell where I stopped to eat on my first attempt in 2016—only to discover that my wallet was missing somewhere along the way of a long trip by way of Musser’s Nursery in Indiana Pa (where I had left it at the checkout counter a few hours prior) and Zett’s Fish Hatchery in Drifting.

My second attempt came a month or so later on the return leg from the reptile show in Hamburg when I took the scenic route on 22 to avoid the atrocious Turnpike tolls coming back. It was also a failure because Altoona is a nightmare of one way streets and the cemetery is kind of out on the north end of town and there is no main road on the outskirts there to get me closer and cut out a big part of the maze of streets. I had done my homework and figured if I could just get to that Taco Bell again and turn up the next street I should be able to find the place I was looking for.

I was taking a great leap of faith against gut instincts urging me to stay home. But as I said to myself and a friend the night before; that you only live once and what will my next article be if I just stay home and carp about how risk averse I’ve become in my middle years.

I went by way of New Centerville in order to pick up some rope gasket and sealer on the way to save gas and mileage. That may have been a mistake because the Stove Works had recently moved and I had a hard time finding it. Then I Made a wrong turn in Somerset which I’ve done before. More time lost. Corrected and got onto 219 North for 22 to take me east to Altoona. Could have visited the Flight 93 Memorial on the way and I almost did taking that exit to find gas but if there were any stations they were well off the highway and gas was getting low. And so was the sun. I should have started out sooner and gotten gas in Somerset but didn’t want to deal with the downtown traffic. Finally found a station nearing Johnstown and filled up there. Made Route 22 and drove east with a splendid view of the mountains a little past peak autumn colors and the moon rising in the evening blue and couldn’t help but think about Piper’s Stephen Silk character in Lone Star Planet being exiled from the Solar League. HQ to the embassy on New Texas. Then I saw the trains climbing the mountain to the north of me as I descended toward Altoona and remembered that Piper worked as a night watchman for the rail yard in this podunk Rust Belt town I was bound for on my third attempt to find the cemetery and his grave.

I managed to find the cemetery this time around without too much trouble but had a helluva time locating Mr Piper.

It took a little sleuthing with the picture of the stone on the website I used for reference matching the trees on the perimeter of the cemetery that are in the background. But I could not find anything that matched the picture which is the only one I could find online. I trekked all over the place and asked for directions three times to no avail. One lead from a group of young people seemed promising. One of them said he had seen it before and really liked the stone. But nothing matched along that perimeter. The majority of the stones in this cemetery face east which is a common custom for Christian burial. That gave me an idea for one last ditch effort before I ran out of daylight.

And I found him just before sunset when I was on the verge of having to give up and there was still enough light for decent pictures for this article which are going to be useful to other fans trying to visit in the future. To spare them my wild goose chases!

It’s in the northeast corner of the Cemetery not far from where I parked a few yards inside the gate and if you stand behind the stone you are looking at the UPMC hospital just across the street!

That was how I spotted the stone as I walked through that section a couple rows back. That was one of my exciting moments in life. On par with finding turtles or other valuable critters or a plant I’ve traveled long way or spent hours searching for.

The hospital turned out to be the best landmark for locating Fairview Cemetery since it’s right next door. Even better than the Taco Bell I was looking for. I initially planned to eat there as sort of a victory lap for finding the memorial of Mr Piper and to make up for the disasterville of my first visit when I was unabnd to eat there on the account of no wallet and no money! However as I was orbiting the block around the cemetery; my risk averse instincts kicked in as I realized that even though my mission was a success, Altoona is still a bedlam when it comes to driving and even worse after dark.

So I decided to make like a bat out of hell and find my way to the nearest interstate and hightail it for home. No victory lap is worth another fender bender and my assessment was correct because I ended up in a lane that shunted me into an out of the way seedy neighborhood I had visited before on the first trip! Luckily I made it through without any mishap.

Was very glad to get out of that podunk Rust Belt town and back on the road for my own. I defaulted to a Burger King somewhere on Rt 22 where I relaxed a while and caught up on email while reflecting more on some of Piper’s best works.

My favorites are “Uller Uprising” which was how I discovered Piper and “Lone Star Planet” & “Space Viking” which I did book reviews in this journal and I really liked the novelette “Police Operation” which is a great introduction to the Paratime Multiverse as the whole concept and description of levels, sectors and belts timelines is detailed in a conversation. I found that one on LibriVox. There is also the introduction at the beginning of “Uller Uprising” that offers the best biographical information on Mr Piper that can be had along with an awesome background description of the two planets central to the story— Uller and Niffleheim that details orbital mechanics, climate and seasons, and the unusual but somewhat plausible silicon and flourine based biologies that is SF world building at its best and what got me hooked on the novel when I picked it up in my college days in the 1980s. I knew then and there that Piper was something special and in the introduction I also learned of the manner in which he ended his life—“by his own hand” the narrative read and thought; why? I did not learn the details of Piper’s life and the financial problems that led him to commit suicide that day in 1964. It would be wrong to judge him but deep down inside the question still echos; why? He already had an impressive retinue of other novels and short stories in publication aside from the few really popular ones listed on his monument.

It has been speculated by a number of sources that had he just hung on a little longer, he would likely have continued producing good works and went down as one the the giants of 20th Century classic Science Fiction- alongside Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert A Heinlein. His works reflect the best of hard SF and Alternative History literature and future history timelines and his influence is evident in the works of the late Jerry Pournelle and L. Neil Smith. And S.M. Stirling and Harry Turtledove too. It has also been suggested that the cute furry aliens in “Little Fuzzy” may have been the inspiration for the Ewoks in the Star Wars franchise- Episode VI : Return of the Jedi.

So I finally got to pay my respects to Mr Piper after all these years and a couple failed attempts at finding Fairview Cemetery and nearly running out of time and daylight to find him! Maybe the best lesson to be had from that as well as traffic decision of Henry Beam Piper to end his life when he thought all was lost—is that the night is always darkest before the dawn and it sometimes pays to hang on and try at least one more time even when the sun is going down.

As it did that evening in Altoona.

Fairview Cemetery

The stone

Closeup.

View from the backside of the stone with the hospital across the street. That was how I first spotted it in my last ditch effort as the sun was going down and I was about to throw in the towel.

View toward the northeast corner of the cemetery past the hospital to the mountains.