Sometimes I see the world like this: Time is a sower, and Events are the seed she scatters across the land. What grows is phenomenal and diverse. There is laughter and joy, nations and culture, I-Pads and the NBA. There is also death, and the places where the dead are put.

Riverside Cemetery in Asheville, North Carolina is 87 acres of hillside above the French Broad River. People have found their way here since 1885, and through a variety of means. Literary great Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) came because of tuberculosis in the brain, and William Sydney Porter, who wrote using the pen name O. Henry, came via cirrhosis of the liver, heart problems, and diabetes (1862-1910). Wolfe was a contemporary of Hemingway and Steinbeck -- they were born within three years of one another -- and would likely have been as famous today had his career not been cut short. O. Henry wrote one of my favorite shorts stories, "The Gift of the Magi".

Parts of Riverside Cemetery remind the visitor how well war grows headstones and tombs. Some people, such as 18 German sailors who served in that miserable event called World War I, died not in battle but as POWs at an Asheville Hospital during a typhoid epidemic. They had names like Karl Flum and Fritz Hoffman.

First Lieutenant Lawrence B. Loughran died in that war too, killed in an aerial dogfight over Calais, France, at the ripe age of 24. Ripe enough for war, that is. His memorial tomb says

THE FIRST ASHEVILLE BOY
KILLED ON THE FRENCH FRONT
FIGHTING WITH THE
AMERICAN EXPEDITIONARY FORCES
IN THE WORLD WAR

They said "the world war" because they didn't know a second one was just around the corner. Another side of the tomb goes on to say

VOLUNTEERED APRIL 7TH, 1917.
COMMISSIONED 1ST, LIEUT. AVIATOR SEPT. 27TH, 1917.
COMMANDING OFFICER AMERICAN AVIATION
DETACHMENT, HOUNSLOW, ENGLAND, FEB. 1ST, 1918
CREATED SERVICE PILOT APRIL 4TH, 1918.
INDUCTED INTO BISHOP, BABCOCK AND BALL SQUADRON
NO. 60 ROYAL AIR FORCE JULY 4TH, 1918
KILLED IN ACTION JULY 28TH, 1918

If interested, you can actually look at the front page of The Boston Sunday Globe for July 28th. The headline: GERMANS IN FULL RETREAT.

Another way to enter Riverside Cemetery is as I did, in a car on an unseasonably muggy April afternoon. It's on the National Register of Historic Places -- the cemetery, not my car -- and time will do well to bring you here.

Joel Carillet, chief editor of wanderingeducators, is a freelance writer and photographer based in Tennessee. He is the author of 30 Reasons to Travel: Photographs and Reflections from Southeast Asia. To learn more about him, follow his regular photoblog, or purchase images, visit www.joelcarillet.com