A short hike up a grass path through a meadow brings you to a hilltop where two cherry trees create a pocket of shade. The view is mostly uninterrupted ridgelines covered in forest. It is here that, when his time comes, Dr. Howard Berg will be laid to rest.

“I tell people this is a nature preserve where people happen to be buried,” says Berg, 70, a founder of Serenity Ridge Natural Burial Cemetery and Arboretum in Windsor Mill, the first of its kind in Maryland.

Unlike traditional burial, natural burial uses no embalming and everything that goes into the ground must be biodegradable. “The idea is to care for the dead with minimal environmental impact while preserving or restoring natural habitat.”

Serenity Ridge is certified by the national Green Burial Council (GBC) and has conducted close to 40 burials since it opened in January 2023. It sits on a portion of a 177-acre property that Berg’s father bought in 1965. Berg, a gardener and Baltimore native with a deep appreciation for the natural world, read up on the idea of natural burial and even drove to New Jersey to visit the closest such cemetery.

“It was a revelation, just seeing what [the owner] had done with the property,” says Berg, explaining how they become natural havens perfect for contemplation and reflection.

There are roughly 220 natural burial cemeteries in the United States and another is slated to open soon in Silver Spring. In this era of climate change, it’s little wonder natural burial is growing in popularity. GBC statistics paint a staggering portrait of the environmental impact of conventional burial, which puts 4.3 million gallons of embalming fluid (containing chemicals like formaldehyde, methanol, and benzene), 20 million board feet of hardwoods, and 1.6 million tons of concrete into the earth annually.

Internments at Serenity Ridge are like the dust-to-dust burials of the pre-Civil War era, before enterprising undertakers began promoting embalming and ever-more-lavish caskets. Here, everything that goes in the ground must be biodegradable—shrouds are cotton or linen, coffins are usually more sustainable poplar or pine, and may not have metal liners, nails, or screws. Even the clothing of the deceased cannot contain synthetic materials. With few exceptions, embalming is not accepted. Even the headstones are low impact, carved into fieldstones that Berg hand-selects from the nearby Patapsco Quarry.

Cremated remains are allowed in biodegradable vessels, but Berg says they are educating people about the negative environmental impact—cremation contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution, while natural burials sequester carbon, a major contributor to climate change.

Steve Kuehne, the cemetery manager, spent 10 years in the conventional burial industry and says the difference here isn’t just in what goes below the soil.

“People seem more at ease with the services here, especially kids,” he says, looking over the inviting meadows crisscrossed with grass paths. “In a traditional cemetery, there are a lot of rules. Here, the family can get involved as much or as little as they wish. The emotion and intention behind everything is different.”

He adds that traditional burials are also expensive, often inhibiting a family’s ability to memorialize their loved ones as they wish. The average price of a funeral in the U.S. is $7,848; at Serenity Ridge, plot, burial, flowers, and a headstone cost $3,850.

For Berg, a retired colorectal surgeon, Serenity Ridge is just another way he can help others. He is aware of what makes the place unique: “Here, we’ve combined the private, public, religious, and nonprofit sectors. This isn’t a cemetery, it’s a community.”

For decades, pediatrician Ralph Brown noticed a difference between the white and Black children he saw. Nearly all the white kids in his Sinai Hospital practice learned to swim by age 7 or 8. “Not the case with African-American families,” says Brown. “I’m embarrassed to admit, it did not register what that meant until I saw a CDC report—maybe a half-dozen years ago—that Black children are five times more likely to drown than white kids.”

It also wasn’t until then, adds Brown, who recently retired, that he understood the statistic’s relationship to segregation and Jim Crow. “There were limited opportunities for their grandparents and great-grandparents to swim, and that legacy has been passed down,” Brown says. He began asking the parents of Black children who did know how to swim how they had learned. “And I kept hearing, ‘Mr. Thorpe.’”

Mr. Thorpe is the tall, skinny junior high schooler on the right in the above photo. His father, Marvin Thorpe Sr., whom he is named after, is the broad-shouldered man standing on the other side of the smiling kids in their backyard pool. The elder Thorpe, who once said he dreamt “of a day where there are no reports of a child drowning,” began offering swimming lessons behind their Windsor Mill beltway bungalow in 1972. He had managed to learn to swim in segregated Lynchburg, VA—by hounding local lifeguards—and developed a lifelong passion for the water. He died in 2004, at which point Marvin II took over the annual Memorial Day to Labor Day enterprise.

Together and separately, Thorpe, who is now 50, and his father have taught an estimated 15,000 people to swim over the past 46 seasons. Mostly, that’s been Black kids, but not all by any means. They’ve introduced three generations in some cases to swimming, including parents and grandparents who decided to learn after their children and grandchildren became swimmers. Former mayors Kurt Schmoke and Stephanie Rawlings-Blake brought their children to the Thorpes. So have the Mosbys—Marilyn and Nick, the city state’s attorney and state delegate, respectively—Ravens linebacker Terrell Suggs, and former Harlem Globetrotter Choo Smith.

“Word of mouth,” says Thorpe, getting the tidy 16-yard pool ready on a recent morning. “We’ve never done any advertising.”

His father’s first pupil, in fact, was his son, who nearly drowned in the family’s then-above-ground pool as a 4 year old. “My father was a physical education teacher in the city school system and coached swimming and tennis at Southwestern High for four years,” Thorpe says. “He taught me to swim the next day. He started teaching swimming in our backyard that summer, built an inground pool a few years later, and I was a part of it, helping him from day one.”

The popularity of the program did not manifest because of his father’s fun teaching style or teddy bear nature. The elder Thorpe was a taskmaster who did not allow parents to stay during lessons and was generally unmoved by children’s tears. “Dad could be very tough, even mean, I thought sometimes, but you did what he wanted. He didn’t think it should take longer than two weeks, two hours a day, to learn to swim,” says Thorpe. “But, at the end of those two weeks, he’d invite the parents to come afterward, and there’d be a Saturday barbecue and the kids could jump off the diving board and slide if they were ready. He called them ‘closing exercises,’ but they were more like a party. He loved those barbecues.”

Thorpe says he was “programmed” by his dad to take over. (His mother, who always handled the admin work, was also a schoolteacher.) He has several siblings, but it was clear his father always intended for him to inherit the job.

At 6-foot-4, Thorpe possesses some of the imposing qualities of his father, but also a gentler manner. Still, he went through a prodigal son period. “I moved out when I was a teenager,” he says. “I didn’t want to do this with my life, do the same thing as him. I quit for three years. Then I realized I loved to teach like he did. He never said a word about it when I came back. I didn’t have to work my way back up the ranks or into his good graces. It was just like I never left.”

Editor’s Note: This story is from the collection, If You Love Baltimore, It Will Love You Back: 171 Short But True Stories from Senior Editor Ron Cassie, due out Oct. 1 from Apprentice House Press at Loyola University Maryland To support local stores, it can be also pre-ordered through bookshop.org.